Hard earned advice against RAID...

[Frank Doorhof]

Let me clearify something

We own a PC store (well actually my wife runs it since I'm full time into photography), the people coming to us with defective DVDR's and CDR's are much more than the defective HDDs.

Same goes for tape.
Tape works when it's stored dry and on a constant temperature.
And you will often need the EXACT same tapereader.

HDDs are in my opinion (and that's with 15 years experience in selling IT) the best bet for failsafe and future proof backup.

But as with ALL backups it's only safe if checked at least yearly (refreshed on HDDs) AND if stored powerless.
And of course it's best to keep at least two copies from older work.

So old work backuped up in your own house and on a location away.
New work backuped up in your own house.

[Ray]

We own a PC store (well actually my wife runs it since I'm full time into photography), the people coming to us with defective DVDR's and CDR's are much more than the defective HDDs.

Frank,
What are you saying precisely? Customers are returning prerecorded DVDs and CDs that won't play on their machines? Customers are returning blanks which fail to record on their burners? Or customers are returning their own recordings that used to be okay but no longer are able to be read due to disc deterioration?

But as with ALL backups it's only safe if checked at least yearly (refreshed on HDDs) AND if stored powerless.
And of course it's best to keep at least two copies from older work.

Well, that's a rather onerous chore, isn't it? The great thing about optical media is, if you forget or find it inconvenient to do that annual renewal, you'll still be okay. Probably the worst that could happen is you might find an odd 10 year old CD that's become corrupted due to physical deterioration and/or faulty manufacture and you almost lost 700mb of data, but didn't because you'd already re-recorded the data to DVD about 5 years ago.  

[Frank Doorhof]

What I meant is what I wrote down

We hear ALOT of complaints about media not reading correct anymore after 4-5 years, some even after 2 years.
I made some backups on the EXTREME expensive TDK goldplated 100year warranty CD-R's, they retailed in that time for arround $20.00 per piece.

I have used 10.
And from those 10 I now have SERIOUS problems reading them with 5.
That's a 50% loss of data.
They are still read by the way without problems but it's not normal that a CD with 600MB will take arround 15 minutes to read.

When I started using DVD-Rs it became noticably worse. Some DVD-Rs were allready showing read errors after 1 year.

With HDDs I know for sure I have at least two backups and because of the size and price it's easy to make double backups.
A 500GB HDD is copied over night and put in storage.
A second 500GB HDD is copied the other night and put online for incremental backups.

For the $120.00 a 500GB retails now that's a no brainer.
If I were to backup on DVDRs I would need ALOT, and I mean a WHOLE LOT

[Ray]

Frank,
Sure is a mystery to me. What are you guys doing??

As I said, I've also had problems with the occasional disc not reading, or reading very slowly then grinding to a halt, but it has always proved to be caused by an incompatible (or faulty, whatever) drive. Those early Kodak CDs, from which it used to take a full 2 minutes on my first computer for an 18mb image to be read and displayed, can now be read at lightning speed on my current XP64 desktop, about 4 or 5 seconds as I recall.

Fortunately, I've always been in the habit of creating space on my hard drives as they fill up with images, by transferring the data to CD and later DVD.

[Monito]

How many DVDs and CDs do you have, Ray?  How do you file them?  In stacks?

[LasseDPF]

Anyone have any experience with the iomega rev drives ?

[Jonathan Wienke]

I wouldn't recommend ANY proprietary drive technology for backups. Does anyone have a working reader for a Syquest SparQ drive??? With industry standard drives like SATA, IDE, etc. you have a pretty decent chance of reading the drive in 10 yeard even if the manufacturer goes out of business...

[jonstewart]

I wouldn't recommend ANY proprietary drive technology for backups. Does anyone have a working reader for a Syquest SparQ drive??? With industry standard drives like SATA, IDE, etc. you have a pretty decent chance of reading the drive in 10 yeard even if the manufacturer goes out of business...
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147351\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I agree with you Jonathan!

However, believe it or not, I do have a working Sparq drive and 5 disks (at least they were working 9 months ago when I tested them).... and no, I'd never dream of using that technology again, for exactly the reasons above.

I'd never again buy into proprietary hardware technology.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I wouldn't recommend ANY proprietary drive technology for backups. Does anyone have a working reader for a Syquest SparQ drive??? With industry standard drives like SATA, IDE, etc. you have a pretty decent chance of reading the drive in 10 yeard even if the manufacturer goes out of business...
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147351\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

And I've got an 8-inch floppy disk around here somewhere. I think it was supposed to hold maybe 120KB of data. I don't have a drive for it, however.  

[pss]

i have used raid 5 for years and it is the best/safest backup method i know....DVDs are useless, after a couple of years they become unreadable....even the manufacturers will agree with that....does not mean that they will all be bad, but you know the one you need will be, plus 4.5 or even 9gb don't really do that much....blueray might be better, but there is still the disc/storage/life issue...
so i have a raid 5 box with 3TB and a couple of mirrored raids....if any of the harddrives fail, i am safe....which is my biggest concern....i swap the HDs about every 2 years anyway to get bigger ones, so the drives never get that old....i have never had a drive fail, but i know one day it will.....
my personal data/day today files are backed up onto a mirrored raid and also online.....i am in the process right now to backup my entire image library online....most important files first....offline storage is the best solution.....all the backup in the world won't help if the drives are sitting next to the computer when the fire hits/water hits/theft happens/whatever.....
with the prices of online storage coming way down i will probably have my most important files with 2 different services....just to make sure....

i stay away from proprietory tapes/drives....anyone old enough to remember syquest? anyway, they all get phased out at one point or another....

my raid 5 is a nitroav box...highly recommended....

[DarkPenguin]

I agree with you Jonathan!

However, believe it or not, I do have a working Sparq drive and 5 disks (at least they were working 9 months ago when I tested them).... and no, I'd never dream of using that technology again, for exactly the reasons above.

I'd never again buy into proprietary hardware technology.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147353\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

If you have the last working drive on the planet you can probably become rich reading peoples orphaned backups and burning them to dvd.  Just an off topic thought.

[geesbert]

i am not going to bore you with how i am backing up my files, it is a bit like some of you do...

but one thing is for shure, my personal pictures, especially of my kids, are all getting printed. those prints might be a bit faded in 30 years, but my kids will probably be able to look at them without understanding my backup system.

i just made a very usable scan of a 45 year old picture of my parents, it was a very bad B&W print where the photographer used a bad fixer, but after a bit of work it is now a very printable digital file.

[Ray]

How many DVDs and CDs do you have, Ray?  How do you file them?  In stacks?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147001\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Thousands, Monito. I used to store the early CDs in the cases they came in, placed in CD racks. Then I discovered zipped wallets with plastic sleeves, very cheap, made in China, but ideal for my purposes. I have various sizes ranging from 12 sleeves to 96. Those that hold 96 DVDs would be about the size of the average 400-500GB external hard drive of a couple of years ago and hold about as much data. I store these wallets on a shelf like books.

When Blu-ray discs become more affordable and multi layered and dual sided, a 96 disc wallet should be able to hold about 10 terabytes of data. That might be sufficient for all the images I have taken in my entire life, but if I'm extremely prolific in my old age, then 2 book-size wallets should be enough.  

[neil snape]

Great thread that immediately scared me into backing up everything on all the computers. I'll just have make it a scheduled routine. Andrew uses SuperDuper. I used Carbon Copy Cloner. I hope to find a way to do incremental backups scheduled weekly. Is this alright or should I use something like Retrorespect?

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Great thread that immediately scared me into backing up everything on all the computers. I'll just have make it a scheduled routine. Andrew uses SuperDuper. I used Carbon Copy Cloner. I hope to find a way to do incremental backups scheduled weekly. Is this alright or should I use something like Retrorespect?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147647\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

For years my "backup protocol" was that I would back up everything whenever I heard that a friend had lost data from a crashed hard disk.    

These days I use a variety of external HDs pretty much as others have described.

[rethmeier]

What about that new thing called Time Machine in Leopard?
It also copies and back-ups.
I'll hook my Drobo on to it.
Cheers,
WR.

[neil snape]

What about that new thing called Time Machine in Leopard?
It also copies and back-ups.
I'll hook my Drobo on to it.
Cheers,
WR.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147684\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

It's a good thing the Time Machine feature. Hope it works better than XP's recovery that has never worked on my PC. It seems to be limited to a limited range of devices but I'm still in the camp of multiple redundant back up disks over raid anyway. Suppose I should recopy all my CD's and DVDs before they too are unreadable.

[larryg]

I wouldn't recommend ANY proprietary drive technology for backups. Does anyone have a working reader for a Syquest SparQ drive??? With industry standard drives like SATA, IDE, etc. you have a pretty decent chance of reading the drive in 10 yeard even if the manufacturer goes out of business...
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=147351\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You are so right I had the Syquest (still have it somewhere) but would have no idea where the software to run it is.  I also did the Bernouli drive and the Jazz Drives with skuzzi hookup   Not sure they would work now.  

Standardization would be a better long term solution