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Author Topic: Back up's /storage to hard disks  (Read 2546 times)

titusbear

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Back up's /storage to hard disks
« on: December 30, 2009, 11:15:10 am »

my iosafe 1.5TB hard drive arrived this morning. A real 'bear' - solid metal heavy.
But more important is the design / protection it offers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOiBzCgAPfE

https://iosafe.com/

Will still back up to dvd's for off-site storage - but the iosafe presents an attractive addition for secure easy access on-site backup. Not sure just how much data recovery you can get for $1K... but it's design mirrors a well thought out product.

Guess you could even find a cheap 'fireproof' file box to put the iosafe in to increase protection.

No real mention of hard drive failure - that's always a crap shoot (hence the dvd off site storage). But none the less - lets this photog artist sleep a little better at night.

(noted that Ken Rockwell backs up to off-the-shelf /standard 3TB hard drives - wonder what his disk failure rate is like?)
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DougMorgan

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Back up's /storage to hard disks
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2010, 02:19:45 pm »

I'd suggest putting a removable hard drive setup in a CD bay and keeping two sets of backups, one always offsite (like in a safe-deposit box).    There are removable setups that either take the hard disk bare or mounted in a special tray.

I don't believe DVD's are a good backup media as they don't age well and the failure rate is very high.   At less than $100 per TB the harddisks are much cheaper than quality DVDs, an order of magnitude faster, and more reliable.

Your external box doesn't seem to give a proper fire rating, though the website mentions one, and may not be enough protection in a real fire.   There should be a temperature vs time rating.    RAID setups only protect against a single drive failure and not things like controller or powersupply failures, multiple disk failures, etc.

Specifically for data loss due to theft of the media your external box is no real protection from theft since the whole box can be stolen easily.   Securing the data itself is another issue but for myself I'm less worried about crack-heads selling my pictures than I am about being unable to sell the pictures myself because some crackhead hocked the drive for fifty bucks.
   
USB is glacial for disk access and can be a hindrance to keeping a good backup routine -- I personally don't trust any windows based auto-backup scheme as they seem to be disfunctional.  

My setup may be a bit of over kill for most photographers but I have raid 5 arrays for on-line data and two complete backups to relatively new hard-drives.  One set of backups goes in a large (100 lb) locked fire safe in the basement and the other is at the bank.   The external arrays are connected by ESATA and are actually faster than internal arrays using the motherboard hard disk controllers.  If I'm going away I can unplug the external arrays and fit them easily in the fire safe, leaving only the OS drive and SAS work drives in the computer itself.   The RAID setup is  for the protecting my most recent work from a drive failure that seem to average about 1 in 20 per year.  I'm dealing with around 6TB of data.

For what it's worth........
Doug
« Last Edit: January 03, 2010, 02:32:37 pm by DougMorgan »
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howseth

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Back up's /storage to hard disks
« Reply #2 on: January 03, 2010, 02:39:58 pm »

"I don't believe DVD's are a good backup media as they don't age well and the failure rate is very high. At less than $100 per TB the harddisks are much cheaper than quality DVDs, an order of magnitude faster, and more reliable."

If you wish to back-up to DVD; you can use 'Archive Grade' Gold DVD-R - such as MAM-A (licensed by Mitsui) They cost about $2.00 a DVD (each 4.78 gigs of storage)

Seems like backing up both to an external hard drive - and some other medium - such as Gold DVD (or CD). makes sense. Keep one of these off site.

Howard
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Ken Bennett

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Back up's /storage to hard disks
« Reply #3 on: January 03, 2010, 02:40:15 pm »

Quote from: DougMorgan
Your external box doesn't seem to give a proper fire rating, though the website mentions one, and may not be enough protection in a real fire.   There should be a temperature vs time rating.


I don't own the Iosafe, but their website claims 1550-F for thirty minutes.

I think it would make a decent Time Machine backup for a Mac user. Not good for live storage, of course, since USB2 is somewhat slow, but for an incremental backup system it should work reasonably well.
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Equipment: a camera and some lenses. https://www.instagram.com/wakeforestphoto/

DougMorgan

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« Reply #4 on: January 03, 2010, 02:47:19 pm »

Quote from: k bennett
I don't own the Iosafe, but their website claims 1550-F for thirty minutes.

I think it would make a decent Time Machine backup for a Mac user. Not good for live storage, of course, since USB2 is somewhat slow, but for an incremental backup system it should work reasonably well.

I guess I didn't scroll down to see the rating.   Note that for a regular fire safe 30 minutes is usually the lowest rating they give but probably good for the size of the disk box.

Wasn't thinking of a mac system with fewer options but I believe for a mac a newer Firewire connection would about double the speed of USB (though still slower than SATA).

Doug
« Last Edit: January 03, 2010, 03:22:59 pm by DougMorgan »
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DougMorgan

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« Reply #5 on: January 03, 2010, 02:51:42 pm »

Quote from: howseth
"I don't believe DVD's are a good backup media as they don't age well and the failure rate is very high. At less than $100 per TB the harddisks are much cheaper than quality DVDs, an order of magnitude faster, and more reliable."

If you wish to back-up to DVD; you can use 'Archive Grade' Gold DVD-R - such as MAM-A (licensed by Mitsui) They cost about $2.00 a DVD (each 4.78 gigs of storage)

Seems like backing up both to an external hard drive - and some other medium - such as Gold DVD (or CD). makes sense. Keep one of these off site.

Howard

The price and capacity aren't very enticing.   $400 for an absolute maximum of one TB of space.   Depending on individual files size probably far less than a terabyte and you'd still have to deal with 200 individual disks.      For the same price you could use 4 separate 1TB drives with 4 copies of the data in a far more convenient form.

On the other hand for small amounts of data I'm sure they are much better than generic DVD's.

Doug
« Last Edit: January 03, 2010, 02:54:51 pm by DougMorgan »
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howseth

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« Reply #6 on: January 03, 2010, 03:26:10 pm »

If I had 6 Terabytes to store ... Yeah, I would not be too thrilled with copying onto DVD's. But lets say you had perhaps a hundred gigs, or less, you could not afford to lose - then the DVD's makes sense. I sure do like my 320 gig external Firewire 800 hard drive, though. Very fast.

Howard
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DougMorgan

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« Reply #7 on: January 03, 2010, 03:56:16 pm »

Quote from: howseth
If I had 6 Terabytes to store ... Yeah, I would not be too thrilled with copying onto DVD's. But lets say you had perhaps a hundred gigs, or less, you could not afford to lose - then the DVD's makes sense. I sure do like my 320 gig external Firewire 800 hard drive, though. Very fast.

Howard

I agree if it's a couple dozen DVD's what I suggested might be overkill but if you start dealing with 1000's of files it's not really a workable or cost-effective system.   Too much like the diskette days for me (anyone work with IBM 8 inch diskette magazines?).    It must be the cheap-gene or something but I also hate having to write a brand new disk if anything changes on a DVD-R.

I'm at least partly idiot though as in addition to missing the actual fire rating I didn't realize this was a single bare drive -- and I do think though that the original poster's device is not a complete solution and is pretty expensive at $330 for a single 1TB drive.  No data redundancy.  No off-line storage.   Not expandable (without replacing the drive).    

I think I paid $300 for my safe which is large enough to hold over 20 drives and rated at 2 Hours / 1850F.    Add $30 for a removable drive bay and we're at the same price (minus drives of course) but expandable to any size and with off-line storage which is critical to any backup scheme.   Not only a hardware failure can destroy data -- software or a stupid user mistake can be just as costly.

Unfortunately while MS and various manufacturers harp on backups as a way to lessen their responsibility for hardware/software failures there aren't many tools to make this as painless as it should be.   The windows backup system is a joke and vista is pretty hostile to removable drives (often requiring rebooting) compared to XP but what can you do......

Doug
« Last Edit: January 03, 2010, 04:49:51 pm by DougMorgan »
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titusbear

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Back up's /storage to hard disks
« Reply #8 on: January 03, 2010, 05:48:50 pm »

Quote from: DougMorgan
The price and capacity aren't very enticing.   $400 for an absolute maximum of one TB of space.   Depending on individual files size probably far less than a terabyte and you'd still have to deal with 200 individual disks.      For the same price you could use 4 separate 1TB drives with 4 copies of the data in a far more convenient form.

On the other hand for small amounts of data I'm sure they are much better than generic DVD's.

Doug


I paid <$375.00 each for a 1.5TB  iosafe w 5year warranty /5year data recovery (Drive Savers) - and keep them in a fire rated safe.
They now have a 2TB model.
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howseth

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« Reply #9 on: January 03, 2010, 06:15:54 pm »

For 6 months, or so, I tried an online backup service called Mozy. It was awful. On a DSL line it took forever to backup even a few gigabytes.- and the software performed poorly on my Mac. Customer service was also sluggish.

Howard

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DougMorgan

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« Reply #10 on: January 03, 2010, 06:52:26 pm »

With the Seagate firmware debacle I lost something like 5 out of 12 7200.11 drives within two months and it was only chance that I didn't permanently loose any pictures though I did loose several weeks of photoshop work.   Between that and an attempted break in I've become something of a zealot.

Doug
« Last Edit: January 03, 2010, 06:52:50 pm by DougMorgan »
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