backup advice needed

[MacGuido]

Hello all,
after much research, I decided to get a 6TB Lacie 2Big USB 3.0 hdd as an external backup archive for my wedding photography.
I own a late 2008 Mac Pro, the HDD comes with a PCIe card for the USB 3.
Unfortunately I have had many issues with this HDD so I decided to get a refund.
For those who are interested, the hdd just does not mount on the desktop when connected to the USB 3 ports unless you shut down the computer and restart.
This is unacceptable because the HDD is a plug & play device, and since I schedule my backup via software I could not really shut down and restart every time.
Furthermore, as soon as I connect the cable to the port the magic mouse become unusable for some reason that I couldn't realize.
Ok now I have to come up with a different solution for my backup.
If any of you have some suggestions that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance!
Guido

[cats_five]

I have a Netgear ReadyNAS with two mirrored disks in, and use Synctoy to copy altered / new files across from my PC.  I also use a memory stick for documents so I can edit them on the laptop - Synctoy will deal with that as well, even if the memory stick ends up with a different drive letter.

It was slow copying files across to the NAS until I connected both that and my PC to a gigabit switch - previously they had been attached to the network via Homeplugs which are slow.  The switch is still attached that way (so that's how my PC 'talks' to the Internet), but the copy from PC to NAS now only goes via the switch.

Ideally I would have some sort of off-site backup as well.

[feppe]

Lacie has anecdotally perhaps the worst record, I would never buy anything from them.

Here's what I do:
1 set in the computer on a separate HDD which is connected 24/7, SyncBack Pro does a nightly backup
1 set on an external HDD which is only connected for weekly backup with SB Pro
1 set at an offsite location on an external HDD to cover for fire/water damage and theft
Crashplan for redundancy

[K.C.]

Lacie has anecdotally perhaps the worst record, I would never buy anything from them.

As IT manager with 23 years of experience and responsible for backing up many workstations and large networks of creatives I wouldn't touch a LaCie drive. Pretty box, cheapest power supply China can build and extremely high failure rate.

The current market for HDs is pricey because of the factories being flooded in Thailand. That's slowly changing, at least availability is, prices will remain high as long as the market supports it. So buy carefully to meet your current needs only.

RAID 1 is your most cost effective local backup, though RAID 5 is the safest. I backup all my image files to a RAID 1 drive and then clone that to another drive that goes off site after a large shoot or every week.

Cloud storage from amazon, crachplan or your vendor of choice should be running constantly.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

I use four internal drives, two for work and two for Time Machine backup. Both are striped, which I'm not very happy about.

I have an external RAID 5 from OWC ( OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 ) connected over SATA with backup automatically taken using "rsync" (which is a part of Mac OS/X) four times a day. I also make "rsync" based backup manually to on of two external drive now and than they, these drives are kept as offsite baclup in my office.

Best regards
Erik

Hello all,
after much research, I decided to get a 6TB Lacie 2Big USB 3.0 hdd as an external backup archive for my wedding photography.
I own a late 2008 Mac Pro, the HDD comes with a PCIe card for the USB 3.
Unfortunately I have had many issues with this HDD so I decided to get a refund.
For those who are interested, the hdd just does not mount on the desktop when connected to the USB 3 ports unless you shut down the computer and restart.
This is unacceptable because the HDD is a plug & play device, and since I schedule my backup via software I could not really shut down and restart every time.
Furthermore, as soon as I connect the cable to the port the magic mouse become unusable for some reason that I couldn't realize.
Ok now I have to come up with a different solution for my backup.
If any of you have some suggestions that would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance!
Guido

[Jon Meddings]

This must be my biggest ongoing struggle as well!  I've tried several options over the years but have now settled on the following:

1. We have 2 photography machines on the network (as well as some business/work ones). Each has Lightroom catalogs of 50K+ images or thereabouts. Images are stored on local/internal 2 TB drives

2. The machines also have a USB 3 HD external drop in drive bay (and a 2 TB drive can back up the internal one(

3. Machines are all networked on a gigabit lan that also has a Netgear ReadyNAS 3200 with 12 TB of RAID 5 storage.

4. Every night SyncBack runs and backs up all the machines to the ReadyNAS

5. Every week or so an external backup of images is made on both machines and copy is kept off site

6. I've looked at a previous cloud solution (Carbonite) but until I can just do an incremental backup to it I haven't found it useful and the single drives kept off site make me at least a little comfortable.

Hope this helps.

[feppe]

6. I've looked at a previous cloud solution (Carbonite) but until I can just do an incremental backup to it I haven't found it useful and the single drives kept off site make me at least a little comfortable.

Check out Crashplan's feature set. It not only does cloud, but also to another HDD or even a friend's computer.

[DeeJay]

My system works great.

I have a working disk. 2x 100GB OWC SSD's in Raid0
I have a droplet in my finder which works with a program called Hazel.
Once a project is finished I drop the file onto the droplet and it saves it to 3 places.
First is Main storage drive on the Mac Pro. It's 4x 3tb Hitachi Deskstar drives in Raid0 to make one 12tb Drive.
Second is a bare sata drive in an esata caddy/dock.
Third is a bare sata drive in a second esata caddy/dock.
So I have 3 copies. One local for me to access, one filed away (when the drive is full I print out the finder and put both in an envelope) on site and another which I send offsite.
I also have a G-Tech G-Drive working with Time Machine to cover the working drive.

On a side note, Hazel is also great as it allows me to automatically import retouched finals into a lightroom catalogue for reference as part of the final saving and backup process listed above.

Bare sata drives are cheap these days (maybe not so much at the moment after the Thai floods) Just go to google shopping and select sort by cheapest price.

Here is the dock I bought:
http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/External-Hard-Drives/Hard-Drive-Docks/sc883/p753.aspx

[aaronleitz]

Here's what I do:

I have two volumes made from 4 hard drives inside my Mac Pro - "Master" and "Master Backup." Both are 2TB RAID stripes. Super Duper copies the contents of Master to Master Backup every few hours. My boot drive is an external drive.

My archiving/offsite-backup uses an eSATA two bay enclosure: a Firmtek Seritek. Three 1TB drives rotate through this enclosure - Backup A (1-10), Backup B (11-20), and Backup C (21-31). The numbers on the drive indicate which days of the month that the drive resides off-site. So on December 15th drives A and C will be in the enclosure and B will be offsite (in a small pelican case). After a job is finished it goes on the two drives in the enclosure and then the name of the job folder is copied to a simple-text list. The process takes about 5 seconds. If I finish a big job I'll speed up the rotation so that I can get a drive with those photos offsite asap. If I'm going through a lot of jobs I'll speed up the rotation so each drive is offsite for only a few days.

When those disks fill up two of them are removed from the rotation and labeled "Backup 5A" and "Backup 5B." The A set drives are stored on site in a file cabinet and the B set goes offsite.

The other day I had a client request for images from a job three years ago. I pulled up the simpletext list and searched for the project name (using command-F), found the proper drive in the file cabinet (it was Backup 2A), popped it in the external enclosure and the images were right there and ready to be copied over at eSATA speed.

I really think it's important to keep your backups simple (DeeJay's setup is a good example as well). Buy some sort of hot-swappable enclosure/dock and bare hard drives and start copying. Make sure you keep track of what goes where in a straightforward way that is NOT based on some sort of proprietary software (Lightroom) or hardware (RAID card) or network protocol (NAS). My simple text list is fast, easy and I can search by date, client, or specific project (that's how I name my job folders: 20111215_client_project) and I can even print the list out and keep a physical copy with the offsite drives. There are many production/digi tech studios that do it this way and they are going through terabytes of data every week and you just can't keep all of that live on a network.

If my house burned down tonight I could buy a laptop and a dock tomorrow and fulfill a client request for 5 year old images by early afternoon.