Backup Solutions.......Please help!!

[searobyn]

Hey All, really hoping that many of you can give me some options on backing up jobs/photos/etc.  I currently have a Firmtek 5 bay multiplier enclosure as my backup solution.  I don't RAID any of the drives, I normally shoot to my computer on set or location, backup on a Rugged hard drive then, drop the info into an A drive and a B drive separately, that way I have 2 copies of the job.

Couple of questions, the Firmtek enclosure is very good but I does have trays and dealing with them, (I now have 12), I'm thinking about trayless more and more, secondly, I"m figuring out that I need to store the hard drives in a separate location and how I should deal with the storage of those B drives??

Any advice to backing up this way, another way, any help what so ever, would be fantastic!!!!

Thanks.

BG

[DarkPenguin]

No real help here.  Just a suggestion that something like Mozy might be an option for you.  That would be the extreme offsite solution.

[ckimmerle]

I have 4-bay Drobo and have had no serious issues. It's protected against a single drive failure with their proprietary software that looks to be combination of RAID 1 and 5. The drives fit without trays. As I save all images onto my secondary internal HD, this setup gives me two copies of the images and, for all practical purposes, protects against two drive failures. I also have two copies of the archives on external HD's which are stored far from here. I tried writing to BluRays (50GB double-sided) for yet another level of protection, but at $30/disk is kinda pricey.

As for the "B" drives, you should really find a storage site out of your region to protect against an act of Mother Nature (tornado, fire, etc). I ship mine to my brother in Colorado. I was looking into renting a small heated bay in a storage facility and using a full-size gun safe ($1000, or so) to store my backup drives. Not sure if it's all that great of an idea, though, as a gun safe has "good stuff inside" written all over it. Still mulling it over.

FWIW, Drobo also comes in an 8-bay unit which is protected against 2-drive failures.

http://www.drobo.com/products/index.php

[Josh-H]

I have 4-bay Drobo and have had no serious issues. It's protected against a single drive failure with their proprietary software that looks to be combination of RAID 1 and 5. The drives fit without trays. As I save all images onto my secondary internal HD, this setup gives me two copies of the images and, for all practical purposes, protects against two drive failures. I also have two copies of the archives on external HD's which are stored far from here. I tried writing to BluRays (50GB double-sided) for yet another level of protection, but at $30/disk is kinda pricey.

As for the "B" drives, you should really find a storage site out of your region to protect against an act of Mother Nature (tornado, fire, etc). I ship mine to my brother in Colorado. I was looking into renting a small heated bay in a storage facility and using a full-size gun safe ($1000, or so) to store my backup drives. Not sure if it's all that great of an idea, though, as a gun safe has "good stuff inside" written all over it. Still mulling it over.

FWIW, Drobo also comes in an 8-bay unit which is protected against 2-drive failures.

http://www.drobo.com/products/index.php

I have the 8 Bay Drobo Pro - havent had any issues with it - its been a good reliable product for me. It backs up my mac pros internal raid set-up

[Farmer]

For backup information, take a look at:

http://dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

For storage hardware comments check:

http://dpbestflow.org/data-storage-hardwar...rdware-overview

For file management see:

http://dpbestflow.org/file-management/file...gement-overview

The whole site http://dpbestflow.org/ is worth a look, too.

With a good understanding of the issues involved, you can develop a sound plan.

Personally, I have data locally on a single drive (or set thereof) in external cases, and on a RAID 5 system (with larger drives available and the issues of RAID 5 with very large drives, I'll likely move that to a RAID 1 solution instead) plus an offsite copy on a single drive (or set thereof) in external cases.

dpbestflow recommends a 3-2-1 which is 3 copies, 2 on different media and 1 offsite.  I don't quite follow that because I don't have different media because frankly optical isn't viable due to size and cost and tape isn't viable due to cost.  For that reason, I make one of the options with redundancy (ie RAID), but primary protection is 3 copies with 1 offsite.  If cost wasn't an issue, I'd be using tape rather than the local single drive and ideally rotate them offsite as well as the single drive (or set) offsite.

RAID, in and of itself, is not a backup.  If the only copy you have is on a RAID (or DROBO) then you don't have a backup - you just have some redundancy for drive failure which is not the same thing.

[Ken Bennett]

RAID, in and of itself, is not a backup.  If the only copy you have is on a RAID (or DROBO) then you don't have a backup - you just have some redundancy for drive failure which is not the same thing.

Thank you thank you thank you.

People who should (in theory) know better keep telling me they have everything "backed up" to a RAID or a Drobo or whatever, and all their photos are safe and secure. Then I ask what happens if they have a burst pipe or a fire in the studio, and I get the blank look in return.

My solution for work is to keep my original raw files on a server in the studio, and keep a copy on a set of external drives at home. The server is supposed to be backed up every night to a tape silo at the university's data center (one advantage of working for what is essentially a large corporation), but that has been broken for several months and might be fixed some time this quarter. We hope.

My solution for home is to keep my photos on two hard drives, and back up all that to an online service like Mozy or Backblaze. For $5 per month Backblaze will store everything on your primary drive *and* everything on an attached external drive up in the cloud. (The external has to be attached all the time, or Backblaze will stop backing it up.) This works if, for example, you have a two-drive external box to store your photos, and simply use one drive as the primary and one as the backup. BB will back up the primary, along with your internal drive.

[ckimmerle]

Thank you thank you thank you.

People who should (in theory) know better keep telling me they have everything "backed up" to a RAID or a Drobo or whatever, and all their photos are safe and secure. Then I ask what happens if they have a burst pipe or a fire in the studio, and I get the blank look in return.

You are absolutely correct, but the OP did ask about on-site, multi-bay storage options, hence the suggestions.

[PeterAit]

You are absolutely correct, but the OP did ask about on-site, multi-bay storage options, hence the suggestions.

I back up to a RAID 5 array and also to 3 rotating bare drives that I connect with a USB dock. I have tried offsite backup but find it horribly slow. I am connected via a cable modem and the upload speed is about 20% of the download speed, so any sizable online backup takes forever and almost always times out or has some other problem before completing. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

[Farmer]

I back up to a RAID 5 array and also to 3 rotating bare drives that I connect with a USB dock. I have tried offsite backup but find it horribly slow. I am connected via a cable modem and the upload speed is about 20% of the download speed, so any sizable online backup takes forever and almost always times out or has some other problem before completing. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

That's why I use physical external drives for offsite backup and then physically take them offsite.  In my case, I have an arrangement with a friend - he holds drives for me and I for him.

[feppe]

Good points above. Reiterating that RAID is not backup, and if you don't have offsite backup (physical or online), your data is not safe from floods, fires or theft.

My solution for home is to keep my photos on two hard drives, and back up all that to an online service like Mozy or Backblaze. For $5 per month Backblaze will store everything on your primary drive *and* everything on an attached external drive up in the cloud. (The external has to be attached all the time, or Backblaze will stop backing it up.) This works if, for example, you have a two-drive external box to store your photos, and simply use one drive as the primary and one as the backup. BB will back up the primary, along with your internal drive.

Mozy sounded too good to be true for $5 per month for unlimited backup, and it is. Main reason: deleted files older than thirty days are culled from their servers, so if I unplug an external drive for over a month, a virus wipes files, or I accidentally delete a file and don't notice it for a month, I'm SOL. This is unacceptable in a backup solution. User error is one of the main reasons for losing data. I also don't like yet another always-on service or program on my computer, and would prefer to run it when I choose - not sure if this has been fixed since the review linked.

And the same 30-day craziness for Backblaze. So does Carbonite, and they take it to the next level by calling this a feature, implying that they shouldn't protect your data from user error or viruses. In fairness, the PR gentleman does say that they're "reviewing" a feature they call "archiving," and the rest of the world calls "backup."

I understand why this policy is in place: they have "unlimited" storage at a fixed price, so their ROI increases the fewer files they store. But the policy of deleting files no longer on my hard drive after 30 days renders Mozy, Backblaze and Carbonite unusable for offsite backup. I'm sure they're great for temporary storage, but you might get a very unpleasant surprise trying to recover files which have been deleted due to this policy.

I'll stick to offsite hard drives kept at the office. I'll sleep better.

[Ken Bennett]

I understand why this policy is in place: they have "unlimited" storage at a fixed price, so their ROI increases the fewer files they store. But the policy of deleting files no longer on my hard drive after 30 days renders Mozy, Backblaze and Carbonite unusable for offsite backup. I'm sure they're great for temporary storage, but you might get a very unpleasant surprise trying to recover files which have been deleted due to this policy.

I'll stick to offsite hard drives kept at the office. I'll sleep better.

Just to be clear, if the data is still on your local drive, then it's kept on the online backup, no matter how old the file. It's only deleted files that get tossed after 30 days.

I think this situation depends entirely on how you look at it. If one thinks of Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite as an online Time Machine drive (to use the Mac example with which I am most familiar), then their policy of deleting files that you have deleted is the same as your local Time Machine backup, which eventually deletes files that are no longer on the data drive.

After all, I generate many gigabytes of data every week -- temp files, working files, huge layered Photoshop files in post production -- that I will delete from my hard drive when I am done working on them. If Mozy had to archive all of those files indefinitely for everyone until the end of time, well, there is not enough drive space in the cloud for all that. I certainly don't have room for it all, so I have to be moderately selective in what I save. And be very careful about what I delete.

I agree that keeping your own hard drives offsite can be better in several ways -- they are easier to access, and you can store whatever you like. However, if you follow a common backup plan, and clone your data drives on a weekly rotating basis, so you have 3 or 4 drives in rotation, eventually your deleted files will drop out of the rotation and be lost forever. In, say, a month or so.

The only way to prevent that is to: (1) never delete anything, and (2) keep adding hard drives and their clones to your on-site and off-site storage.

The final reality is that there is no perfect backup plan. Everything is a compromise, and no matter what system is used, it's possible to lose data through carelessness, viruses, and acts of Nature.

[PeterAit]

Just to be clear, if the data is still on your local drive, then it's kept on the online backup, no matter how old the file. It's only deleted files that get tossed after 30 days.

I think this situation depends entirely on how you look at it. If one thinks of Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite as an online Time Machine drive (to use the Mac example with which I am most familiar), then their policy of deleting files that you have deleted is the same as your local Time Machine backup, which eventually deletes files that are no longer on the data drive.

After all, I generate many gigabytes of data every week -- temp files, working files, huge layered Photoshop files in post production -- that I will delete from my hard drive when I am done working on them. If Mozy had to archive all of those files indefinitely for everyone until the end of time, well, there is not enough drive space in the cloud for all that. I certainly don't have room for it all, so I have to be moderately selective in what I save. And be very careful about what I delete.

I agree that keeping your own hard drives offsite can be better in several ways -- they are easier to access, and you can store whatever you like. However, if you follow a common backup plan, and clone your data drives on a weekly rotating basis, so you have 3 or 4 drives in rotation, eventually your deleted files will drop out of the rotation and be lost forever. In, say, a month or so.

The only way to prevent that is to: (1) never delete anything, and (2) keep adding hard drives and their clones to your on-site and off-site storage.

The final reality is that there is no perfect backup plan. Everything is a compromise, and no matter what system is used, it's possible to lose data through carelessness, viruses, and acts of Nature.

A good solution to the deleted files problem is available with many backup programs, such as SyncBack Pro. You can easily program it to "archive" files (that's the term I use) by copying to a new, dated folder each time. For example, each week I archive my Outlook.pst file (all emails, appointments, etc) to a folder on my RAID array named Outlook Backup day-month-year. Thus, I have a copy of the entire file for 2 weeks ago, 4 weeks ago, and so on, and I can clean out old emails from the active file without worry that I might need them some day. This is very inefficient of disk space, of course, but disk space is cheap.

[Dale Allyn]

Another option for one's off-site drives (or otherwise redundant backups) is using a dock such as THIS and then storing the drive in a case such as THIS before taking it to a bank safe deposit box or location similarly protected against fire, etc. Desiccant packs can be added to the safe deposit box if there is a concern of damage due to humidity.

Of course, one can skip the drive dock and just use an enclosure for creating mirrors while working, then pull the copy, put it in a case, and store or ship, etc.

I have the Voyager linked above (4 interface model) and I'm quite happy with it. I'm a Mac user and use SuperDuper! to clone any of several hard drives (including those in local enclosures) for various forms of backups.

Just more options to add to the discussion.