new TMIP article.... "MAKE A BACKUP"

I 2nd this Tim. Especially with all the spyware and viruses taking down computers everything can be lost very easy and also with HDD crashes and other hardware going south.
I have worked on many pcs where people had nothing backed up as in pics,music,downloaded programs and personal docs etc and they were infected with 3000 or more spywares and several hundred viruses and trying to clean all that up without doing a clean install is a giant pain in the you know what and even though I did the pc never runs as good as a clean install would make it

 

Good article - you can never drive that point home enough.

I'm even more anal ... I import all my originals to Adobe Photoshop Elements (into the catalog). If it's a significant "set" - like 200 pix from Disney or something - I then make a backup to CD-Rom of the originals. Then (after tagging the photos), about every other month or so, I burn a backup of the entire catalog (12,500 images and counting) onto a couple of DVDs and eventually give on of those sets to my sister to hold on to (just in case ... I'd hate to lose every memory in a fire).

 

no, really anal is making dvd copies,and backing up to an external hard drive and putting 1 in the safe deposit box, 1 in your mom's fireproof safe

 

I agree with the backup - I always backup to either an iPod or Laptop on holiday, but for editing and managing photos, I would look into a solution like Aperture on the Mac or Lightroom (cross platform) that will allow you to do non destructive edits.

 

I've been thinking about the issue of backing up data. I myself am not a big backer uper, and yes, I do lose data on occasion. In a way I feel I should be MORE concerned about it than if I were just a photographer.. because I'm also a hobby writer, and I tend to consider my writing more precious than my pictures.
But I've got an external hard drive that I'm going to start using to both offload things from my internal hard drives and also back up the important things.

But I don't like that as a serious solution. I once read a web page article that had been written on the issue of archival media, the idea being that some types of CD or DVD media would tend to have longer shelf lives than others. In the comments for this article some people kept bringing up RAID arrays, and I'm prone to agree.

I have a chain of thoughts that leads up to that though. First off I think Hard drives SHOULD be fairly reliable, and the way that they're designed to predict failures by monitoring certain key performance parameters that should only help. The problem is I'm currently running a RAID 0 array of two hard drives, and one of them reported that it was headed towards failure many months ago, probably approaching a year by now. So the failure detection is clearly not perfect.

However I still prefer hard drives to static DVD backup sets. For sheer capacity and convenience, if nothing else. But also because it's a live system, if something goes wrong you find out about it. If a DVD or CD goes bad while it's sitting on the shelf you don't know until you try to access it.

So anyway, the concept of RAID arrays. Described simply, a RAID array is a collection of two or more hard drives (preferably identical) that are combined together by a piece of hardware (the RAID controller) and then appear as a single collective drive to your operating system. My current RAID 0 setup is plugged into my motherboard, it has a built in RAID controller. RAID 0 means that the data being stored on the drives is split up and divided between them. The idea is that when you're reading or writing the data, it's being fed into or out of two drives simultaneously, increasing the read and write speed. However it also means that there's no redundancy, the loss of one drive means the loss of ALL data. The reliance on multiple drives is considered to make the array less reliable since the chances of a failure are essentially multiplied by the number of drives.

Clearly we don't want that for backup purposes. There are other options though. RAID 1 stores the same data on all drives. Which means if you lose one you can remove it and plug in a new one. Then you have to rebuild the array, which essentially copies the over to the new drive, and then you're good to go. But of course you get less capacity, if you're using two drives you get half the total capacity.

But there's more. The holy grail that I'm currently pursuing is RAID 5. That one uses at least three drives. You get both a speed increase and redundancy, so any one drive can fail and you're still okay. You don't lose half the capacity, although I'm sure there is some capacity loss for the parity data.

To the non technically inclined among you this may sound technical and difficult, but.. it's REALLY not. I built my RAID 0 array without knowing anything about how to do it. I literally plugged the drives into my motherboard, went into the BIOS for the controller (by holding a certain key on bootup), explored the menus, and guessed as to what I had to do. And it worked. I do have a certain talent for intuiting my way through computers, but still.. it was fast and easy.

So for my final point. If we're talking about a backup storage option I favor external systems. Just because if they get full you can easily plug in a new one. I'm a big time computer geek but I HATE mucking about inside my computer, it's a mess.. I have so many cables, it's not the technical aspect, it's the physical.

I'm not sure how much options there are in the way of external hard drive enclosures with built in RAID controllers. I've never looked. But I do know that the Western Digital Mybook series of external drives have a 1 terrabyte option that's made up of two 500GB hard drives, and the box states that you can set it up as RAID 1 for redundancy.

Some still argue against that as a reliable system.. for starters if a drive does fail on it I doubt it's easy to go in and replace the drive, so replacement costs could be higher. Although I can't help but think that the device just contains two standard hard drives, it should be possible. Secondly the device itself could fail, the power supply could go or something. You're not just limited to hard drive failures. Whereas with a proper internal RAID array you should have full modular replacement ability. Plus such options are potentially vulnerable to power spikes, something that fries the main PC could also kill the entire RAID system. You could hedge against that by keeping it disconnected when not backing up to it, but..

My point is that it's there. The 1TB Mybook may not be really cheap, but I still think it's reasonably priced considering its capability and capacity. You can get one, set it up as a RAID 1 array, and you've got instant redundant storage without having to touch a single cable other than the USB connection that it uses (it may also have various flavors of Firewire). I don't have one so I can't comment on the ease of setup, but.. given that they're advertising it as having RAID 1 ability, and the Mybooks seem to be marketed as simple, easy to use drives, I have to assume that they've either included software that can do the RAID setup for you, or else made it easy to set it up yourself.

As I said, I personally favor attempting to build a RAID 5 system as the ultimate solution. Whenever I end up building a replacement system for my current desktop I may attempt such a thing, my end goal being to have over 1 terrabyte in capacity with accelerated read and write speeds PLUS redundancy. But I like making things complicated. And I'm just in love with the whole concept of distributed parity, the idea that the data is spread out over three (in this example) drives in such a way that ANY two drives can contain an entire copy of the data.

And again, I want to specify that optical media backup enthusiasts take the view of optical media being superior, perhaps because of the simplicity, the whole no moving parts factor.. but my personal leaning is to favor RAID, although for the moment I make do with optical backup (some suggest that DVD+ is more reliable than -, for a number of technical reasons) combined with the external drive for more regular backups.

 

Backup is essential!

My own backup system is pretty simple; I sync files between my laptop and my desktop computers on a regular basis, and I periodically make DVD copies of my important files (including my pics). I go one better than that, however - when I make my DVD copies, I make two - one stays at home, and one goes to work. Viola! Off-site redundant backup!

When on vacation, I tend to go commando - I copy my pics off the CF cards onto my laptop and run Noise Ninja on them immediately, before backing up. And I tend to wipe the cards before I back up the pics. This is somewhat risky, but I don't want to burn a new DVD or CD every night while at WDW - I'd be burried in disks! I do copy them to two sepparate places on my HDD, so that if they get damaged by Noise Ninja or any other post-processing I do, I still have the original pics. But if my HDD or the whole laptop were to fritz on me, I'd lose all my pics.