As I amass more and more GB's of photo files, I am curious what our photographers are doing for safe storage and recommendations you have.
Storage Options
- Thread starter ski3pin
- Start date
Hard drive space has become VERY inexpensive -- easy to find drives as cheap as 4¢/GB or less. Like $100 - $120 for 3TB druves -- on sale, at least. I have several drives in my desktop and a 4TB external drive as back-up.
As for "back-up": It depends on whether you're guarding against hard drive failure or fire-and-flood. If it's the latter then backups need to be made or moved off-site -- somewhere other than your house. I don't have any off-site back-up...but I've thought of occasionally putting/keeping a backed-up drive in my car or truck, which would go with me if/when I had to evacuate.
Of course, there are lots of "cloud storage" options, but with digital image files getting bigger and bigger it becomes a HUGE amount of data to upload to the cloud.
As for "back-up": It depends on whether you're guarding against hard drive failure or fire-and-flood. If it's the latter then backups need to be made or moved off-site -- somewhere other than your house. I don't have any off-site back-up...but I've thought of occasionally putting/keeping a backed-up drive in my car or truck, which would go with me if/when I had to evacuate.
Of course, there are lots of "cloud storage" options, but with digital image files getting bigger and bigger it becomes a HUGE amount of data to upload to the cloud.
There are drive-docks that permit plugging a bare drive in to be filled with back-up files from your computer and then pulled out and stored somewhere off-site.
Such as one of these:
Such as one of these:
As MarkBC mentioned, storage is dirt cheap anymore. I use external drives from Western Digital and Seagate to backup my files. I do store the backups off site. Costco has them on sale three or four times a year for between $70 and $100, depending on manufacturer and size, and which way the wind is blowing.
A bit of an aside... My first programming job was for a small health care company, using mini computers. Our drives were industry leading 474MB Fujitsu Eagles that formatted out to 400 megabytes. If memory serves me correctly, the drive and a controller was just under $20,000. Our system grew to four of them for a whopping 1.2 gigabytes. Each drive was about the size of a big box of oranges. Now a couple of terabytes fits in a shirt pocket.
A bit of an aside... My first programming job was for a small health care company, using mini computers. Our drives were industry leading 474MB Fujitsu Eagles that formatted out to 400 megabytes. If memory serves me correctly, the drive and a controller was just under $20,000. Our system grew to four of them for a whopping 1.2 gigabytes. Each drive was about the size of a big box of oranges. Now a couple of terabytes fits in a shirt pocket.
Thinking more about this...and primary storage and back-ups in an age when desktop computers are declining.
My desktop computer has enough drive bays and internal SATA connections that I have several internal hard drives. And with 4 terabyte (T
and larger drives becoming common and cheap that's room for a lot of storage and back-up for that storage. Back-up against hard-drive failure -- not fire-and-flood.
But a lot of people don't have desktop computers anymore -- just laptops.
So with a laptop, the back-up drives will necessarily be external drives -- and the primary storage may need to be external, also. Lots of options for external drives (I'm a long-time fan of Newegg.com).
And with 2.5-inch drives (the size found in laptops) increasingly available in larger capacity that option is small and portable and stowable. Maybe a more convenient option for off-site storage, because of the smaller size.
I still prefer 3.5-inch drives -- more bang for the buck, even though you can't stick them in a shirt pocket.
My desktop computer has enough drive bays and internal SATA connections that I have several internal hard drives. And with 4 terabyte (T
and larger drives becoming common and cheap that's room for a lot of storage and back-up for that storage. Back-up against hard-drive failure -- not fire-and-flood.But a lot of people don't have desktop computers anymore -- just laptops.
So with a laptop, the back-up drives will necessarily be external drives -- and the primary storage may need to be external, also. Lots of options for external drives (I'm a long-time fan of Newegg.com).
And with 2.5-inch drives (the size found in laptops) increasingly available in larger capacity that option is small and portable and stowable. Maybe a more convenient option for off-site storage, because of the smaller size.
I still prefer 3.5-inch drives -- more bang for the buck, even though you can't stick them in a shirt pocket.
Alley-Kat
Elder Statesman
Hard drives will eventually fail.
Not an opinion, just a fact.
Some research into the concept of redundancy may be warranted.
I use a Raid system, "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
Some software is required to make it all automatic at the time of initial saving, however, simply manually duplicating one hard drive to another can sort of accomplish the same basic thing.
There's lots to say about RAID, so, I'll let everyone do their own research.
And, Mark has a good recommendation to also have an off-site back-up.
The cloud could be a good thing for non-personal, non-sensitive, "I don't care if anyone hacks it" storage.
Not an opinion, just a fact.
Some research into the concept of redundancy may be warranted.
I use a Raid system, "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
Some software is required to make it all automatic at the time of initial saving, however, simply manually duplicating one hard drive to another can sort of accomplish the same basic thing.
There's lots to say about RAID, so, I'll let everyone do their own research.
And, Mark has a good recommendation to also have an off-site back-up.
The cloud could be a good thing for non-personal, non-sensitive, "I don't care if anyone hacks it" storage.
Though "eventually" can be a long time in the future. I've never had a hard drive fail.Alley-Kat said:
But it's true -- any mechanical device (and most other devices) will eventually fail... which is why backing up data -- photos -- on more than one device should be standard.
craig333
Riley's Human
I have seen them fail but it generally takes quite a long time. I really should be backing up my files. Not so much that my stuff is all that important, its just the annoyance factor of bringing a new drive up to speed. Even with a fast connection thats a lot of hours to re-download stuff and get it all patched up. Thanks for the reminder. I had a raid array on my old computer but I've been really slacking on this one. Maybe I'll go see the guys at ATC and stop by Fry's while I'm in the neighborhood.
Stalking Light
Feral Grandpa
I use G-RAID drives from G-Technology on my iMac and also have a couple of cheapo Seagate 2TB USB drives configured as a RAID array for my time machine backups on my MBP laptop.
pvstoy
Senior Member
I have been down many different approaches and as your file size on disk grows it boils down to some factors of approach.
Our files are Important to us. They show details and memories of past trip and adventures that may never be repeated. Images captured can be printed, shared, or entered into photo contest. They are a record as to where you been and could aid in behavior detail for Audubon or technical papers.
So being IMPORTANT how many copies? We have three. One is the working drives, one is the backup that is at the other end of the house and the last in in a safe deposit box. Fire flood, theft, there is always a copy off site. That one off site is only as good as when you had backed it up last.
Tech savvy. Could be as simple as cloning hard drive or letting some canned software do it for you, to writing batch commands and having the operating software run a timed back up. Further up the line is having multiple raid boxes attached by LAN through a switch.
Like said hard drives will fail from day one to whenever. Many factors that cause failures from power sags - spikes to hard drives being too full. Some have one year warranty to some up to 5 years. Search out good quality drives that have good reviews with venders such as Newegg.
I'm setting up a NAS system using three Synology 1815+ external box. They hold eight drives. Working box I have 7 - 6 TB drives configured in a raid 6 ( two drive protection) Disk volume size is 27 TB. We have close to 16 tb worth of images, yikes! The box is attached to a switch. All lines are going through the switch (LAN) and not the router to each other. At the moment a second box has 6 - 4 tb and 2 - 2 tb drives in a SHR raid and 4 tb protection. It will take three days to make a copy and will be taken off site , can you guess how long that would take going up to a cloud?. And when that is done a third copy will be generated. It gets complicated and I still need to learn more about this to make it run faster. Muscling through with a sledge hammer!
I have a shelf of smaller drives and miscellaneous boxes that I have used and since expanded to larger.
A back up is only as good as when you did it and if you have protected it.
- how important are my files to me?
- how much tech savvy am I willing to learn?
- what is the cost I'm willing to invest to protect my images?
Our files are Important to us. They show details and memories of past trip and adventures that may never be repeated. Images captured can be printed, shared, or entered into photo contest. They are a record as to where you been and could aid in behavior detail for Audubon or technical papers.
So being IMPORTANT how many copies? We have three. One is the working drives, one is the backup that is at the other end of the house and the last in in a safe deposit box. Fire flood, theft, there is always a copy off site. That one off site is only as good as when you had backed it up last.
Tech savvy. Could be as simple as cloning hard drive or letting some canned software do it for you, to writing batch commands and having the operating software run a timed back up. Further up the line is having multiple raid boxes attached by LAN through a switch.
Like said hard drives will fail from day one to whenever. Many factors that cause failures from power sags - spikes to hard drives being too full. Some have one year warranty to some up to 5 years. Search out good quality drives that have good reviews with venders such as Newegg.
I'm setting up a NAS system using three Synology 1815+ external box. They hold eight drives. Working box I have 7 - 6 TB drives configured in a raid 6 ( two drive protection) Disk volume size is 27 TB. We have close to 16 tb worth of images, yikes! The box is attached to a switch. All lines are going through the switch (LAN) and not the router to each other. At the moment a second box has 6 - 4 tb and 2 - 2 tb drives in a SHR raid and 4 tb protection. It will take three days to make a copy and will be taken off site , can you guess how long that would take going up to a cloud?. And when that is done a third copy will be generated. It gets complicated and I still need to learn more about this to make it run faster. Muscling through with a sledge hammer!
I have a shelf of smaller drives and miscellaneous boxes that I have used and since expanded to larger.
A back up is only as good as when you did it and if you have protected it.
OP
OP
Thank you all very much for the insights on how you handle storage. I have been doing similar with back up onto an external hard drive. I want to build in redundancy with an additional external drive or two. After out evacuation here last fall, we concentrated on personal, irreplaceable items only. It was easy to grab a couple of small hard drives (personal data back up and photography). I'm also curious about off site storage and thus far Patrick's idea of back up kept in a safe deposit box - as long as you keep up the habit of monthly updates. Good ideas all and thanks again.
Now that lots of helpful answers have been supplied... I wanted to insert this technically on-topic -- but not very helpful -- item:
This little guy, which usually lives in my tablet/laptop hybrid, is the size of the tip of my little finger, and yet it has the capacity to hold all the content of 150 sets of Encyclopedia Britannica.
I just think that's SO cool!
...and larger-capacity µSD cards are already available.
("150 sets of E.B."? My first electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which included all the content of the print edition but not much more, came on one CD. So that's less than a gigabyte. Maybe 200+ could fit on the card.)
This little guy, which usually lives in my tablet/laptop hybrid, is the size of the tip of my little finger, and yet it has the capacity to hold all the content of 150 sets of Encyclopedia Britannica.
I just think that's SO cool!
...and larger-capacity µSD cards are already available.
("150 sets of E.B."? My first electronic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which included all the content of the print edition but not much more, came on one CD. So that's less than a gigabyte. Maybe 200+ could fit on the card.)
PaulT
Need gumbo
If you do full backups, keep two copies at home and rotate with a third that you keep off site. If you use automated incremental backups, better understand how your backup software determines what changes have occurred since the last backup as you rotate backup drives. That is, does the software update a changed file index on the computer's working drive as changes occur or scan and compute the changed files based on state of the files on the backup drive.
My concern on backups for photos that you might want to use in a decade or so is that they get rewritten periodically to refresh the magnetic records and copied to current storage technology so that they can be retrieved at a later date. For example, how many of us could read a Sony HI8 video today or read a backup file on an Iomega ZIP or JAZ disk, or a CD-Rewritable disk or even a compact flash card now that SD cards have largely superseded them? Reading DVD-R and DVD+R are not universally compatible. Technology doesn't remain still for long. Choose wisely and keep your backups moving forward to current media.
Paul
My concern on backups for photos that you might want to use in a decade or so is that they get rewritten periodically to refresh the magnetic records and copied to current storage technology so that they can be retrieved at a later date. For example, how many of us could read a Sony HI8 video today or read a backup file on an Iomega ZIP or JAZ disk, or a CD-Rewritable disk or even a compact flash card now that SD cards have largely superseded them? Reading DVD-R and DVD+R are not universally compatible. Technology doesn't remain still for long. Choose wisely and keep your backups moving forward to current media.
Paul
Many good points made. The challenge for me is as much organizing backups as it is making them. I use database software to keep track of storage devices and their contents, but the increasing volume of image and video files is intimidating. Not to mention that there are often multiple versions involved. Storage is cheap but it takes precious time to sort through a pile of external hard drives (and CDs, DVDs, Zip drives and slides from past years). A backup does little good if I can't find what I'm looking for quickly and work with it in current apps.
As I get older there is the nagging question of what will happen to all these images when I am no longer around to care for them. No one will want to look at so many files even if they could. I think it is important to select the best images and either print them (one-off books are easy to make) or keep them as JPEG in long-term storage. There was a poignant seen in one of the recent Planet of the Apes movies where what they wanted most was to see an image of their child but it was locked away in a dead tablet.
As I get older there is the nagging question of what will happen to all these images when I am no longer around to care for them. No one will want to look at so many files even if they could. I think it is important to select the best images and either print them (one-off books are easy to make) or keep them as JPEG in long-term storage. There was a poignant seen in one of the recent Planet of the Apes movies where what they wanted most was to see an image of their child but it was locked away in a dead tablet.
I had been using USB flash memory chips (sticks) but they were slow and my software engineer daughter was getting reports of flash memory chip failures. So...
I purchased an external (USB 3.0) Samsung 250 gig SSD T1 chip set, Solid State Drive. The reviews said:
Samsung makes all the chips in the set for faster and more reliable file transfer.
The SSD chip design is more durable than flash memory sticks and is capable of 1000 times more read/writes over the same spot on the chip. Samsung's SSD chip quality is the same as commercial cloud/internet storage devices.
The SSD is more shock (drop) resistant than hard drives.
My experience:
Wow, really fast. A 20 gig (annual picture collection) copy engages the laptop's hard drive and does not let go sending files to the SSD at 10 times the speed of a flash memory stick.
If you handle raw picture files either an internal SSD drive or an external T1/T3 SSD will speed up file movements compared to a hard disk if you have USB 3.0 or 3.1 for the external choice.
The reviews said the discontinued T1 Samsung SSD I purchased works well on Windows which is why I choose the T1.
The reviews said to go with a current T3 SSD if you have an Apple computer while there are no reports of Windows problems with the T3 SSD. The price difference between a discontinued T1 and a current T3 is minor.
Samsung SSD's are not cheap just FAST!!! I spent so much time labeling and organizing pictures the price of the SSD was worthwhile. Labeling 1000's of pictures without a good backup felt like a waste of time.
I plan to get another SSD next winter and have dual backups. Currently we have full backup on SSD and another on flash memory.
I purchased an external (USB 3.0) Samsung 250 gig SSD T1 chip set, Solid State Drive. The reviews said:
Samsung makes all the chips in the set for faster and more reliable file transfer.
The SSD chip design is more durable than flash memory sticks and is capable of 1000 times more read/writes over the same spot on the chip. Samsung's SSD chip quality is the same as commercial cloud/internet storage devices.
The SSD is more shock (drop) resistant than hard drives.
My experience:
Wow, really fast. A 20 gig (annual picture collection) copy engages the laptop's hard drive and does not let go sending files to the SSD at 10 times the speed of a flash memory stick.
If you handle raw picture files either an internal SSD drive or an external T1/T3 SSD will speed up file movements compared to a hard disk if you have USB 3.0 or 3.1 for the external choice.
The reviews said the discontinued T1 Samsung SSD I purchased works well on Windows which is why I choose the T1.
The reviews said to go with a current T3 SSD if you have an Apple computer while there are no reports of Windows problems with the T3 SSD. The price difference between a discontinued T1 and a current T3 is minor.
Samsung SSD's are not cheap just FAST!!! I spent so much time labeling and organizing pictures the price of the SSD was worthwhile. Labeling 1000's of pictures without a good backup felt like a waste of time.
I plan to get another SSD next winter and have dual backups. Currently we have full backup on SSD and another on flash memory.
smlobx
Lost again
Interesting that no one is advocating cloud storage....
I shoot RAW +JPEG on my Nikons. JPEGs get uploaded to a folder on smugmug.com, there is unlimited storage there so I break the things out by event or date within a backups folder. I then also select the best and/or edited images and move them into a separate subject matter gallery so that someday (hopefully a LONG time in the future) someone can go through and review and figure out which if any they want to save for future generations. Yeah, I pay for it but it works for me.smlobx said:
RAW stay on a couple of NAS drives.
I tried Google cloud for free but the file upload speed was much slower than going to my T1 and T3 Samsung SSD's (I did buy a second SSD, one in the safe deposit box). Obviously, upload speed would depend on your internet service. Also, Google cloud tried to sync my files, cloud versus disc, which slowed down my computer. I take 6,000 pictures in a single trip which gets cut down to 3,000 after sorting and labeling. Google cloud sync'ing lasted less than one day and was cured by deleting all the cloud files rather than spend the time figuring out how to turn off sync.
pvstoy
Senior Member
iowahike I agree that cloud storage is not for everyone. I can take 30,000 images in a single trip and can you imagine how many days or months to upload to the cloud that would take?
rubberlegs
back country campers
Wow, 30,000 images. That would be an enormous task to go through them. Are they all worth keeping? I've decided my pictures are not that great, might as well shrink them to 800x600 and delete 90% of them.
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