grampy26

Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.

ketihflyr

Suggestion- 2 external hard drives, each drive 1 Terabit (1T) I use Seagate, they are a great company and customer support is in the USA they speak English and are very helpful. A 1T drive is about $80.oo at Walmart.

Smudgey Loc: Ohio, Calif, Now Arizona

What a lot of people don't understand its not if, but when your hard drive crashes. I have a 12 TB backup distributed amongst 5 drives. These back up the backup. You could go to a cloud, but I always wonder what would happen if the cloud goes bankrupt. You could put everything on DVDs. If you back up on M disk, it will be archive quality, and the photos could be retrieved 100 years from now, if there is anything to play it on.

Al Beatty Loc: Boise, Idaho

Hi grampy26,

I recently experienced the same disaster. I did find a work-a-round that was OK but not perfect. I use Lightroom CC so have "reference pictures" for all of the lost pictures. When I need a picture from one of those I "lost" I highlight the reference picture in Lightroom, press Ctrl c and paste in in Photoshop CC. I then use PS to upsize the picture. I've printed a few 8 x 10 inch pictures that were "less than perfect but better than nothing" using this process. If you have access to a program (like Lightroom or similar) with reference pictures you might consider using this idea. Take care & ...

whitewolfowner

Two drives is the answer but Seagate drives are the worst ones out there for longevity and dependability. The best are Western Digital and Toshiba. The cheapest are the Wester Digital My Book series with their green drives installed and they are an excellent choice for an external drive to store photos on. Don't go too small, leave extra space for the future; they can have a long life. As soon as you take your photos off the camera and put them on the computer, copy them immediately and store them on both external drives, and when fixed, do it again. That way if something happens when working them, they are not lost. Remember the golden rule with hard drives; it's not WILL my hard drive fail; it's WHEN WILL my hard drive fail. At all times have them on at least two drives the minute they go into the computer and don't format the card until that step is achieved.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

You've already experienced a disaster because of short sighted thinking. Looking for the least expensive backup solution signals you are about to commit another mistake.

You will need to establish for yourself how important your images are, and what that means in terms of value/cost.

Least expensive is a relative term. I would look at the premium, no expense spared, backup solution and start to dial back from there. You will learn how to do it right, what that will cost, and as you dial back you can then make informed decisions about what your tradeoffs will be.

You will need to establish your current needs, and project what your future needs will be.

A good back up will include multiple drives and/or an NAS, with dupes in different locations, a cloud based solution such as CrashPlan, BackBlaze or Carbonite, and for disaster recovery, a means of creating an image of your system drive, in the event you lose your system drive. Something you will do each evening.

You cannot get a 4 TB drive that is reliable for $120. They are universally cheap and junk. However you can get a Western Digital Black or RE drive (standalone or RAID), or an Hitachi Ultrastar for around $210, and buy a case (single drive, USB 3) for around $40, then you'd have a decent drive that should last to the end of its 5 yr warranty. Other than the Seagate Constellation drives the rest are junk. Cheap, when it comes to data integrity, is a false economy.

If you go NAS, forget about Drobo, Seagate, and most other solutions - Synology is the choice of IT professionals and photographers alike. The are modular, fast, reliable, expandable, and many offer a personal cloud with data encryption that is actually pretty good.

As you can see, a proper backup is not a trivial matter, unless you want to be in the same situation with a bunch of low cost consumer oriented drives that are designed to fail.

Obviously, only you can judge for yourself what your price sensitivity is, and to what extent you will go to protect your images (and other data). j

grampy26

Thanks for input, I realized after I posted that the way I put what I was looking for was kind of an oxymoron, can't have best and least expensive for this. The hard drive was a 3tb Seagate and it was them that told me stuff was unrecoverable, told me not to keep it plugged in all the time. Mistake # 1. Have some saved on DVD's and flash drives and someone mentioned using Amazon for photo backups, something to think about along with other options. Hard lesson learned but life goes on.

whitewolfowner

Go with the two hard drives for yourself. A third back up off site will guard against theft and/or fire, but I believe in putting my trust in myself, rather than others. Others disappoint just too many times. Those photos can be recovered; the government can recover anything they want; just might not be affordable to do so.

jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

Excellent response. A good backup system is not something to do on the cheap.

I agree that Synology is the NAS to use. I have one for my home office, where I do all my PP and store my photo shoots, and one at our studio office for our interior design business.
It is upgraded consistently by Synology and easily customized to fit my needs and requirements. I do not use cloud services but do use 2 off line hard drives for old archived files and photos. The Synology NAS's are copied and updated to 2 other backup hard drives I keep at the opposite site of the master.

I love that I can access the Synology systems via quick connect on any PC or mobile device to get info for the design business or photos, etc. when in the field.

whitewolfowner

I had a synology and had to return it. Couldn't get it set up and their reps didn't have a clue either. Went with Qnap and love it and their tech support is right on and friendly to boot.

jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

That is interesting... I had customer service help me after the initial setup to do some extra things and they were great. I do not know much about your system, but glad it works for your needs.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Software raid on my macpro plus my nas is pretty reliable. It wasnt that long back one of my drives failed in the raid so i bought 2 more drives and then copied from the remaining original raid drive to my new raid. The nice thing is since my files are stored on the raid when i copy from the card i have 2 copies immediately. My system drive is smaller and I had to do an upgrade that might cause problems, it did. But i had cloned the drive and did the upgrade on the clone and fixed the issues. The original drive is now an offline backup. Provided your backup plan is robust enough for your situation you shouldn't lose data.

Try to be organised back up what matters not the junk. e.g your browser might have 500Mb of cached files you will never want them again.

whitewolfowner

Are you on a PC? I use a mac and have a feeling that Synology people had no idea what a mac was.

jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

A long time ago, I was a Mac user. But the demands of the business for AutoCAD and other software made me move to PCs.

Now, I get much more bang for my buck with PCs than I could if I bought the equivalent power and number in Macs. Perhaps the idea that Synology customer service isn't geared for Macs is a distinct possibility.

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Contrary to what some have suggested here, there is no hard drive-based solution that is foolproof. Any hard drive can crash at any time.
I have Carbonite cloud backup, which, when added to backup drives, gives you protection as close to perfect as you can get. www.carbonite.com
>>>Alan