Capture48 Loc: Arizona

I only use Carbonite on my Wife's PC, on the MAC I use CrashPlan. A RAID Is a storage device, just not a good BU solution.

Rotating to a safe deposit box, or Aunt Mary's house works fine as long as you get one copy off-site the chances of two locations catching fire or getting robbed in the same day are astronomical. So you are probably safe this way. On a personal note I did the manual rotation for years and years. I found that when I did it manually I always fell behind. If I was supposed to change out my drives on Monday sometimes I would not need to go to the bank, and hence never got my drive out of my safe deposit box. many times I found myself up to a month late, this put my data at extreme risk. meaning if anything happened I would lose a months worth of photos and other data.

For this reason I decided to make sure my BU was automatic and did not require any intervention by me. Hence the Crash Plan cloud backup. You however may be very diligent, and never miss a manual backup. Or perhaps your data is not that valuable and you can stand a months worth of losses.

Decide which works for you and just be very regular if you use a manual BU process of rotating a drive off-site. If you decide to go with a cloud based BU like CrashPLan it is pretty much set and forget. But I caution everybody should test their BU solution on occasion.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Still wrong... a RAID system is NOT a backup, but STORAGE... redundant/fault tolerant storage....

If ONE of the drive within a RAID array fails, you have lost nothing, pop in a new drive and the RAID set will rebuild.

If you are rotating external drives for storage, how do you keep track of what is on what? Depending on your backup plan/system perhaps rotating a backup disk makes sense, perhaps it just makes recovering your data harder or impossible.

If you buy a raid set, say 2 drives mirrored, you only swap one drive out when it fails, not to put in safe storage normally.

The point of RAID is redundancy, so if one drive fails the data is still accessible...

RAID alone should NOT be considered a backup.

Make sense?

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Exactly - backup = set it and forget it unless you need to recover. :)

akfishguide Loc: PA

Thank You very much for your advice. I will check out Crash Plan as I know nothing about it. I do not have a lot of photos to back up at this time, but the library is beginning to grow (only about 26,000 at this time) I am planning to make copies of photos that are important and are from film days and then back those up to external HD's and off site as a just in case as well. Many of those photos are irreplaceable. I lost my youngest daughter 2 years ago and never want to lose the photos i have of her. Some are digital and some are film. Also photos of my parents and my wife's parents are on film and need to be saved as well. Thank You again for taking the time to guide me on this educational adventure.

Capture48 Loc: Arizona

Happy to help, you more than most have a good reason to be very careful, but photos are not the only data on my computer. Since I run my business on the same MAC as my personal life, there are a ton of financial and other data I do not want to lose. So it's not just photos, but my entire data set that gets backed up to Crash Plan

Everything I say from here on is OVERKILL pay no attention unless your data is EXTREMELY important to you. I have triple redundant Backups. I have a NAS (Not BU, but Storage) I use a MAC Time Machine (Because it keeps versions) and I use CrashPlan (Because it's my off-site BU). So at any time my data is always in three places. many believe this is overkill, and it may be I won't argue that point, but storage is very cheap these days.

In reality you need two copies at a minimum! One of these copies needs to be off-site. I use the Time Machine because it will do a restore MUCH quicker than an off-site BU. But strictly speaking it isn't necessary.

BTW - just mY humble opinion, but turn those film photos of your daughter into digital. keep the film, but the digital will not degrade.

Good luck

akfishguide Loc: PA

Thank you again for all your advice. What you have done is what I plan to do as well. Two backups (original and copy of photos) and I have time machine for my laptop at present with everything that is on my laptop. I will then store things offsite as well. Thanks again.

Capture48 Loc: Arizona

:thumbup: :thumbup:

bcmink Loc: Monona, WI

Raid 1 represents mirrored drives; so in reality it is no different than using two external hard drives that you back up in a rotation on a sequential basis.

In general when one is using a RAID one array you don't remove one of the mirrors unless the drive fails. So if you implemented an external NAS with a RAID 1 array you would not remove drives on a rotating basis. If that were your intent it makes no sense to use a NAS/RAID set up.

The advantages of using a NAS is that the NAS is indeed hot swappable in case of mirror failure. A NAS has its own OS and does not tax the resources of your computer. The NAS is smart enough to park the hard drives in a sleep mode when they are not accepting write and seeks. The OS acts to preserve the longevity of the drives. The NAS is typically available via web access from anywhere at any time. There are a host of other advantages as well.

The problem with RAID 1 is if you infect one of the disks, they are both infected. RAID 1 seek and write access is slow.

If you're going to bother with a NAS versus two external rotating back up drives it is best to consider a three drive NAS and RAID 5 versus RAID 1. RAID 1 isn't fault tolerant! RAID 5 is very fault tolerant and very fast. You can lose one drive without any ill effects and easily recreate the array.

If you're wedded to mirrored drives and want to for instance take one of the drives with you for travel, then stick with a simple system with external drives.

Remember that a NAS is not necessarily a back up unless you use multiple NAS arrays. A NAS is a storage array and if you have one and store all of your photos on the NAS, that is not a back up. You would need a second NAS or a large NAS where you could run on RAID 5 array and then a second mirror of that array. That becomes complicated.

My advice. Back up to external drives x2 and use cloud storage as a redundant third backup. It is a lot cheaper and less complicated. Keep one of your back ups in a fireproof water proof safe in between back ups so it cannot be damaged by fire, flood or stolen.

Bobbee

Godd discussion. Marking for the links.

OnDSnap Loc: NE New Jersey

I have two machines with RAID, the older being a 4 drive 0+1, and the newer computer has a 2- 1TB drives RAID 1, My internal HD's are used for system and program files ONLY, All my work files and photos is stored on External 1 TB WD-Hd's, which are then backed up on another set of external drives. Two additional drives are kept off site and are inserted into the chain of backups and updated weekly as total backups.
The primary purpose of RAID 1 is if one drive fails, you can still run on the other, you pull the bad drive, insert a new identical drive, it then rebuilds off the other good drive. The Raid 0+1, which by some called the old way, Drives 1 & 3, 2 & 5 are redundant. If I recall. Knock on wood, never went down. You can also go with an external backup and ad drives as needed such as in a Drobo system...Pulling a RAID drive weekly as you mention makes no sense, 1st you would need 3 drives, and the one you pull and reinsert a week later will not be Identical to the drives within your machine. So the RAID, sees the newly inserted drive as new and needs to be formatted and then written to with the data from the drive remaining in the machine, making it identical. It's a safety net...I've had to use it only once on the newer computer, pulled the bad drive, called my supplier for a new one, aired overnight, installed the new drive,rebuilt, all within 24 hours...the big thing, no down time.
BTW, my backup drives (the externals) do incremental backups daily (Using Acronis) and total backups are done weekly, the totals are kept off site.

queencitysanta Loc: Charlotte, North Carolina

The critical issue with a backup is "If all of your backups are at home and your house burns down your back ups will be destroyed/

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Any hard drive can fail. Happens all the time. Consider a cloud backup service like Carbonite in addition to your external drives. No data limit.

Zaruka Loc: Illinois

Drives fail, houses burn and cloud providers go out of business. These are the realities and if you rely on one you will find yourself on Petapixel with a sad story. Multiple backups with off-site storage is the only way to go.

aellman Loc: Boston MA

Precisely why I suggested it.

Zaruka Loc: Illinois

Agreed. I preserve digital content for a living and I run into so many stories about lost files and desperate recovery strategies. I am obsessive about drive fail at home and purchase a new 3-5Tb drive every six months. Any single failure is no problem. You do have to have a migration strategy. I use software to synchronize my repositories and seek out any content migration failures. I do also keep DVD copies of some critical photo shoots but they are extras and not relied upon.