DavidThompson Loc: Asheville, NC

Using Lightroom, I have an external drive to save my originals and I know that it is supposed to be backed up and a copy kept off site. I am trying to simplify things so I can spend more time with camera in hand. I read an article in PC Magazine about backup services and idrive was their top choice. I spoke to a company representative who happens to use Lightroom and he said that many people use their service for backups, their service is reliable, etc. Am I in left field or is this a reasonable approach to simplify a task? Thanks for comments.

brucewells Loc: Central Kentucky

I would suggest a second external drive and backup your current drive to that new one. I’m not familiar with iDrive. I use CrashPlan and it works great, and there are others, as well.

I use SyncBack SE to do my local backups. They have a free version. It can be configured with a schedule, making backups automatically, freeing me to do other things. The CrashPlan service is also automatic.

Hope this helps.

PeterBergh

I use the old DOS command XCOPY with a large handful of options to copy my important files to about a dozen external disks. The big advantage of XCOPY is that you need no additional software (XCOPY comes with Windows) and it's easy to retrieve any file, should that become necessary.

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

I also use SynchBack. Setting up a schedule is pretty easy, and after that it is automatic. You do need to check it from time to time to make sure everything is going smoothly. I've had failures because a drive became disconnected [I have cats that wander over everything!] or a drive was full. The backups will only add new stuff to the external HD, but unless you have it set for it, will not remove anything you have deleted.

Manually backing up works, but definitely cuts into your time.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

I can never figure out why people opt to backup on site versus in the cloud. I look at backing up as insurance. Too expensive when you do not need it and not enough when you do. What if you home burns down, is burgled, is hit by a tornado, earthquake, hurricane, flood, and the list of total losses goes on and on. That is why I use Carbonite. My files are always safe and available, not just from home but also anywhere in the world. With all I spend on photography plus all my other data, $60 annually is cheap insurance.

If you still want to back up locally, I would recommend using a mirrored array. Now, your entire hard drive is backed up instantly and if something goes wrong, you have the other drive take over instantly.

DavidThompson Loc: Asheville, NC

I REALLY APPRECIATE all of the information. I took a class at a local technical school and an internet course and a book as big as a dictionary and none mentioned “the cloud.” Thank you Hogs for going above and beyond!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Maybe the book was published before “the cloud” became popular? 😉. You should keep a backup copy of your data, and mirroring, as has been suggested, is a good choice. However, you should also keep a third off-site DR (disaster recovery) copy, and if you have decent internet access, cloud storage is ideal for that purpose. In addition th the one mentioned, you might consider Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple. With cloud storage, you want a major company with financial stability and multiple geographic sites (your data will be replicated on several of the sites for DR) for safety.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Archive/Backup is a widely discussed topic. Most people are talking about archive. In my view, backup is just for files you will be using in the immediate future (time scale is up to you) and archive is forever.

The consensus appears to be that for archive you should make several copies. At least two, but more is better. Many people recommend mixing media (external hard drive or cloud or even "other"). At least one copy should be kept off-site for safety purposes.

In the old days a lot of people saved things on CDs or DVDs. 20 years ago that was pretty much the option. The old home-written disks have gone out of favor for the most part because their longevity is poor. I have good quality disks that have lasted more than 20 years, but I have had others that were unreadable after 3-5 years. The other problems with disks is that they don't hold enough. DVDs hold a couple Gigs. Storage requirements today are Terabytes. That means you have a lot of disks to sort through to find something. Future data storage requirements may well be into the petabyte range. External hard drives have pretty good longevity (compared to disks, anyway), but since they're mechanical, they do eventually fail.

Backup, being the short-term option, can pretty much use any of the above methods (disks, hard drives, cloud). Archive, being the long-term option, requires maintenance. If you are storing things locally (hard drives or disks) you will have to validate your data on a regular basis and copy your data to new media as they become available and the old media are phased out. The cloud does that so you don't have to (assuming a good cloud provider) but there are recurring fees for that service. Local storage has the advantage that you have control over the data (which could also be a disadvantage if you get sloppy or careless). The cloud has the bandwidth disadvantage -- it may take days to download a large amount of data which you could do in hours with a local system.

PS: When talking about archiving your data you should not be talking about Lightroom. You should be talking about EVERYTHING. Your word processing files, your emails, your program configuration files.......

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

I don't think using a service (cloud service) such as this is the best. The reason is because what happens if the company gets hacked, or goes belly up, or they have a fire in the equipment room where their servers are, or someone sabotages their stuff, etc.. But the biggest reason is because I helped someone get some of their images back from a cloud server one time and you wouldn't believe how cumbersome and slow it is to get them back. It took forever and I couldn't just open up some folders and find just the images that she was missing from the cloud. It was not fun.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Sorry to disagree, but would you agree that it’s unlikely that Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple are likely to go belly-up without notice? Secondly, why would a hacker be interested in sorting through thousands of user’s document (mostly photos) rather than a database of social security and credit card numbers, which are the hacker’s classic targets? The idea of a server room fire or other disaster is a non-issue because cloud providers keep 3-5 copies of your data at different geographic locations, exactly to prevent this problem, something that you cannot possibly implement with any other backup or archive method. Finally, while many cloud services will provide your recovery data on a disk, many/most towns and cities have Gbit (1,000 Mbit) downlink services available. Assuming that a realistic/conservative transfer rate is half that, then you can download ~ 60 MBytes/second, 3.6 GBytes/minute or about 200 GBytes/hour, so you could easily download >1 TByte overnight. Now if you live in a rural area where you’re running DSL, or are unwilling to pay (even temporarily) for that level of service or do your download from an area that does, then the cloud may not be for you, but remember, this is your DR copy, only to be used when BOTH your primary and backup fail.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

Don't use ANY cloud storage for offsite backup of your photographs! Computer security experts say you should always maintain a minimum of three (3) forms of backup for your photographs. At least one should be off site to protect against loss in the event of fire or natural disaster. The Cloud is not the best choice because your photos will be under the control of a second party that may have technical problems, financial failure or bankruptcy, sale to an unreliable party or may hold your data hostage to rising costs. Furthermore, upload speeds for large RAW files is way too slow and over time causes undue ware to hard drives. My system provides both on and off site redundant backup that is completely under my own control.

My system consists of the following:

1) All storage of photographs is external to the computer’s (iMac) internal drive. The computer's internal drive is only used for speed when actually editing by temporarrly copying files onto its hard drive then copying them back to the backup drives when editing is done and erasing them from the internal drive.

2) Downloads from the camera, editing, final product and primary storage is on a 5Tb Western Digital My Book drive.
a) Each shoot is stored in a folder identified by job name and date.
b) Within each folder are three sub-folders labeled “RAW”, “Edit” and “Final”. All uploads are made to the RAW folder and only copies of the raw files are copied to the Edit folder for editing. The final output that may include JEPG, TIFF, etc. files are transferred to the Final folder.

3) The complete primary storage drive is backed up to a Drobo 5-drive RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). This allows multiple backup copies of the data along with offsite backup. In addition, the Drobo’s firmware automatically corrects any data transfer errors and insures that all backup drives have matched data. The RAID consists of five Western Digital Red Drives, which are designed for this type of service and have an excellent reputation for reliability. Furthermore they are “hot swappable” which means they can be safely inserted and removed from the Drobo without removing power from the system.
a) The Drobo is only powered on when backups are being made. Otherwise, it is powered off. This limits the exposure to possible hacking.
c) Although the Drobo can hold up to five drives, only four are in the unit at any given time. Three of the drives are never removed and provide the basic redundancy.
d) The fourth drive position is used for the offsite backup. Two drives are used for that purpose.Once a week or as necessary, drive 4 is removed from the Drobo and taken to the bank. Drive 5 is removed from my safe deposit box and drive 4 takes it place in the box.

4) Drive 5 is inserted into the Drobo where the data from Drives 1, 2 and 3 are automatically copied to it.

Although this calls for an investment in equipment, it is a one time investment that is economical in the long run.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

With respect, there is some misinformation here concerning cloud storage, and if the description is accurate, a basic misunderstanding of how a RAID system stores data.

First, I beleive I’ve addressed most of the flaws in the anti-cloud argument above, but let me just add that the idea that uplaoading data to the cloud causes undue wear on your hard drive is incorrect. Anytime you copy data from your primary storage to another destination, whether it’s the cloud, an external drive or a RAID, any “wear” is the same - it doesn’t matter what the destination is, it still has to be read from the primary storage. Also, as an aside, most drive failures are unrelated to the head seeks incurred when reading data.

Now to the RAID. You haven’t mentioned what RAID level you’re using, but regardless, the data on the 3 remaining drives cannot be copied in it’s entirety to a single drive which you take off-site (simple math will tell you that’s impossible). You may think that you’re taking all your data “to the bank”, but you’re not - at most, you’re taking only a part of it. You’re essentially “failing” one drive from the redundancy group and then rebuilding the drive when you insert the replacement drive (and in the process, you’re killing the performance of your array while rebuilding the new drive). Let me explain. If you have 4 drives in the array, they can be used in any number of RAID configurations, depending on how it’s configured:

RAID 0 (unlikely). The data is stripped across all the drives for speed - if you lose one drive from the set, you lose all the data since every file is stripped across all the drives.
RAID 1 (mirroring). Two of the drives are used to store data, and the other two are mirrors for redundancy (safe, but you only utilize half the available storage - the rest is used for redundancy)
RAID 1+0 or RAID 10. A combination of 1 and 0. Two of the drives are stripped for speed and the other two are used for mirroring. (Faster and safe, but again only 50% utilization).
RAID 4 (seldom used except by NetApp) 3 data drives plus one drive used strictly for parity data. Each of the data drives contains 1/3 of the data and the 4th drive is used for parity information.
RAID 5 (most likely what is being used). Uses all the drives to store block data and the parity information is rotated across all the drives (the parity information must reside on a different drive from the data). You can lose one drive in the group (what you’re doing when you remove one drive), and the array will continue providing data which it makes up for the remaining drives on-the-fly using the parity information. When you insert your rotated drive from the bank, the array will begin rebuilding the missing data onto the replacement drive. The downside is that if you lose a second drive before the replacement drive is rebuilt, you lose all your data. The other downside is that the array performance drops in half while the array is in “degraded mode” and rebuilding, which can take days with large drives.
RAID 6. Just like RAID 5 except using 2 parity drives so that you can lose a second drive while rebuilding without losing all your data. The downside is more space used for parity that cannot be used for data.

The one thing in common with all these methods is that all of the data never exists on one drive - the one you’re taking to the bank. A RAID array is certainly better data protection than a single drive, but there is no RAID level that will allow you to take all the data from the remaining drives and archive it onto a single removable drive unless you’re only using 1/3 of your remaining 3 drive’s space and mirroring it onto a single drive which would be a very strange and extremely inefficient use of your space. What you should be doing is leaving all the drives in your RAID and keeping a spare, either seperate or online to use in the event of a failure and then backing up or mirroring the RAID to another off-site system or the cloud for DR. By the way, while I understand taking your system down except when backing up, you should know that a majority of drive failures occur when a drive is stopped and then restarted.

If you doubt any of this explanation, take the drive that you remove to the bank, Mount it on different system (exactly what you’d do if your house and the RAID burned down) and see what portion of your files are there (if any). In other words, test your backup, and if you do, you’ll choose a different method.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Just think what would happen if you got the notice that the one you use is going belly-up.

Everyone in the world is going to try to download their data at the same time.

Yes, it's unlikely, but I consider cloud archives secondary. Local archives are primary. Cloud archives are there if you absolutely have to have them because all your local stuff has failed. Yes, cloud services are probably safer than your local archives because they hire people to maintain them. But you hope you never have to download a couple terabytes of stuff in an emergency.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I agree. Although many businesses are run completely in the cloud and it's estimated that 2/3 of US businesses (including DOD, Social Security, your bank, credit card companies, your medical providers, etc) put at least some of their data in the cloud, I use it (Amazon S3) as my off-site 3rd copy in addition to my primary and local backup.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

That is ancient history. Not the situation today.