Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I'd never use cards as backup. I'd have them all over the place, at ?$ a pop...
I'd rather have one external drive than 50 (or a hundred) SD cards.
AT $20 pop, that would be between $1,000 and $2,000.
I can get a lot of other stuff with that money.

rck281 Loc: Overland Park, KS

Good advice

jefflane

I once lost pics because the controller for the mirrored drives failed and was not replaceable. I currently use a QNAP file server (4, 4 TB drives) with backups to two Seagate 6 TB drives. As I exceed the single drives, I get bigger ones.

tgreenhaw

I store all my images on my computer the same day I shoot which also goes to Amazon Cloud automatically. I back this up to a WD External Drive with a Robocopy script. I only really use Amazon Cloud to show pictures on my TV and share with phones.

When I travel, I copy my images to my laptop every day. I like to review and delete junk at that time. When I get home I copy that to the external and then computer before I delete from my laptop (usually on my next trip).

Since the cost of SD cards has come down so much, I've stopped deleting files from them and always have at least one blank on hand for each camera I'm carrying.

I used to repair hard drives and upon review I guess I'm pretty obsessive about backups :-)

tgreenhaw

FWIW I've not personally had good luck with Seagate but have not had any Western Digital external drive failures. (knocks on wood)

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

And that is the problem with 3rd party relatively inexpensive RAID controllers, and the reason I recommend just using the native RAID capability in either Windows or MacOS. I would just buy an external JBOD (just a bunch of drives) drive enclosure, and use the OS to do the RAID.

hassighedgehog Loc: Corona, CA

I have my photo's backed up on 3 technologies. An external 1 TB HD, a 255 GB SSD drive and a 64 GB Thumb drive.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Do you back up your documents, spreadsheets, PFDs, etc. also? Or just photos.

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

backups - use the 123 rule. I'm on a mac so I use Time Machine for my first backup. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for 2 - it makes a bootable copy of my drives. I have it going to two different HD so if I have a drive failure I'm still good. It backup every Sunday and Wednesday nights.
Lastly and best I back up to BackBlaze continually. It backups only the files not apps. I currently have 9 TB backup up to it. Best deal in the marketplace. I'm grandfathered into my original price of $5/month but it is only $6/Month for UNLIMITED BACKUPS.

I live in an area where I have had to evacuate 4 times in 10 years due to fires. If I wasn't home I would not get to the Time Machine or CCC backups so BackBlaze is critical.

Remember each process is backing up different:

The time machine makes a backup of the status of your drives going back as long as the Time Machine HD has enough storage. Evidently it will start deleting the oldest backups. I am backing up about 5 TBs so it doesn’t have a ton of dated backups.

CCC makes a cloan of the CURRENT STATUS at the time of the backup. So lets say in the Sunday backup you have an image but you erase it before the Wednesday backup - its gone forever as far as CCC is concerned. It might be in your Time Machine Backup.

It will be in your Time Machine backup as it stores all your data period. It adds to your backup the new data storing it with all the old data rather than overwriting it.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

123 rule? for backups?

We computer "old timers" refer to the backups as Father, Son, and Grandfather.

therwol Loc: USA

I'd run out of room really fast with those options. I just bought three 5TB external drives to add to 7 other drives I have ranging from 1 to 4 Tb. Everything gets backed up on 3 drives. I use the cloud for sharing. I also have a fair amount of room on two computers, 4 GB Samsung SSD in a laptop and 2TB NVMe plus 2Tb Samsung SSD in my Dell desktop. I work with the files on those, but everything eventually is taken off.

Rmccully

I have my photos and Lightroom catalog on a drobo that has a built in redundancy. I have the drobo backed up to backblaze, a cloud based system, and I backup the drobo to an external hard drive using Retrospect software.

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

Don't forget prints. I consider my 16x20 prints a hard copy Backup.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Have a 16x20 scanner bed?
(just kidding.)

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

Do you store them locally or in the cloud?