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Hey all,

 

Recently I have been really getting back into photography. I have upgraded kit and new lenses. My alamy port is about to expand dramatically.

I went to china last month and took about 50 GB of photos and videos.

 

I want to know what you all do for storage is there any safe alternative to external hard drives?

I have had 2 break on me losing all my data...this is tragicly thousands of photos!

 

If there isnt then do people know of any very good hard drives that arent going to break and lose all my data?

Or any other novel solutions for PC (kind of like airport for apple maybe?)

 

Jonny

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Most use their own hard drives. I have two WD Duo (four drives) with both set to raid so I have four copies of my files. That is apart from the other daily weekly copies I make which are stored separately away from the office.

 

Some use the Cloud but personally I do not trust them.

 

Allan

 

arterra just beat me to the line.

 

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I am on iMac so also backup to another drive with "Time Machine".

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Neither do I trust the clouds.

 

I try to keep my photos on two hard drives at all times (or within reasonable time) - i.e. my computer hard drive and an external. If one of them breaks down I will have to establish another. I do the copying manually.

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I have two external drives that are the same size as my hard drive. I use Superduper to clone my entire drive. One drives stays at home and the other is kept off site. They are swapped every month or so.

 

I have a third external drive that is constantly backing up via Time Machine.

 

I use usually buy Western Digital drives.

 

i don't have fast enough internet upload for cloud storage of any meaningful kind.

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I learned the hard way, like you. I had my images on one external when I first started out, and it failed. I paid $100 to a company who recovered my files and put them on a new drive that I supplied. I bought a second like it and mirrored that drive.

 

I'm on my second set of externals. If one fails, I'll buy a new one and copy everything again to the new drive.

It's a horrible feeling to have all your eggs in one basket and lose the eggs.

Betty

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I use one 3TB external drive in addition to the hard drive in the box. Used to use two external drives but became lazy/mean. Store raw files and processed JPGs. Only keep TIFFs if a work in progress.

 

Recently discovered that I had inadvertently wiped out a month's worth of work dating back to 2009. No idea when or how it happened - or if there are other instances. Intend to look back at my old drives when I can get the motivation. Anything that is of any use is with Alamy, so not too concerned. Moral of tale, software/procedure as important as hardware.

 

I try to edit in camera and avoid duplication, rather than defer judgement to the processing stage, so reducing the amount of storage and procrastination time required. Despite this, still slogging through photos taken in June this year.

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Everyone will (and has had) their own take on this.

 

What works for me is to treat the SD cards like film; so when one is full, I keep it in a box and pop a new one in.

 

The RAW files are imported to an external drive, which my Mac backs up to Time Machine hourly.

 

I also keep an HD in the car which is a clone of the external HD. This is done every week or so.

 

For the future, I will be investigating cloud storage through Amazon as a third back up. I realise the downside to this, but as a third, easily accomplished option it might be viable.

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I too tend to keep my images on card until I have secure copies. On the road that is usually to the HD on my laptop and duplicated to a separate (Samsung) portable HD. If I really need to to clear my cards (or make room on my laptop - only has small SSD) I also have a couple of 64Gb USB memory sticks that I dump them to.

 

If I am in my motorhome I usually have 2 laptops my small and light 13in one, and my 17in with a bigger disk which I only use when driiving myself or working from a media centre.

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In addition to external and internal drives, I store images and such on M-Discs.

 

Will the machinery be available to play M-Discs in a thousand years?

 

Who knows?

 

Allan

 

Maybe not, but in the meanwhile I tend to trust it over magnetic media that is married to the drive that runs it.

 

It seems it's more often the drive mechanism than the magnetic medium itself that fails.

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NAS (personal cloud) is the way to go. If you can afford it get RAID duplexed disks.

Yep - setup a NAS using a RAID array of multiple drives.

 

Select higher quality hard drives designed for Enterprise/commercial NAS system usage instead of "consumer" grade drives.  Over the years I've used IBM Deskstar drives which was sold to Hitachi and are now HGST.   We're now using a pair of HGST Deskstar NAS drives in an NAS RAID to backup both mine and wife's Mac's.   I might be jinxing us but so far never had a drive failure over many years of using IBM/Hitachi/HGST drives.  Consumer grade Western Digitals are another story - wife's Mac had two crap out.   YMMV!

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I have a copy on my PC disk (which is getting full and I need another) and backup to a NAS (built from an old PC running FreeNAS) with 2 1TB Western Digital Red drives in (specifically designed for NAS).

 

I chose not to use RAID as that would instantly delete a file from both if I mistakenly deleted something. Instead, the NAS syncs the two drives over night and doesn't delete anything ever from the second drive (I have to manually decide to delete it).

This way if I mistakenly delete something on my PC, that will get synced to the NAS on one drive and be deleted, but it will still be on the second NAS drive. Kind of like a 1TB recycle bin I guess.

 

The drives in the NAS are in removable caddies and when we are away I put one in our fire-proof safe and one at my parents.

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I have one of these and absolutely love it.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1159845-REG/synology_diskstation_ds1515_5_bay_nas.html

 

I have 10tb of storage in RAID Configuration.  It's one of the best purchases I've made.  If a drive fails, I just swap it out with no data loss.  You can also set it up to have a standby drive in case one fails, it will fail over to the spare.  It's a great system (you can also buy it without the drives for less money....but then you have to buy the drives for it....

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1103579-REG/synology_diskstation_ds1515_5_bay_nas.html

 

 

If your Internet service provider allows you to "forward port", you can also access it while you're on the road and upload files and images to it remotely.

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I have one of these and absolutely love it.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1159845-REG/synology_diskstation_ds1515_5_bay_nas.html

 

I have 10gb of storage in RAID Configuration.  It's one of the best purchases I've made.  If a drive fails, I just swap it out with no data loss.  You can also set it up to have a standby drive in case one fails, it will fail over to the spare.  It's a great system (you can also buy it without the drives for less money....but then you have to buy the drives for it....

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1103579-REG/synology_diskstation_ds1515_5_bay_nas.html

 

 

If your Internet service provider allows you to "forward port", you can also access it while you're on the road and upload files and images to it remotely.

 

Good things these are and I use a raid set with 5 drives as well.

But they *do not* protect your images from accidental deletion, fire, water, earthquake, overpower .... 

Also remind yourself that all drives within are usually of same or similar age - a second disk failure soon after is not uncommon. 

I also have two homes 600KM apart from each other and keep copies in both locations.

 

 

When tight on budget, one could also keep a copy with a friend or family in another location. 

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NAS (personal cloud) is the way to go. If you can afford it get RAID duplexed disks.

 

+1

 

1x 4/5 bay NAS setup as RAID 1. You will have two disks for storage and the other two back them up. This protects agains disk failure. This will be the main storage system.

1x 4/5 bay NAS as RAID 5. Use this to backup the above RAID NAS ideally with different disks to the main system. This protects against hardware failure and major disk failures due to manufacture faults. RAID 5 is slower but will give you more space and as it's only used as backup and won't to store additional data, does't really matter. You could backup two main system NAS drives in affect.

 

Store copies of all images asJpgs on external solid state storage something like SSD drives, bluray disks etc. They have no mechanical parts to fail and can be stored in a separate location in a small fire proof safe if necessary. Protects against theft and fire at the main location. SSD's are great, getting a lot cheaper and very small.

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