How do you back up your files?

[jimmy986]

I wasn't sure where to post this so hopefully this is the best place. I currently keep all of my photos on an 8 TB external drive. My Mac only has 1 TB of storage and my photos are just over 900GB. I need to get a back up for the external since I can't use my computer to store them on. What is a good way? I would love to have something that would automatically sync with my external but if need be it doesn't have to. Cloud storage would be nice because then I wouldn't be relying on two drives located together if anything should happen to my home. I know the easiest option would be to just buy a second drive and it may be what I do but I wanted to check and see if there were any better ideas.

[sixzeiss]

A small NAS device with "personal" cloud would probably help you. Its possible to configure the Disks in the NAS to be redundant, and they all seem to have "backup" method/button for copying to an external disk.

Western Digital make a few devices (i.e. My Cloud Pro Series PR4100), and QNAP make an even broader range of devices.

[slackercruster]

I use a bunch of external drives, some DVDs and thumb drives short term. My main back up is the original SD cards. I'm a scatterbrain and have deleted files off my computer more than once and had to go back to the SD cards.

Cloud takes over the computer, didn't like it.  Stop paying the bill and in 30 days your cloud files go poof! Some of the media is kept off site.

 

[garryknight]

I use FreeFileSync to mirror my photos to an external drive. Simple enough to set up and very easy to use.

[martynhicks]

I always work from one main back up drive, then I duplicate/mirror that to a second hard drive. When that's full, I'll move to two new drives and do the same. It's a pain but always having duplicate backups is definitely worth it.

[Thad E Ginathom]

So far as photographs is concerned, I don't delete the pics on my memory card unless or until I have to, so that is one copy, but I don't count it.

So far as photographs and all other data on my computer is concerned, I keep two external portable drives (It has just become necessary for me use 2Tb drives). About once a week, I make a backup to one of these drives and swap it with the other, which is kept at a friend's house in a different area. Technically, I use a linux program called grsync which just copies new files to a mirror directory tree on each drive. I also use tar for occasional systems backups from which I could (probably) restore my entire system without reinstallation. All this is very OS specific --- back in windows days I had an excellent sync program, but I forget its name.

This is a low-discipline, low-security, somewhat haphazard regime which I would have laughed at when it was my job to do this stuff. But it is good enough for me. If I lost a week of concert photos it would not be the end of the world, but if I lost a holiday's worth, that would be more serious. Professionals can add frequency, discipline and rigour.

It occurs to me to emphasise the importance of two things. First, a back-up disk should not be connected to a computer or to mains power except when in use. Second, one back-up should be at a different location.

I have not mentioned the cloud. I do not use it at all much, except for sharing. IF I had huge bandwidth and high internet speeds, I would use it --- as a convenience, or as another string to the bow. Personally and professionally (but long-since retired anyway) I believe in having physical possession of*, and responsibility for, my data. There is no company that is so perfect, whatever its size, that it will never have downtime, or so huge as to be completely immune from catastrophe.

Coming back to brass tacks: there are at least two, if not three (sometimes four!) copies of my photos (and music, and personal stuff) at nearly all times. The times when there is not is counted in hours and days.  

 

*Including that vital off-site storage, of course.

Edited May 25, 2019 by Thad E Ginathom

[WestonDeclan]

On 5/26/2019 at 2:07 AM, Thad E Ginathom said:

So far as photographs is concerned, I don't delete the pics on my memory card unless or until I have to, so that is one copy, but I don't count it.

So far as photographs and all other data on my computer is concerned, I keep two external portable drives (It has just become necessary for me use 2Tb drives). About once a week, I make a backup to one of these drives and swap it with the other, which is kept at a friend's house in a different area. Technically, I use a linux program called grsync which just copies new files to a mirror directory tree on each drive. I also use tar for occasional systems backups from which I could (probably) restore my entire system without reinstallation. All this is very OS specific --- back in windows days I had an excellent sync program, but I forget its name.

This is a low-discipline, low-security, somewhat haphazard regime which I would have laughed at when it was my job to do this stuff. But it is good enough for me. If I lost a week of concert photos it would not be the end of the world, but if I lost a holiday's worth, that would be more serious. Professionals can add frequency, discipline and rigour.

It occurs to me to emphasise the importance of two things. First, a back-up disk should not be connected to a computer or to mains power except when in use. Second, one back-up should be at a different location.

I have not mentioned the cloud. I do not use it at all much, except for sharing. IF I had huge bandwidth and high internet speeds, I would use it --- as a convenience, or as another string to the bow. Personally and professionally (but long-since retired anyway) I believe in having physical possession of*, and responsibility for, my data. There is no company that is so perfect, whatever its size, that it will never have downtime, or so huge as to be completely immune from catastrophe.

Coming back to brass tacks: there are at least two, if not three (sometimes four!) copies of my photos (and music, and personal stuff) at nearly all times. The times when there is not is counted in hours and days.  

 

*Including that vital off-site storage, of course.

1. Select the Start button, then select Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Backup and Restore.
2. Do one of the following: If you've never used Windows Backup before, or recently upgraded your version of Windows, select Set up backup, and then follow the steps in the wizard.

[FunWithCameras]

One thing that I find worrying is when I see that someone has just one backup of their images. Or even no backup if they have all their images on a single external drive. These are the people you see posting in forums asking how they can get their photos recovered from a failed hard drive...

Yesterday was International Backup Day - seems a good time for a little rant...

Hard disks FAIL! Sooner or later, every single hard drive will fail. It might last a week, a year, five years, even more, but it will fail. If all your images on a single hard drive, you are going to lose all your images one day.

Does that bother you?

The answer is to have multiple copies, on multiple devices (no, having three copies of all your images on the one hard drive is NOT backup).

There are a lot of options.

1. Cloud backup is one, but make sure you are using a cloud backup run by a reputable company (a couple have vanished without trace, leaving people without their backups).
2. Some people backup some of their images to Flickr or Instagram or SmugMug or whatever - make sure they don't have a clause in their contract which gives them the right to use your images without your permission!
3. Hard disk servers on your LAN - this is rather old-school, and you still need to backup the server!
4. NAS boxes are an option, but you should probably have them connected to a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to ensure their storage is not corrupted by a power failure
5. Tape backup used to be an option, but it's not a real option any more
6. USB connect external hard drives

Personally, I use USB attached 2.5" hard drives - I used 2.5" hard drives because they are powered by the USB connection. You can get larger 3.5" external hard drives (14TB or more), but they are powered by little transformer wall-warts, and those either go missing or fail in a puff of smoke. Much easier to use drives powered from USB. Currently these hard drives are available up to 5TB, and they are cheap. You can get them from lots of places, even big stationery stores! Buy multiple brands (I mostly use Western Digital and Seagate. Lacie are generally too pricy for backup. Toshiba should be good) - you don't want to make years of backups to discover that all the drives have failed because of a manufacturing flaw.

Don't use SSD external drives - way too expensive for backup - use the SSDs for rapid downloading of your images and processing them, but back up to old-fashioned magnetic disks.

Another neat feature of external 2.5" disks is that they are fairly compact. You can transport them easily, and your brother / mother / son / granddaughter / best friend won't mind if you ask them to keep one or two for you - you want your backups stored in multiple locations so you don't lose your images if your house or apartment burns to the ground.

The absolute minimum number of copies of your images that you need is 3, and that is only enough if you keep checking that each backup is still accessible. More is better. I tend to create a new full backup about once a month, and the current price of hard drives is low enough that I frequently buy a new drive for the next backup (if you don't buy a new drive, then re-use an older one - never write your new backup over your most recent backup!). I have a drawer full of old backups - gosh, some of the oldest are on 250GB hard drives!

Rant over. Now go buy a drive and make a backup!

[8201]

Highly recommend Backblaze for cloud backup.

[DenverSteve]

I'll present from a different direction. I've been a professional photographer for over 40 years. I've worked for most major magazines, advertising and new agencies over the years and moved around the country, not including traveling half the time for work.  I've never accidentally lost images.  I have never worried about "old" images after they've been published, sold or sent to an agency for their use.  Like probably 99+% of people in the U.S., I have never had my house destroyed - so I don't worry about something catastrophic happening to it. BUT, If something catastrophic did happen, like the Northridge Quake, - my lowest concern would be my "stuff", including images.  My computer asks me too many times if I'm sure I want to erase something so, I don't remember deleting anything that was important.  Even if I did, it's in the trash can which I review prior to purging (again asked too many times if that's really what I want to do).  I've never had a hard-drive fail or fall apart in 5 days, one month, 5 years or more.  The world would not end if every image made, by everyone vanished.  We would just make more.  That said, images go from camera SD card (daily so I don't get behind), to laptop for processing and transmission to clients then to iMac for final workstation/storage in case they're needed in the foreseeable future.  Maybe because I replace my computer every 3-4 years, and I buy the best equipment possible, I've never had a failure that would render my images (or equipment) inaccessible.  So, in short, worry less, get out of the house, shoot more. 

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by DenverSteve

[TheJungleExplorer]

I back up to the cloud, to an internal, and to an external drive that I replace every year. 

I use Google Photos for cloud backup.  It used to be free and unlimited (boy did they regret that with me), but now you have to pay monthly.  I like Google Photos because of the advanced search options.  With over a million photos, I can find most any photo in a minute or less.

The best deal currently for Cloud storage is with Microsoft. They have a family plan and it cost $99 and comes with 6TB of cloud storage.  You also get one year of Office 365 for free with this plan for you and five other family members. It's a smoking hot deal.  I have not tried it for photo storage, so I don't know about their photo search features. 

[harrypm]

My Workflow:

Media RAW/XAVC/ProResHQ --> SSD (Working) / HDD (Holding 50TB Unraid & 20TB Local)

Google Workspace (Shared Drives only) import backups & distrobution. (Cloud) (14GBP/m)

Cold Archives are on M-Discs this can range from 25GB to 100GB discs with checksum printout sheets.

Formatting For All Media (Inital Import)

Make Model YYYY.MM.DD HH.MM.SS

 File format Photo:

DNG + Original + JPEG 100%

File format Video:

Media is muxed into the .MKV Container with native media and orignal metadata of files preserved in a .txt some media like ProRes .mov files are kept native due to recorder playback support.

Adobe Lightrooom is used to index and manage my 150k active photo database but if a replacemnet ever comes around thanks to the universal indexing and naming im not dependent on lightroom as its easy to refrance an export to orignals manually.

 

Why this workflow:

The reason for adopting DNG is due to smartphone and agnostic software support alongside each archive having tools to decode and extract the raw data if need be, and there is no un-supported sub-data with Sony/Minolta and phones use the format by defacto.

The reason for adopting M-Disc is due to it using BluRay standard pits, but while in-organic layers is not that fancy its the high quality molding while its not as strong as a glass master disc touture test wise, it is however idiot proof if stored in a fire proof safe or underground in a vac pack will last decades longer then any outher medium you can thank me for updating the wikipedia page lol.

The reason for adopting the MKV container is due to the abbility to stream the files, weather it be via googles software or torrent/p2p chunks of data based methods the standard .mov/mp4 containers are not practical for streaming full data files or for if data recovery is required and MKV has also been supported by Davinchi Resolve for a while and takes seconds to mux for use with the Adobe suite if need be.

 

Extended Workflow Notes:

The workflow for 35mm & APS film has the same workflow just using the digital shot data from my Minolta camaras or notes and or burn-in data if any shot timing data can also be exact dated by audio recorders with timecode and GPS derived with snapshots taken around the same time as the analouge shot.

Media such analouge tape (VHS/SVHS etc) is FM RF copyed then FLAC compressed for software decoding of the video or hifi fm signal later this allows any issues of hardware or limits of current era software to be removed from the process.


Ramblings about methods & hardware:

All consumer cloud options are terrible for backup, G-Suite (Now Google Workspace) is 10~15USD/m for basically Petabytes of storage on the entry business plans, if you only use the shared drives, I think there is a bit of a gap between the datahorder/home media server community and photo/video one but each side has its own lessons to be learned for cost and workflow, but a lot of people forget about one time cost solid archival.

External drives should never be used in caddys with any hardware level encryption, why? data recovery cost is not worth it. (WD my book units etc)

NVME is now the modern SSD standard in the M.2 format for consumers even adapts to USB/TB3 interfaces with simple single IC board adapters, and with CF express type B/A and used in direct caddys by Kneafinity even after SD Express is adopted direct storage will finally take over the world.

But it has a finite short life, keep an eye on read/write use with crystal diskmark and always backup your database if you keep it on a soild state drive do not expect more then 5 years if the drive is not used for high data tasks it could last 25 or more years if powered on once a week for example.

HDDs 8TB and higher is the best value 7200 RPM used to be the best thing in the world, now duel actuator drives will have around 400/400MB/s or faster by the end of decade, WD/Seagate's server and data center drives are the best bet, but bare in mind do not power cycle these i.e power cut/hard off etc and they will live a nice happy service life of 10~15 years if kept cool and spinning, windows drive sleep mode can also hit these drives hard.

M-Disc/DM Archive/Glass Master Disc & Sony Optical Archive are todays leading offerings for store once dont worry later, LTO tape is still a good option if you take messures to vac pack and cold store it right but optical is idiot proof media wise ware as LTO is easy to damage, media is cheep but costs more then a new camara body to replace readers if using current gen hardware if your burning over 10TB a year Sony optical archive is a good solution if less then 3TB then go M-Disc. 

Checksums are a thing people need to learn more about for daily digital world use it saves and prevents insanity and allows you to confirm your backups are still good and or your data is bad.

[bushwacked]

On 5/5/2023 at 11:06 AM, harrypm said:

File format Video:

Adobe Lightrooom is used to index and manage my 150k active photo database but if a replacemnet ever comes around thanks to the universal indexing and naming im not dependent on lightroom as its easy to refrance an export to orignals manually.

Ramblings about methods & hardware:

All consumer cloud options are terrible for backup, G-Suite (Now Google Workspace) is 10~15USD/m for basically Petabytes of storage on the entry business plans, if you only use the shared drives, I think there is a bit of a gap between the datahorder/home media server community and photo/video one but each side has its own lessons to be learned for cost and workflow, but a lot of people forget about one time cost solid archival.

 

Super informative there Harry! I did have a couple questions ...

- For LR, with 150k photos, have you noticed any slow down in using it daily?

- Maybe I am missing something, but I looked at google workspace and the $12 plan and it was 2TB pooled ... 

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!