Backing up images

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cr_wildlife

cr_wildlife

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I have been backing up my images on 2TB external hard drives. I would like to have a larger system at home, so that I don't have to keep plugging in and unplugging these drives. I have heard that many people are using RAID system setups for this purpose. Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I should order, RAID or something else?
Thanks for any advice that you give.
Corey
 
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I want to use a back up strategy that is simple, dependable and that I can control (no cloud back ups for me! LOL!). I also back up to external hard drives. I just purchased an 8 TB external Fantom GForce 3 HD to consolidate data on 3 older separate external HDs. I make two back ups of my data and store one off premise. I consider my website a 3rd backup.
I am also getting ready to install a 12 TB internal hard drive into my PC and copy data to it from 3 older internal hard drives.
 
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I use external hard drives for storage, three of them, and two are RAID configured. I use a RAID 1 configuration, which means I only use half of the space for main storage and the other half as a backup. I also use an off-site storage, Backblaze. I am also looking at how to consolidate all my external drives as I think they are in the 3-5 year "maybe prone to failure period" but I need a lot of storage so still looking around. Lots of decisions!
 
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I use a Synology NAS as well. However, it depends how much you need to back up to configure it efficiently. I have 4 6Tb drives in a RAID 5 configuration that has given me enough storage for (I'm estimating) another 4-5 years, at which time I can get a second unit to daisy chain. Of course, I'm sure the technology will have advanced considerably and I may rethink it all :).
 
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I also use a 4 bay Synology as mentioned,Hudson has a great video. my network is also al 10Gbps so transfer of images is fast!

The big advantage to my is I can access my data from anywhere .. so long as there’s internet.
 
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There are many ways to do this. IMO it's more important to choose a route that works with your personality than to choose the "optimum" technology. If you are fairly disciplined with backing stuff up then simply using multiple external drives works fine. If you aren't very disciplined and/or don't want to worry with it then a RAID system is probably a better option.
 
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Butlerkid said:
I want to use a back up strategy that is simple, dependable and that I can control (no cloud back ups for me! LOL!). I also back up to external hard drives. I just purchased an 8 TB external Fantom GForce 3 HD to consolidate data on 3 older separate external HDs. I make two back ups of my data and store one off premise. I consider my website a 3rd backup.
I am also getting ready to install a 12 TB internal hard drive into my PC and copy data to it from 3 older internal hard drives.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the advice, Karen.
 
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Viathelens said:
I use external hard drives for storage, three of them, and two are RAID configured. I use a RAID 1 configuration, which means I only use half of the space for main storage and the other half as a backup. I also use an off-site storage, Backblaze. I am also looking at how to consolidate all my external drives as I think they are in the 3-5 year "maybe prone to failure period" but I need a lot of storage so still looking around. Lots of decisions!
Click to expand...
Thanks for the advice!
 
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I have an OWC RAID 5 thunderbird four drive array.

As I understand it in this configuration RAID 5 means one of the drives is backup and the rest are available for storage. The advantage is speed of data transfer. Theoretically the drive speed becomes something like three times as fast as a single drive. The other thing it does is provide security against a drive failure. Software manages the drives and if one is having problems it warns you so you can swap out the bad drive and the system automatically copies the data onto the replacement drive.

I spoke with my computer consultant. He said this method is faster than a NAS storage, which is a separate array of drives hooked up through a computer network.

He also said the fastest way to do this is to get a large tower and put the series of drives directly inside the tower.

I find this OWC raid was fast enough for me as long as I keep OneDrive from mucking things up.

I do have portable drives I can bring them on the road and copy images into them until I get back.

The OWC stays home. I connect to the computer by a Thunderbird port. It came with the drives already in them and setting up did not require a lot of technical skill.

You can scale the system by the size of teh hard drives. I paid under a grand and my system uses four 2 tb hard drives, giving me 6tb in storage.
 
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wotan1 said:
I have an OWC RAID 5 thunderbird four drive array.

As I understand it in this configuration RAID 5 means one of the drives is backup and the rest are available for storage. The advantage is speed of data transfer. Theoretically the drive speed becomes something like three times as fast as a single drive. The other thing it does is provide security against a drive failure. Software manages the drives and if one is having problems it warns you so you can swap out the bad drive and the system automatically copies the data onto the replacement drive.

I spoke with my computer consultant. He said this method is faster than a NAS storage, which is a separate array of drives hooked up through a computer network.

He also said the fastest way to do this is to get a large tower and put the series of drives directly inside the tower.

I find this OWC raid was fast enough for me as long as I keep OneDrive from mucking things up.

I do have portable drives I can bring them on the road and copy images into them until I get back.

The OWC stays home. I connect to the computer by a Thunderbird port. It came with the drives already in them and setting up did not require a lot of technical skill.

You can scale the system by the size of teh hard drives. I paid under a grand and my system uses four 2 tb hard drives, giving me 6tb in storage.
Click to expand...
Sounds good. Thanks for the advice.
 
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wotan1 said:
I have an OWC RAID 5 thunderbird four drive array.

As I understand it in this configuration RAID 5 means one of the drives is backup and the rest are available for storage. The advantage is speed of data transfer. Theoretically the drive speed becomes something like three times as fast as a single drive. The other thing it does is provide security against a drive failure. Software manages the drives and if one is having problems it warns you so you can swap out the bad drive and the system automatically copies the data onto the replacement drive.

I spoke with my computer consultant. He said this method is faster than a NAS storage, which is a separate array of drives hooked up through a computer network.

He also said the fastest way to do this is to get a large tower and put the series of drives directly inside the tower.

I find this OWC raid was fast enough for me as long as I keep OneDrive from mucking things up.

I do have portable drives I can bring them on the road and copy images into them until I get back.

The OWC stays home. I connect to the computer by a Thunderbird port. It came with the drives already in them and setting up did not require a lot of technical skill.

You can scale the system by the size of teh hard drives. I paid under a grand and my system uses four 2 tb hard drives, giving me 6tb in storage.
Click to expand...
RAID 5 doesn't quite work like that; there isn't a specific backup drive. All the drives are used for data, but the data written includes redundant "parity" information so that if a drive fails, the contents of that drive can be reconstructed from the remaining drives.

The reason RAID 5 has often been used commercially is that you don't lose access to your data when a drive fails. However, you still need a backup because if you have a second drive failure before a new drive is put in AND the data from the failed drive reconstructed, you lose all your data. In addition, performance may be severely degraded while drive reconstruction is going on.

Performance of RAID 5 depends a lot on the implementation. It's good for reads, writes might not perform as well.
 
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PhotoLover said:
RAID 5 doesn't quite work like that; there isn't a specific backup drive. All the drives are used for data, but the data written includes redundant "parity" information so that if a drive fails, the contents of that drive can be reconstructed from the remaining drives.

The reason RAID 5 has often been used commercially is that you don't lose access to your data when a drive fails. However, you still need a backup because if you have a second drive failure before a new drive is put in AND the data from the failed drive reconstructed, you lose all your data. In addition, performance may be severely degraded while drive reconstruction is going on.

Performance of RAID 5 depends a lot on the implementation. It's good for reads, writes might not perform as well.
Click to expand...
I accept all that. I don't consider myself an expert on computers and networking, and it seems the older I get the less expert I am becoming. I live in Seattle home of Microsoft, Adobe and large parts of Google and Amazon. I am surrounded by these tech geniuses and frequently work with them to get things done I can't do myself. They are kindly but I feel like they think I am less of a human being because I can't do Linux, don't know how to write code and don't know computer networking.

It has always been clear to me that the RAID 5 is a storage system with a little redundancy built in but it still needs to be backed up.

I am about to bring one of those experts in to review and revise my setup.
 
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From HUDSONS set up with a caveat. Synology NAS has been great, and speeds are great. The OWC Thunderbolt Pro dock has been a hot mess. While the 10GB Ethernet port works well, the CFE reader runs hot and IS SLOW and will often CUT OFF my internet connection. I sent it back under and RMA and they said it was fine. NOPE. Also it lacks sufficient TB ports. I will NOT buy OWC again after this experience. So find a different 10gb solution.

I posted about it here.

Don't NAS around; my experience

What prompted me to finally get a NAS - actually Apple's mysterious about face on supporting thumbnails for HE*. Without being able to see the thumbnails, when choosing to open files and other tasks it got to be a PIA. I knew if I started shooting in Lossless I would eventually jam up the set...
bcgforums.com bcgforums.com


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If the drive is directly attached to the computer using the images by Thunderbolt…then that will be faster than a NAS unless the NAS is 10 GB Ethernet and connected via an appropriate switch to a similar port on the computer and the RAID might still be faster. If you want t9 share the images with all computers on your network…then fundamentally the computer sharing the drive is a NAS to the other devices on the network…since the NAS is essentially a computer and hard drive. The NAS is another thing to manage,,,and if your main computer is on 24x7…there’s no reason to go with a NAS instead of a RAID and sharing it. OP’s brief description of how RAID 5 works is slightly incorrect as was pointed out…but from a practical standpoint the idea of 1 drive being a spare isn’t far wrong…you lose the capacity of one of the drives in the RAID and generally speaking they are mostly tprequired to be the same size.

There’s nothing wrong with either RAID or NAS approach…mostly depends on if you want another computer to manage and keep updated…and as I said if you have an always on computer sharing a RAID (or even a single drive as long as adequate backup is accomplished) is simpler and provides the same benefits. For most people…including Hudson if he had actually discussed it with a computer expert…there are few to no benefits provided by a NAS. They do have the ability to share files and drive space across the internet easily with another user as he does with his buddy Rick…but the same sharing can be easily setup in several other ways.

Either way…both the NAS and the RAID need backup…and to the other devices on your local network there is zero difference between the two. Hudson is a great photographer…but I’ve watched his setup videos and get the idea that he’s not really a computer geek. For what he’s using the NAS for…a RAID on his Mac Studio and an appropriate size DropBox account would be cheaper and provide the same benefits…but as I said nothing wrong with either approach as long as one understands the pros and cons of both of them.
 
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wotan1 said:
I accept all that. I don't consider myself an expert on computers and networking, and it seems the older I get the less expert I am becoming. I live in Seattle home of Microsoft, Adobe and large parts of Google and Amazon. I am surrounded by these tech geniuses and frequently work with them to get things done I can't do myself. They are kindly but I feel like they think I am less of a human being because I can't do Linux, don't know how to write code and don't know computer networking.

It has always been clear to me that the RAID 5 is a storage system with a little redundancy built in but it still needs to be backed up.

I am about to bring one of those experts in to review and revise my setup.
Click to expand...
I wasn't trying to nitpick ... I just think it helpful for the user to know all the relevant implications of the storage technology. Said technology can be complicated. But for example, comparing a RAID 5 implementation with a single big disk I'd expect:

  1. Better read performance from the RAID 5
  2. Worse write performance from the RAID 5
  3. Access to your data even if a disk fails .... though until the disk is replaced and reconstructed there are issues.

As I mentioned, it's great that one still has access to the data when a disk fails, but disk reconstruction can really use up a lot of disk bandwidth, so it might be hard to do much during that step, and of course there is the possibility of a double disk failure. But while the RAID 5 won't help you on data input when you copy the photos off the cards onto the computer, the write once/read many usage pattern of photo processing is a nice match for RAID 5's read speeds.

Another example, compare a RAID 5 using HDDS with a single fast SSD:
  1. I'd expect the SSD to smoke the RAID 5 on writes, and probably be a lot faster on reads, depending on the type of SSD
  2. If the SSD fails, then no access to data until the backup drive (which is probably not another fast SSD) is copied to a new SSD. During that time, you are vulnerable to a double disk failure (backup drive failing). Which is why I have a cloud backup and a local backup.
I haven't played with home use NAS setups. As others have pointed out, you need a really fast network for a NAS to compete with local attached storage in terms of throughput and latency (and good software implementations). That said, the use of networked storage is quite common in the business world, even in performance critical applications, though they use very fast networks.

Right now I have one relatively slow SSD with my latest photos on it, and one HDD with older photos, both backed up to a 5400 RPM drive. And a cloud backup. I'm thinking about getting a bigger faster SSD and putting all the photos on it. My restore time would be slow, but daily use very fast for a modest cost. But I'm happy with the SSD speed for normal operations.

If lightroom was more NAS friendly I'd have a high speed NAS so that I could easily access the photos imported into LR from multiple computers. But LR is not NAS friendly and I don't want to try and hack up a solution to make that work.
 
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PhotoLover said:
I wasn't trying to nitpick ... I just think it helpful for the user to know all the relevant implications of the storage technology. Said technology can be complicated. But for example, comparing a RAID 5 implementation with a single big disk I'd expect:

  1. Better read performance from the RAID 5
  2. Worse write performance from the RAID 5
  3. Access to your data even if a disk fails .... though until the disk is replaced and reconstructed there are issues.

As I mentioned, it's great that one still has access to the data when a disk fails, but disk reconstruction can really use up a lot of disk bandwidth, so it might be hard to do much during that step, and of course there is the possibility of a double disk failure. But while the RAID 5 won't help you on data input when you copy the photos off the cards onto the computer, the write once/read many usage pattern of photo processing is a nice match for RAID 5's read speeds.

Another example, compare a RAID 5 using HDDS with a single fast SSD:
  1. I'd expect the SSD to smoke the RAID 5 on writes, and probably be a lot faster on reads, depending on the type of SSD
  2. If the SSD fails, then no access to data until the backup drive (which is probably not another fast SSD) is copied to a new SSD. During that time, you are vulnerable to a double disk failure (backup drive failing). Which is why I have a cloud backup and a local backup.
I haven't played with home use NAS setups. As others have pointed out, you need a really fast network for a NAS to compete with local attached storage in terms of throughput and latency (and good software implementations). That said, the use of networked storage is quite common in the business world, even in performance critical applications, though they use very fast networks.

Right now I have one relatively slow SSD with my latest photos on it, and one HDD with older photos, both backed up to a 5400 RPM drive. And a cloud backup. I'm thinking about getting a bigger faster SSD and putting all the photos on it. My restore time would be slow, but daily use very fast for a modest cost. But I'm happy with the SSD speed for normal operations.

If lightroom was more NAS friendly I'd have a high speed NAS so that I could easily access the photos imported into LR from multiple computers. But LR is not NAS friendly and I don't want to try and hack up a solution to make that work.
Click to expand...
This is all good and I always appreciate knowing more about what I am doing.

Now if someone will tell me how i can make a 5k monitor work on a Windows pc that would really make me happy. I have a high end Razer Blade 15 with a Nvidia RTX 3080 ti graphics card. I really wanted to get one of those 5k monitors for photo editing.
 
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cr_wildlife said:
I have been backing up my images on 2TB external hard drives. I would like to have a larger system at home, so that I don't have to keep plugging in and unplugging these drives. I have heard that many people are using RAID system setups for this purpose. Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I should order, RAID or something else?
Thanks for any advice that you give.
Corey
Click to expand...
Hi Corey
My set-up is to use 2 external HDD's, I did have Two 4TB HDD but changed to Two 16 TB HDD's to keep up with the ever increasing data
I have a Mac and use the software Carbon Copy Cloner to have a "clone" of the external HDD, YMMV but having 2 copies is enough for me,
When away from the property the external HDD's are stored in a full size fireproof safe
.................. Gary
 
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wotan1 said:
This is all good and I always appreciate knowing more about what I am doing.

Now if someone will tell me how i can make a 5k monitor work on a Windows pc that would really make me happy. I have a high end Razer Blade 15 with a Nvidia RTX 3080 ti graphics card. I really wanted to get one of those 5k monitors for photo editing.
Click to expand...
I got no thoughts on that! I bought a Mac studio computer and I really wanted a good monitor. Wow, the Apple Studio display is really expensive. But I googled and looked at stuff and it wasn't clear that I wouldn't have issues with other monitors. So I just paid up for the Studio display. Which is really really nice for photo processing.
 
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