Photo storage?

[Jerryjaws]

I currently have a WD 4TB desk top storage for all my photos/work flow. And an emergency back (Samsung SSD 1 TB portable back up) I keep in fire proof safe. Is there any other better options out there? I've been looking at an NAS system. Not really sure what set up to get.

 

[Graham Clark]

Been using a Synology DS1618 36TB NAS for just over a year now, not had any issues at all. Using the Synology SHR data redundancy set up.

Similar to yourself I also back up to Samsung SSD's. I have a pair of 2TB T5's for the current year, adding a new pair each January.

 

[Nick B.]

I keep three back-ups: daily backups (with Time Machine and a Carbon Copy Cloner incremental backup), a monthly full system back-up (stored in my house) and a 6 monthly full system back-up stored in a bank safety deposit box. I use HDD drives rather than SSD since they are cheaper; the speed of transfer for back-ups isn't a big issue. There are many potential variants of this structrure. A fire prrof safe sounds like a good idea. Tha, or having an off-site back=up, can be important. How often do you update the emergency back-up disc? Do you include a back-up of your OS or just your photos? I'd suggest having a back-up of your system disc too.

Many people suggest using cloud backups (e.g. BackBlaze). The upload time can be a problem is you have a lot of files. BUt, it can give more peace of mind.

I don't have an NAS. They can be expensive and a bit slower than directly attached discs. But, many people use NAS and find them very good. NAS also can allow you to have access from other computers.

The exact system is less important than having a back-up of some type

 

[gordon_g]

Always, Always keep three Copy's and ALWAYS keep the third copy off site, Fire poof box's and safes don't mean that a Harddrive will survive inside the fire proof safe... There are time limits on every fire proof box / safe. are you willing to bet the HD survives inside when everything else could be gone? @Nick B. has a great plan by keeping a 3rd copy in a safe deposit box. Other options are storing at a friends house or a family members house (Encrypted of course) I use on line service (Backblaze currently) (sure the initial sync can take a while, I do however have a really nice internet connection which helps. I also use time machine to do daily backups, and I also have Carbon Copy Cloner to a fully bootable disk, separate from my time machine backups.

Really it comes down too how important is your data... if you have 20 photos that are must not lose it different than if you have 1 TB of stuff. The three back up rule is. great rule to live by however.

 

[MartyD]

I have a shared drive that I use to backup 3 computers using a backup application, I also have two attached sync drives that I manually sync my images to, and I use BackBlaze as my offsite backup.

Here are my thoughts on backup practices. Sorry, I feel like this is one of those times when you asked me what time it was, and I am telling you how to build a watch.

I like to keep my working drives connected internally on my computer. I think there are speed advantages to keeping files stored that way. I also tend to move files to slower drives when they may not need to be accessed regularly.

It is important to know what the purpose for your backup practice is, disaster recovery, redundancy, versioning, or recovering deleted files. They all may require a little different approach. If you have multiple copies of corrupt files or the incorrect version of a file it does not help the recovery.

Pay attention to backup software and how it chooses what to backup and how long it retains files that you have deleted either intentionally or unintentionally. Some software apps choose by file type and you may need to manually choose some folders to be certain they are backed up. The retention time can be a specific length of time or unlimited.

You need to pay attention to backup schedules as well. Continuous backup is great but if I put 1000 files onto my PC and my backup app and BackBlaze both started running and I am trying to process images at the same time, computer resources can be stretched.

Backups can become bloated over time with unnecessary files. I have several “Do Not Backup” folders that I have identified as folders that my apps should not backup. I use these folders to store files that I know I am not going to need again or can recover from online resources when necessary. Things like manuals, practice files, test files, downloads, and things like that can add up over time if they all get backed up.

I have found cases where a folder was backed up, then I realize I misspelled the folder name, I rename it, and some backup software will back it up again. Not really a problem it just starts to eat up backup space if you decide to restructure your storage system.

I have never had much success recovering system files from a backup if I have a boot drive failure. I have a 500Gb boot drive and my data and images are stored on a separate drive. I do backup certain directories on my boot drive, but I also clone my boot drive every few months. My boot drive is a high speed NVMe and I clone it onto a SSD that costs about $60. If my boot drive fails, I can install the SSD, maybe update a few apps, restore a few folders, and still have access to my data folder on a separate disk. Since my boot drive is only 500Gb it does not take long to clone it. Some cloning apps will allow you to create a disk image to keep as well.

BackBlaze works well and has limitations and advantages. My internet upload speed is only 10Mb so it did take a while to do the initial upload. I currently have about 3.5Tb on BackBlaze so at my current upload speed it would take a couple of months to upload all that data again. If you are fortunate to have 1Gb upload speeds it would take about 8 hours. On a day to day basis now it generally uploads all my new files overnight. BackBlaze by default only retains deleted files for 30 days, you can pay an additional fee to have them retained for a year and pay even more to have them retained indefinitely. You can access your BackBlaze files using a web browser if necessary.

I am not sure about fire safe use for storing drives. Years ago, you could purchase media safes. These safes were designed to protect tape media for longer times in a fire. I do not even know if they are available anymore. Where I live we have tornados as well and I don’t think a fire safe would offer much protection in the event of a tornado.

In all the business environments I have worked with I have installed Raid arrays and they are probably the best solution for preventing interruption from drive failure. If a drive fails the data is still accessible, just swap out the bad drive and let it rebuild. If I had to be certain that I could access my images without having to restore I would install a Raid. There is some storage and processing overhead with using Raid devices.

NAS storage is great as well, NAS with Raid drives is even better. I have never used a NAS Raid device so I cannot speak on the speed or cost advantages. The closest think I have had to a true NAS devices was a shared drive on a Netgear router. It worked well but seemed to become disconnected fairly often. I moved the drive to a shared drive on my main PC and still use the same software and it works much more reliably.

I use OneDrive or iCloud drive for all my day to day documents. I do not store any images that way, but it is a convenient way to store and access working documents from multiple machines. I believe that OneDrive keeps 25 versions of stored documents. OneDrive or iCloud drive also is a pretty easy way to share a few images if needed.

I do like to use an app on my PC called FreeFileSync, then also have RealTimeSync. File sync compares the contents of two directories and allows you to update one directory with another, mirror them, or update one with the other. I do have all my photo directories synced with external drives. I have to run this app manually, but it gives me a way to be certain that the contents of two drives are the same. I use it from time to time to compare the contents of my working image folders with the contents of my image backup directory. This is how I have found that certain directories or file types were not being backed up or that unnecessary files were in on my backup drive.

I like to have a have one copy of my archive/backup drive connected to my computer and one copy stored away. I always know if my connected drive is accessible but I am never sure how that drive stored away is going to work. I have had a case or two over the years when a backup drive worked when I put it in storage but was not working when I connected it the next time.

I like to swap out my drives every few years. The cost of storage seems to be constantly increasing in size and decreasing in cost. My current working image drive is a 5Tb drive so in the next few months I will swap it out for an 8Tb drive. It is my belief that your working drives are under more stress day to day than your backup drives so keeping them current helps reliability.

Marty

 

[Woody Meristem]

I always back up all the files on our primary computer onto another laptop and a 1TB hard drive -- and have another hard drive for our safe deposit box. Fire-proof is really a misnomer since after a long enough time in a hot enough environment everything inside will be turned to ash or melted -- think a file cabinet/safe plunging to a basement then being surrounded by the coals of all the combustibles in the house. On-line storage may sound good, and easy, BUT ... I was in our local camera shop one day when a customer came in looking for help. Seems there were some very important photographs (apparently wedding photos) stored on the cloud when the customer's home computer suffered an unrecoverable crash. He couldn't find his photos on whatever cloud service he'd used and neither could the provider. The shop's owner couldn't help him other than to advise the customer to keep their own back-up.

A few years ago I researched "permanent" storage systems for our files at work. Electronic data (think digital photographs) has one major flaw -- the systems/formats change frequently. How many of us have a computer that can read a 5 1/4" floppy disk, or the more recent 3 1/4" floppy? Our newest laptop has no CD/DVD reader. What's the next to go???? Be prepared to move all your files to a new storage system every few years as "improvements" come along. Have your best photos printed using archival inks and paper and they'll last your lifetime -- probably.

 

[Roaring 40s]

Cloud backup services are cheap and increasingly offer the option to start by sending out a HDD for your first full backup. This gets around slow networks.
An advantage of a cloud backup is access offsite.
They operate in the background without user intervention.
But a local backup is also recommended. Some cloud backups include that, eg Zoolz.
You still need to be vigilant. If your files get corrupted, any backup may just copy them over the good ones, so opt for a service that does versioning (and keeps deletions). That means buying much more space than the files occupy on your HD.
And whatever you go for, test it regularly, so when the merde hits the fan you know what to expect and what to do.

 

[JP Onstwedder]

I currently have a WD 4TB desk top storage for all my photos/work flow. And an emergency back (Samsung SSD 1 TB portable back up) I keep in fire proof safe. Is there any other better options out there? I've been looking at an NAS system. Not really sure what set up to get.

I use Synology NAS. It's reliable and decently fast, enough for raw images to be stored there with Capture One's catalogs on the local hard drive. Synology has a useful and easy app called Drive which you can use to backup and synchronise files. What I do is:
- store C1 catalogs on the local drive and back up daily to the NAS
- store raw images and processed images on the NAS
- the files on the NAS are synchronised in real time to a Seagate 8TB backup disk

In addition I will make backups from the NAS to external SSD drives after major trips (so no need in 2020....sigh...) and store those offsite (office).

The Synology software is not easy, if you go down that route be prepared to spend a good number of hours to learn how to use it; or pay someone to set it up (and get them to document what they've done!).

One advantage is that the Drive app is available for mobile platforms so all my images are instantly available on iPad and iPhone anywhere and that is fast enough to be usable.

 

[Andrew Lamberson]

I pushed the easy button and backup my final .jpg images (and their .PSD files) to OneDrive. But I don't have near as many images to backup as you guys do.

I download my RAW images to my 1TB hard drive on my computer and plan on deleting them eventually (I don't need to keep a bunch of bad shots!).

 

[joe43]

My backups are now saved to 3.5 inch spinning drives that are in external hard drive enclosure cases. Some of the cases have a built in fan to remove heat buildup. Some are just made of aluminum. I bought enterprise hard drives with varying capacities. My largest is a 14 TB drive that is in a hard drive enclosure made by Rosewill. This one has a fan. And the Rosewill drive case has a well made On Off switch too.

Installing the enterprise drive in the case is very easy. I am not tech savvy and I did it without any problems. It takes just a few minutes.

The hard drive enclosure should come with everything you need.--power transformer, USB cable. I got everything at NewEgg over the Internet.

When I want to do a backup, I turn on the appropriate drive and backup the images with SynchBack SE. When the backup is done, I remove the drive with Safe to Remove on my windows computer. Then I turn off the power for that drive. I do not keep my drives set to On.

If the enterprise drive gets full, I just take it out of the enclosure case and install another one.

Link to Rosewill case:

RX-358 U3C BLK - External 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure to USB 3.0 / eSATA, Support 3.5" SATA III / II / I - Rosewill

3.5 Inch hard drive enclosure with aluminum body. Solid built to protect your 3.5 Inch Hard Drive. USB 3.0 port and eSATA port. Two options for data transfer. Support UASP function, which makes the data transfer up to 70% faster than traditional USB 3.0. Built-in cooling fan with dedicated fan...

www.rosewill.com

 

[Roaring 40s]

IMO an offsite backup is essential.

I live in a bushfire-prone country. In the US recently as well we have sadly seen homes burn to the ground.

Cloud services though are quite variable in cost, features and speed.

I've had domestic subscriptions that take over 3 weeks to complete a full set. Only recently in Australia have services started offering HDDs for the first backup.

Other services have either bailed out of this market or jacked up their prices to prohibitive levels, and so regular changes have been needed.

Currently I use iDrive for one machine (it crashed two others regularly) and Zoolz for the remaining PC.

Of course, a HD can be stored offsite and updated regularly.

 

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Main storage: Synology NAS configured as RAID 6 on 10gbe ethernet **. The size? As big as you need now plus something bigger for expansion, but with more drive bays free for even more expansion later. You can buy a smaller NAS (fewer drive bays), but expansion later would mean replacing all the drives with larger ones, while having empty drive bays makes that much simpler by adding more drives.

Backup: simple single-volume RAID copy of the NAS main store. This is not as robust as a mirror/parity RAID, but I'm trusting the RAID 6 on the NAS a lot — this is just a safety on top of that. In a USB box of drives.

Offsite: I backup to a 3rd copy on large portable USB drive now, which I store as far away as possible, but I'm going to move to an offsite cloud backup. Probably Backblaze because of reputation, plus features and functionality. Don't do yourself the disfavor of dissing cloud based on one or two anecdotal stories you've heard — do the research.

** 10gbe is much faster than 100mbps/1gbe, but I still use a local PCI NVMe m.2 for scratch and cache.

 

[ccirelli]

All my photos are sync'd & backed up on Adobe's servers, via Lightroom. My iMac and MacBook Pro both also store full originals. Smart Previews are on 2 iOS devices - iPhone, and iPad (I do not consider these backups).

I also keep backup copies of my Lightroom catalog on 2 separate portable hard drives, they're updated at least weekly. My plan is to expand these backup drives to 2 larger / mirrored desktop drives, but the portables do the job well for now.

So my photos are on 5 separate drives - Adobe's cloud server, iMac, MacBook, Backup Drive 1 (home), Backup Drive 2 (office). That said, with my MacBook now being my secondary computer, I'll likely switch that over to Smart Preview local storage.