Best backup options?

[Houston1852]

I've noticed my laptop is nearing the extent of it's available storage. I am just an amateur photographer. I have a ton of photos on my computer. I do have 1 Maxell external hard drive that my photos are backed up onto, also I back up everything with Mozy (although I've heard poor reviews about them). I plan on backing up alot of my pics to blank dvds, although I know that will take alot of time. I'm curious as to what my absolute best option for backing up my photos would be. It seems like no matter what I'm using to back them up I'm very hesitant to actually remove them from my laptop. With such limited storage remaining I'm afraid I'm going to have to. I had 2 iomega ext hard drives that both quit working after a few weeks. I think that leads to my reluctance to erase already backed up pictures. I was considering a different online storage, maybe "Just Cloud". Would I be just as well off to have 2 or 3 external hard drives kept in different locations?

Thank you for any help!

[mike_d]

Plan A:

Upgrade the hard drive in your laptop to have enough space to hold your library and have enough room for growth. Back that up to an external drive. Also save them to an off-site service like Mozy or Crashplan (my favorite).

Plan B:

Move your library to an external drive. Back that up to a second external drive. Also save them to an off-site service like Mozy or Crashplan (my favorite).

[JStubbs]

This is a good place to start http://dpbestflow.org/links/39 Peter Krogh is one of the creators and the author of The DAM Book.

[hollis_f]

Plan C:

Go through your ton of images and delete all the rubbish. When I did that the free space on my hard drive quadrupled.

[westcliff]

Originally Posted by mike_d

Plan A:

Upgrade the hard drive in your laptop to have enough space to hold your library and have enough room for growth. Back that up to an external drive. Also save them to an off-site service like Mozy or Crashplan (my favorite).

Plan B:

Move your library to an external drive. Back that up to a second external drive. Also save them to an off-site service like Mozy or Crashplan (my favorite).

+1

Hard drive on my desktop PC is backed up hourly to a connected USB drive (via Mac OS X's Time Machine), and backed up weekly to a second USB hard drive that I store off site. If I ever start to run out of space on the internal drive as the primary storage, I will move to the Plan B described above, probably either BackBlaze or Crashplan.

[PLLphotography]

get a free year of crashplan. don't have to be a carbonite user as it states, just put in your email address. they don't ask for credit card information or anything.

https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/

[Nathan]

Originally Posted by hollis_f

Plan C:

Go through your ton of images and delete all the rubbish. When I did that the free space on my hard drive quadrupled.

Ditto. It's a long and tedious task, though.

[RHChan84]

Originally Posted by hollis_f

Plan C:

Go through your ton of images and delete all the rubbish. When I did that the free space on my hard drive quadrupled.

This!
And of course backup to off-site as well.

[MCAsan]

For our MBPs we don't keep any libraries (photos, music, videos) on the internal SSD. The SSD space is for OS/apps and data like email and calendars. The rest of the SSD is used for photo capture in the field. When we come move we edit and move the photos to external RAID 1 drive sets. The whole file system (laptop SSD plus external RAID set) is backed up by Time Machine to 3TB drives. You can get 3TB Seagate drives at Costco for around $130.

When we want to show photos we export them as jpgs and put them on iPads. The music libraries we want to carry are on our iPhones.

[Wilt]

Another alternative is to set up a network storage drive, which is accessible within your wired or wireless network at home, and have the data on that. The network drive also has a USB port into which you could plug another harddrive to have another location on which your data files are copied.

Or you could have a RAID1 setup with USB connection to your computer, and the data is duplicated on the two harddrives within the RAID1.

[phoomanchew]

Elaborating on what Wilt said...

I am a more advanced amateur and I too have 1000s of photos of family, vacations, etc. If I lost just one, I would be devastated and my wife might put a hurting on me ... So with that, I use some of the thoughts from here http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview.

For my important stuff, I use a ReadyNAS http://www.readynas.com Ultra 4 as my networked attached storage. The NAS contains four 1TB drives. All of our desktops and laptops connect to the NAS and all photos and valuable documents are backed up to the NAS. The NAS gives me RAID Level 5 for data protection as well as a way to backup my valuables to multiple removable hard drives and DVDs as described on the DP Best Flow web site. I keep one of my removable backup hard drives in a safe, one backup at the office, and one in my laptop bag that I carry... That way in case something happens, I know I have a good backup... Some may call me paranoid, but I never want to lose anything that I cannot replace...

I do not remember where I heard it but "Having only one copy of a file is not considered having a backup..."

[Scott M]

I use an external drive as my primary data storage device (no data gets saved to the PC's internal drive). I then backup the data to a 2nd external drive. All "keeper" photos are stored on Smugmug after the JPEGs are processed from the original RAW files. Finally, I back up all data files to Crashplan for an offsite copy.