Hard Drive Problem

awad wrote in post #15431188
or you could have them mail you a drive.

I don't see a point to cloud storage if I'm going to have them mail me a drive. It's just 'way to easy to manage backups on my own--no more difficult than regularly checking the oil level in the car and the air pressure of the spare tire (which everyone with a car does, right?).

RDKirk wrote in post #15431197
I don't see a point to cloud storage if I'm going to have them mail me a drive. It's just 'way to easy to manage backups on my own--no more difficult than regularly checking the oil level in the car and the air pressure of the spare tire (which everyone with a car does, right?).

College buddy of mine has a son who was in his twenties, who burned up the engine of his car because he never checked the oil.

I have four stepdaughters all adults, and I know with absolute certainty that two of them have never touched a dipstick after I showed them how to check the oil years ago...they did not even know where to FIND the dipstick in their current vehicle, I had to show both of them within the past year.

Sad commentary about the generation who will be running government and industrial enterprises after our generation has retired.

RDKirk wrote in post #15431197
I don't see a point to cloud storage if I'm going to have them mail me a drive. It's just 'way to easy to manage backups on my own--no more difficult than regularly checking the oil level in the car and the air pressure of the spare tire (which everyone with a car does, right?).

the point is it's a redundant backup, with the option to forego the cloud when you need to in an emergency. crashplan is my 4th backup, if i ever have to use it... something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Wilt wrote in post #15431209
College buddy of mine has a son who was in his twenties, who burned up the engine of his car because he never checked the oil.

Really! oil is to be checked? I thought when you return the leased car, they do it themselves

jakele_x wrote in post #15430880
What kind of hard drive should I buy for my Mac? The one I had last time was WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0, but it ended up failed 3 times and in result I lost over 12,000 raw photos and over 5,000 raw video footages. I need something more reliable but not too expensive.

I have a few of those WD 2Tb drives, and haven't had any issue with them yet, I also use a couple of other manufacturers too. Reliability isn't my main concern, I expect them to fail sooner or later so don't try and find a drive I can rely on to protect my data.

If you are asking for suggestions as to a drive which can be used, on it's own, to safeguard your data then, I'm sorry, but there isn't one. The same goes for any form of data storage. The loss of your raw photos and videos wasn't a result of that drive failing, it was a result of not having a backup.

Whatever data storage you decide to use, you need at least three totally separate archives of all your data, and with at least one kept in a different location. My images are duplicated on multiple USB hard drives, and stored in multiple locations. I have no worries about drive failure, if one fails I simply replace it and restore the data from one of the backups.

awad wrote in post #15431213
the point is it's a redundant backup, with the option to forego the cloud when you need to in an emergency. crashplan is my 4th backup, if i ever have to use it... something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

"Fourth backup" basically means you don't expect to use it. But here is a problem in that logic:

Part of the safety of having multiple hardware backups is that if there is some delay in recognizing data corruption--say, a virus or worm--there is a good chance that you'll discover it before it has been duplicated on all of your backups.

With a cloud backup, that "fourth backup" will actually be the first to be corrupted. You may gain a point in that the cloud backup is offsite, but the chance of data corruption is greater (for most of us) than the chance of the house totally burning down an all hardware drives are recoverable (data can often be recovered from a drive retrieved from a fire or flood).

I'm not saying a cloud backup is a moral evil. I'm just saying it's not nearly as reliable as a backup solution as it may seem, and nobody should depend on the cloud as his sole or even primary backup method. The cloud is not a backup solution--at best, it's only a very minor part of one.

As solution for multi-device data availability, however, it's perfect.

awad wrote in post #15431187
The weddings i shoot on the weekend are around 100-150gbs each and they're usually uploaded completely within the week.

Which crashplan option do you have an what is your internet upload speed?

My current internet connection is only 1Mbps, which is probably the real issue.

Heath wrote in post #15431420
My current internet connection is only 1Mbps, which is probably the real issue.

My local Cable company gives 30MbPS for $30 as part of triple service. Used to have ATT before and was more expensive.
How can you survive with 1MbPS?
My WiFi Router will not support minimum connectin if less than 5MbPS.

I agree with much that has been said in this forum. I think for each individual person, he/she will come to a different conclusion on backup solutions based on his/her needs. A pro photographer who will need instant access to their backup probably should forgo consumer level cloud storage and look into business level solutions.

It all comes down to how you assess your risk of losing data (disaster, corruption, theft or virus), your budget and how precious you feel your data is.

For my purposes and my budget, I rationalized that keeping 1 live and 2 backups onsite and Crashplan (<$4/month) assures me that I'm covered. It is true that while the consumer-level Crashplan service I subscribed to is SLOW, I hope to never use it, or if I do, it is just to restore a few files here and there. One of the times that my drive failed (before I had Crashplan), I was able to recover 99% of the files with a hard drive recovery utility. In the event I have a fail like that and I could not recover the lost data from my backups, I would use Crashplan to get that last 1%.

In the event of a complete catastrophe where I lose the 3 onsite backups, my data is not so essential that I would pay for Crashplan to ship me a drive. I could wait months or whatever time it took to completely restore the drive. However, for all you pros out there that would need instant recovery, it may make sense to have Crashplan send a drive. But actually, if you make your living out of photography, probably subscribing to business or enterprise level solutions like Amazon make more sense.

RDKirk wrote in post #15431371
...Part of the safety of having multiple hardware backups is that if there is some delay in recognizing data corruption--say, a virus or worm--there is a good chance that you'll discover it before it has been duplicated on all of your backups.

With a cloud backup, that "fourth backup" will actually be the first to be corrupted. ...

You definitely have a limited understanding of the features available in various cloud-based services.

CrashPlan, for one, will NOT be the "first" to be corrupted. In, fact, if you adjust the version / archive settings for this, it will NEVER be corrupted by a corruption inherited from your computer!

Cloud services provide an excellent PRIMARY backup, if you don't need speed.

If you do need speed for your primary backup, they still provide an excellent off-site backup and an excellent archival service.

In addition, they provide a fall-back in the event of multiple failures.

If you do find yourself in the position of having to restore your entire backup from the cloud (rather than a few files), most also offer options where you don't have to download from the cloud, courier-based services at the like.

Finally, for me, it is not insignificant that the cloud-based backup is fully automatic, set and forget. You compare maintaining your own off-site backup to changing the oil in your car. I do that; every 3000 miles / 3 months. Your analogy exposes one of the disadvantages of maintaining your own off-site backup... unless you have your own "mini-cloud" system (which CrashPlan allows you to set up, BTW, free), there will be gaps in your off-site archive. IOW, if you need to use it, you will not have your most recent work/files in the offsite backup.

Do NOT trust cloud storage. Doing so is extremely foolish; I have never found a cloud company that will take legally-enforceable financial responsibility for their failure to protect the data you "entrust" to them -- whether the failure is one of improper disclosure or loss.

As a guy who used to run an ISP and has been intimately involved in computer hardware since the early 1980s (think Winchester 5MB -- not GB, MB drives along with the old DEC RL series cartridge disks!) I am somewhat of an anal SOB when it comes to this subject.

First, all disks eventually fail. Every last one. In addition there are occasionally other problems beyond your control, such as a fire at your location. You need to think of this when it comes to data and figure out how to protect against it. This means more than one copy, always, with at least one stored off-site.

In addition whatever you use for backup you need to TEST those backups and make sure they're readable. I have been called in more than once by a company to help recover ("cold", never having been called before) and discovered that their "backups" are unable to be restored AND ARE WORTHLESS. This usually happens two or three or five years after the program is put in place and EVERYTHING is, as a consequence, GONE. In a non-trivial percentage of these cases the result is literal business failure.

With that said, my RECENT (last few year) experience is that Seagate, Hitachi and WD drives are all about equally likely to fail. The most frequent times for them to fail are right out of the box within the first month or two and then they start to degrade around the third to fifth year of use.

In addition the hotter they run the more likely they are to puke. Therefore, heat management is important. If it's uncomfortably warm to touch when running it's too damn hot!

2TB drives are cheap these days. On Black Friday I managed to grab a pair of 3TB drives for $100 EACH. That's ridiculously cheap. I have an automated backup system here at my location that runs nightly, weekly and monthly backups automatically off the network and allows me to recover any failure within the last year with that granularity (daily within the week, weekly with in the month, monthly within the year) and rotate the secondary drive out every couple of weeks to a safe deposit box at the bank. Thus if the building burns I can lose up to 2 weeks of data, but no more. My "home" network consists of of nearly 2TB of "volatile" (subject to change) and ~3TB of "archival" (read-mostly) stored data that MUST NOT be lost.

It all comes down to how you define acceptable risk. When I ran my ISP the definition was "no more than one week" and therefore the tapes (which was what we used at the time) went to the safe deposit box once weekly. If you're really ridiculous about "no failures" you run a real-time journaled filesystem across a network to a server in a different physical location and then back THAT up, which now makes you disaster proof to a large degree as well.

Here's another example -- I run a pretty-popular blog and trading forum focusing on the markets and politics. The "primary" machine is at a colocation site in North Carolina. The entire data repository for that forum and blog is stored in a Postgres database. The database is then "hot" mirrored to my home network in Niceville over a SSL-encrypted data link where a second copy is synchronously stored to a completely separate second machine in a rack in my utility room. That database server can be brought online as the "main" in literal seconds, losing at worst the last comment posted to the forum at the time. If the colo burns to the ground or is hit by a tornado I am offline for mere seconds and the DNS can be swapped in under an hour.

But that's not good enough because a software failure or a malicious intruder could give a command to wipe the database, which would be dutifully echoed down to Niceville and destroyed there too! So to cover that possibility I can timeline restore the database and also physically back up the disks on both ends, and those backups go into the vault rotation. That's "safe enough" for my uses.

Incidentally about a year and a half ago I got to test this "for real"; the RAID controller in the system at the colo went insane and scribbled on all the disks, crashing the machine and destroying all the data that was there. So much for RAID's redundancy!

No data was lost.

Remember that backups are not just about failures but also mistakes (e.g. accidentally deleting a directory full of shots you didn't really mean to kill!)

Lots of great advice tickerguy, and thanks for the warning about cloud storage. I can't say that I completely trust the cloud idea at this point (which is why I have basically 3 copies onsite), but the expense is nominal that I consider it as an experimental safety net. We will see how well it works if I need their service, or if they are even around 4 years from now. I am hoping that I will not get a simultaneous loss of my 3 copies such that I will need a full recovery from Crashplan.

I am particularly impressed by this quoted part of your post. I can only dream of setting something like that up, although I think the amount of time, knowledge and expense is probably way beyond what I capable of.

I think the pros who depend on photos for a living should take note of how you've setup your backup system, and it might be valuable for them to invest in something similar to ensure against loss and guarantee rapid recovery of invaluable data.

tickerguy wrote in post #15432320
Here's another example -- I run a pretty-popular blog and trading forum focusing on the markets and politics. The "primary" machine is at a colocation site in North Carolina. The entire data repository for that forum and blog is stored in a Postgres database. The database is then "hot" mirrored to my home network in Niceville over a SSL-encrypted data link where a second copy is synchronously stored to a completely separate second machine in a rack in my utility room. That database server can be brought online as the "main" in literal seconds, losing at worst the last comment posted to the forum at the time. If the colo burns to the ground or is hit by a tornado I am offline for mere seconds and the DNS can be swapped in under an hour.

But that's not good enough because a software failure or a malicious intruder could give a command to wipe the database, which would be dutifully echoed down to Niceville and destroyed there too! So to cover that possibility I can timeline restore the database and also physically back up the disks on both ends, and those backups go into the vault rotation. That's "safe enough" for my uses.

Wilt wrote in post #15431209
Sad commentary about the generation who will be running government and industrial enterprises after our generation has retired.

Not sure the current generation in charge has set a terribly good example either.

Regardless, cloud backups have their place. Services like Crashplan have a set it and forget it convenience. Being to access files while away from home can be handy and if your connection is reasonably quick it's more up to date than that removable drive most people update once in a blue moon.

That said it should never be your only plan. I view cloud backup services on the level of Crashplan as a reasonably priced convenience service. It can be a handy backup to your backup's backup and it might just fill in the gaps for the average Joe if they lose everything up to a month or two ago because their main drive failed and their backup drive hasn't been updated for a couple months.

I got a couple of these Buffalo Thunderbolts to take advantage of the fast data transfer capability to the mac's with a thunderbolt port.

http://www.buffalotech​.com …s/ministation-thunderbolt

$179 for a 1TB drive is outrageously expensive -- you can nearly buy a 3TB drive along with a USB/Firewire/eSATA equipped external enclosure for that sort of money, or (thinking redundancy again) buy two 1 or 2TB drives and two enclosures -- you can definitely do that with two 1TB drives for that money, and can get close with 2TB drives.

Firewire is quite fast and a Macbook with an Expresscard slot can support eSATA (which is native drive speed and sacrifices nothing in protocol translation since there is none.)