What's better works for backup HDD or CF/SD cards

I wonder if you could burn a DVD with the JPEGs from each wedding and mail them to your mother's more frequently. Your current strategy results in you only having off site backups with the oldest work and losing the newest work is more likely to become an issue, isn't it?

tkbslc wrote in post #15462800
My (poorly executed) plan is to rotate USB hard drives from my office, which is 20 miles from my house and on the 4th floor. What actually happens most of the time is all 3 copies of my photos sit within 2 feet of each other.

mike_d wrote in post #15462824
We all start out with the best of intentions, then the rest of our lives gets in the way of rotating backups. That's why I do an online backup too. It might not be perfect, but it gets done.

Hey, this thread was a good reminder. I rotated my backups last night and have a fresh copy of all my photos and videos at my office!

tkbslc wrote in post #15465862
after 5-10 years of just sitting, many drives would never start up again. I agree with your logic, but I'd do at worst annual refresh to make sure the drive is still working and data is there. And just to keep the bearings from seizing up.

Good point. HD's are mechanical devices at heart, and mechanical devices have things like bearings and seals that harden, etc, with disuse. I'm not sure what the time-frame should be, but they should be regularly powered up and checked for integrity. The mere act of powering them up and running chkdsk (for example) will tend to "refresh" the bearings and seals.

tkbslc wrote in post #15465862
after 5-10 years of just sitting, many drives would never start up again. I agree with your logic, but I'd do at worst annual refresh to make sure the drive is still working and data is there. And just to keep the bearings from seizing up.

RTPVid wrote in post #15466317
Good point. HD's are mechanical devices at heart, and mechanical devices have things like bearings and seals that harden, etc, with disuse. I'm not sure what the time-frame should be, but they should be regularly powered up and checked for integrity. The mere act of powering them up and running chkdsk (for example) will tend to "refresh" the bearings and seals.

Agreed, checking your data every 5-10 years is asking for data loss.

Good way to backup jpegs is on flickr. its unlimited and can store them privatly as well.

SMP_Homer wrote in post #15465978
my backup system is leaning more on immediate than long-term backup...
come home from wedding, cards get backed up to laptop... cards set aside and not reused until wedding is delivered... new laptop images get backed-up to RAID box....
so before I start editing, I have 3 copies of the wedding... once wedding is edited and delivered, I'm down to a copy on the RAID box...
Once a year and/or whenever I remember and feel like it, I copy all the current year (or as far back as the last time) on a new drive and get that dropped off at my mom's place, which is pretty far away) so eventually that wedding is now at 2 locations... but that 2nd location doesn't happen sometimes until a year later (or more... I think my last offsite was 14 months ago now)
uploading, and potentially recovering gigs to/from the cloud isn't feasible for me

Depending on your NAS/RAID box, external drive that it rsyncs to. At least its a second copy even if its just on site.

joeblack2022 wrote in post #15466841
Agreed, checking your data every 5-10 years is asking for data loss.

Correct, just as everyone mentioned, check them yearly. That was my point, sorry if that got lost. I meant to keep the drives for that amount of time, then trash them and move on. Yearly backups are always good!

A system I use is to use a smaller ex HDD to load daily/weekly and archive each event to DVD/Blueray or whatever then when this drive is full buy one twice the size, load the smaller drive to the newer and load up to the newer drive until full, then buy another twice the size etc.

The old drives are stored away having loaded all events to DVD/Blueray and to the newer drives so there's multiple copies should any one not start again or become corrupted.

The DVD's are stored at our own business premises and HDDs at home. Each HDD is marked with the year the contents were shot.

At the moment I have nine ex HDD drives totalling about 7TB sitting on the bench each taking different events as they are shot. I have a paper log on the side detailing to which drive an event goes to and occasionally I scan the log and load to the biggest and latest drive so I can access it easily to see where an event might be.

With the occasional weddings I do I simply keep all files on backup cards until backed to 3 ex HDDs, archived on DVD then I format them.

As I shoot jpegs I really don't fill the drives up as quickly as you raw shooters do even tho I shoot about 70,000 images a year. My oldest ex HDD is now about 9yrs old and it fired up perfectly just before Christmas when I tested several (well two to be exact).