Sony Lounge Thread MKIII (All Sony cameras welcome)

Images are saved. Phew!

Now to revamp my backup strategy

Sorry guys but another post from me about archiving - this may interest some of you though.

After my scare last night I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the best method for long term archiving of my digital image files. Hard drives in constant use are only rated for 3-5 years before issues can start due to the magnets etc. External drives sitting stored may last a decade or two but will eventually degrade.

It seems the best option for prosperity is M-disc media. They can be read and written to by standard blue ray recorders and are readily available. Extract below from a website I was reading -

“Write-once BD-R HTL (High To Low) can last for 100 to 150 years given a relatively mild environment—i.e., not on your dashboard in Phoenix. Milleniatta’s M-Disc BD-R and DVD+R write-once discs use an even more stable data layer that is rated for 10,000 years. Only its polycarbonate outer layers reduce that to a mere 1,000 years. Note that this is all theoretical, but the testing MOs were rigorous and performed by the government of France (BD-R), and the Navy for the Department of Defense (M-Disc DVD).

Available in 25GB, 50GB, and 100GB (currently very expensive) flavors, BD-R also has enough capacity to handle long-term backup and archival chores. The downside is a relatively slow 21MBps writing at best—substantially slower than USB 3.0 hard drives and SSDs.

If you’re worried about optical drives disappearing, know that optical retains a very strong presence in the archival community, as well as the enterprise, so that should give you some reassurance.

Advice: Despite its slow speed, optical is pretty perfect for archiving your most important data.”

Not ideal for everyday backups but potentially the best option for passing your images on to future generations of your family

There’s also the issue of disc size. Depending on how big your collection is it could end up spanning a lot of discs

Another reason I like my Drobo: It continuously monitors disc health and provides an alert when it’s time to replace a drive. Since the files are stored redundantly (automatically) on the Drobo’s five drives, you can just pop out an old drive, insert a new clean one, and it writes all the data on the new drive that was on the old drive.

My oldest Drobo is a USB based drive and I keep it off 99.9% of the time. My other Drobo, the 5N, is on all the time. I try to keep everything duplicated across both Drobos, which means I have four copies of every file.

And now I am reminded that I still have some files to duplicate across my Drobos.

David Arbogast wrote in post #18534693
Another reason I like my Drobo: It continuously monitors disc health and provides an alert when it’s time to replace a drive. Since the files are stored redundantly (automatically) on the Drobo’s five drives, you can just pop out an old drive, insert a new clean one, and it writes all the data on the new drive that was on the old drive.

This is exactly why I like my Synology NAS setup as it does the same thing. I got a beep to say a drive had failed but I still had access to allow me to backup ahead of swapping the drive just in case. In my panic last night I swapped out the good drive instead of the bad drive. If I had just swapped the bad drive first I would have been back online within the hour without the stress - Lesson learned.

Where my current backup workflow fails is because I realised that the backup of my NAS is encrypted which is what I am in the process of changing just now.

xpfloyd wrote in post #18534695
This is exactly why I like my Synology NAS setup as it does the same thing. In my panic last night I swapped out the good drive instead of the bad drive. If I had just swapped the bad drive first I would have been back online within the hour without the stress - Lesson learned.

Where my current backup workflow fails is because I realised that the backup of my NAS is encrypted which is what I am in the process of changing just now.

Maybe a second Synology drive for additional redundancy then? I’m OK with needing to replace drives as they go bad (so long as they don’t all go at once!), so a 3-5 year lifespan/drive doesn’t worry me. But, it gives me peace of mind knowing that I have my data stored on two separate Drobos.

Figuring out where to put 20TB of blu ray discs does. I haven’t done the math, so I’m not sure how many discs it would take to store a TB of data on blu ray.

David Arbogast wrote in post #18534703
Maybe a second Synology drive for additional redundancy then? I’m OK with needing to replace drives as they go bad (so long as they don’t all go at once!), so a 3-5 year lifespan/drive doesn’t worry me. But, it gives me peace of mind knowing that I have my data stored on two separate Drobos.

Yeah that might be the easiest way at the moment. I am weighing up the options and assessing how I do things. I am about to try out "USB Copy 2.0" on the synology apps to check if it copies the files in a way they can be read by any machine. If thats the case then that will likely be my solution initially as it can be auto-scheduled etc. Without sounding like a broken record the main thing I worry about is my kids ability to look at my images when ive kicked the bucket as they will likely not be doing the 3-5 year backup upgrade that I will do.

Yeah that would be a lot of discs! It would require 20x 50 gig discs to store 1 terabyte. 1TB is what I have at the moment in digital images (probably quite small by comparison to others but I have only been shooting since 2011)

xpfloyd wrote in post #18534711
Yeah that might be the easiest way at the moment. I am weighing up the options and assessing how I do things. I am about to try out "USB Copy 2.0" on the synology apps to check if it copies the files in a way they can be read by any machine. If thats the case then that will likely be my solution initially as it can be auto-scheduled etc. Without sounding like a broken record the main thing I worry about is my kids ability to look at my images when ive kicked the bucket as they will likely not be doing the 3-5 year backup upgrade that I will do.

Yeah that would be a lot of discs! It would require 20x 50 gig discs to store 1 terabyte. 1TB is what I have at the moment in digital images (probably quite small by comparison to others but I have only been shooting since 2011)

The reality is that most of my data is raw files...way too much of which is pure garbage that I ought to delete anyway. Storing only my final edit jpegs would be a tiny fraction and a really good thing to get copied to optical discs.

This is a very helpful issue you’re raising and starting to sound like a great backup project for me in 2018!

David Arbogast wrote in post #18534721
The reality is that most of my data is raw files...way too much of which is pure garbage that I ought to delete anyway. Storing only my final edit jpegs would be a tiny fraction and a really good thing to get copied to optical discs.

This is a very helpful issue you’re raising and starting to sound like a great backup project for me in 2018!

Think you have nailed it on the head there. Selective archiving of final edits and family stuff and not archiving the rest for example the 50 shots I took of each sunset to get the one I wanted

Heck for archiving even full res jpegs of the final edits would suffice. No need for multilayer tiffs etc

xpfloyd wrote in post #18534735
Think you have nailed it on the head there. Selective archiving of final edits and family stuff and not archiving the rest for example the 50 shots I took of each sunset to get the one I wanted

Heck for archiving even full res jpegs of the final edits would suffice. No need for multilayer tiffs etc

I like the idea of optical disks for a storage medium that will last for generations. Yeah no need to preserve raw files, and I wouldn't burden anyone with digging through them unless one of my kids ends up getting into photography or digital media. I just looked at my 2017 personal photos that are saved in JPEG, and it comes in at just under 25gb. So I could probably make an optical disk for each year. Just make sure you keep a BD drive with your disks so people can actually access this stuff, but its no different from the fact that my dad's old home videos were on mini VHS disks. We eventually converted these to DVD's, and then a couple years later ripped those to MPG's. But either way, the original physical copies still exist.

I need to look back at my really old stuff and trash the raw files. If I hadn't edited them in 3+ years, chances are I never will. I actually got bored and tried to process some old stuff....you mostly realize why stuff wasn't processed before, and those old Canon files are not fun to process

Okay... So i'm making up for no purchases last year with an FE85 in the first week of January

LeeRatters wrote in post #18534742
Okay... So i'm making up for no purchases last year with an FE85 in the first week of January

Nice one Lee. Did you not have the Batis?

xpfloyd wrote in post #18534761
Nice one Lee. Did you not have the Batis?

Yes - I still do currently. So it's a bit stupid really.

But........ I've never liked the look of the Batis. I've never used the OLED display. I've never used the IS/OS on the lens.

I like the look of the FE. I like the MF/AF switch & the 'focus hold' button. I think it's slightly smaller. It's definitely slightly lighter.

So with the IQ & blur very similar & they are both 67mm filters I thought I'd try it.

Bought used anyway but like new for what I think is a reasonable price.

The Batis I bought used also so I'm expecting to loose a little but not too bothered about that - I bought it just before the FE was announced!!

LeeRatters wrote in post #18534775
Yes - I still do currently. So it's a bit stupid really.

But........ I've never liked the look of the Batis. I've never used the OLED display. I've never used the IS/OS on the lens.

I like the look of the FE. I like the MF/AF switch & the 'focus hold' button. I think it's slightly smaller. It's definitely slightly lighter.

So with the IQ & blur very similar & they are both 67mm filters I thought I'd try it.

Bought used anyway but like new for what I think is a reasonable price.

The Batis I bought used also so I'm expecting to loose a little but not too bothered about that - I bought it just before the FE was announced!!

I hear you mate, went same the same process myself recently and decided to get the FE and sell the Batis. Unfortunately I bought the batis full price New at release so it didn’t work out financially to sell t as it was too much of a hit. Having said that I do love the batis and the images it produces. I just like the look of the FE body better plus would like that eye-af button on the lens

Nice discussion on backup solutions. Glad it worked out well for you Eddie in the end. On an unrelated topic I’m considering purchasing these lights for some macro photography. Especially interested in the UV light.


https://m.dpreview.com …v-and-arm-s-lighting-arms

Charlie - Since you are using a synology I thought I would let you know the result of me trying out Synologys "USB Copy" programme. It basically does an exact copy onto an external drive (or wherever you choose) without encryption so you can unplug the external drive from the synology and into a PC/Mac and access your files straight away. You can also set up versioning and a schedule. It seems like a pretty neat way of backing up the NAS without being tied into Synology software to re-access your files.

Thought I would post a photo since ive been jabbering on for a few pages

One from yesterday. Callum was actually scootering towards me on this shot so the A7RII done not bad in AF-C single shot and f/1.8

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/23cd​JP9