It's 2020, what is your backup solution?

RDKirk wrote in post #19148956
Interestingly, that article did not propose any cause of SSD failure other than excessive read/write operations. There was no other suggestion of anything else that would kill them. "Age" itself is not a cause, unless they can point out an actual time-related degenerative process (cosmic radiation, maybe?). What happens if an SSD is turned on and all its data read (only), say, once a year?

What kills them is an electronic phenomenon that renders individual memory "cells" incapable of retaining data. In order to prolong the life of the drive the manufacturers use an algorithm that spreads the use across all of the cells but the problem remains that there is relatively finite number of writes available.This is a wide range, often given as 3,000 to 100,000.

gjl711 wrote in post #19148964
Have a source for that data? From the The Univ. Of Toronto did with Google and their data centers seems to indicate different results. Hard drives may fail faster, but SSDs suffer far greater un-correctable data faults than spinning drives. I know from my own personal experience that when a spinning drive fails, its easy to recover the data but when a SSD fails, your screwed. Also, I believe a lot has to do with how the drives are used. Spinning drives seem to make much better backup devices as the data degrades much slower than a SSD.

First of all I made a stupid mistake there saying that SSD drives fail less often than SSD drives but, obviously, I meant mechanical drives and the rate is supposedly 25% less. As for sources that particular nugget came from OnTrack - a major data recovery firm.
Personally, I agree with you that when an SSD fails you are, indeed, screwed. The cost of professional data recovery is well beyond most people's means.
As for it being "easy" to recover data from a failed spinning disk - only if it's not a physical failure. If the drive needs heads or a new controller board that's not going to be easy and it's beyond all but specialist data recovery firms - whether they be as big as OnTrack or as small as the Russian guys who design and make the jigs and tools that are used to do it. Controller boards look like an easy swap - but that doesn't account for revisions, firmware versions, etc and was really only somewhat easy in the days of IDE drives and then only if you could find a drive that was an exact match to the one you needed to recover.

PS: for myself, I'm still not comfortable with SSDs for data and my next build, sometime in the next few weeks, will have an NVMe for the OS and 7200rpm SATA disks for data.

I think it's safe to say, that everything fails, sooner or later & that's why we all have backups of our data. Don't we?

joeseph wrote in post #19149939
I think it's safe to say, that everything fails, sooner or later & that's why we all have backups of our data. Don't we?

This is true, it all will fail. But a lot of folk do not have backups or even think of backups. Maybe a single backup, like a cloud account or a single spinning drive, which is great that people at least have 2 physical copies of their data, whatever it may be. It's just more of a question of awareness. These days, more and more people have more data than they ever had before and it's less and less safe in many ways (from theft/random to hardware failure or bit flipping). And on top of that, when we do have a backup solution, it's not always tested to be working and reliable. So it's interesting to see what strategies everyone is using that are aware and have a practice, and it's good info for people who happen upon things and decide its time to build their own backup strategy. Plus there's lots of information out there, but lots of it is merely anecdotal, so it's good to find information that has metrics behind it to at least help be a good pointer.

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For example, some basic summaries found in this thread so far:

SSD/Flash - Fast, but temporary storage solution; better for working environment and portability, but not a good long term storage medium for backup (even if not accessed)
HDD - Durable, still fairly fast, highest storage capacity for cost, reliable for a few years with redundancy, but still not a long term solution (hardware failure)
Optical - Very durable, lasts significantly longer than HDD/SSD/Flash, highest cost per capacity, slowest to transfer, hardware required isn't an option for every system
Cloud - Durable, requires internet, requires constant fee to maintain, medium cost per capacity, slow transfer, widest access when on the go

How each are implemented makes a big difference though. For example, a redundancy system using any of the above discs is superior to no redundancy. Having layers of physical backups is superior to redundancy (ie, having 3 separate copies on 3 separate mediums is superior to having 1 system that simply has redundancy).

Privacy also matters to some, not all, so which ones are easy to employ encryption.

And of course, not all data needs this sort of treatment.

Very best,

For weddings - I have two copies of each card in the camera. When I get home they are backed up to two portable HDDs. One is then taken off-site and one stays at home. The SD cards do not get deleted until the wedding is delivered. I cull from the external HHD and import the picks on to my MBP. At this point there are 4 copies of the RAWS. After editing I back up the final JPGs on to the two external HDDs and keep another backup with the client gallery.

Considering some form of cloud backup but as yet not found the ideal solution. I actually used Amazon Prime as it has unlimted RAW uploads however, It started to mess up.

Is anyone backing to the cloud? I bought crashplan about 3 weeks ago but have 500GB to upload and its taking ages

PerfectCaptain wrote in post #19150138
Is anyone backing to the cloud? I bought crashplan about 3 weeks ago but have 500GB to upload and its taking ages

I use Backblaze B2 for images, which I think provides the best bang for the buck. They charge by how much was actually stored that month rather than by set increments of storage capacity.

But I'm extremely selective about what I back up to it. Before I started keeping an eye on everything being uploaded by my back-up program, it had gotten to quite a large amount at quite a pretty penny the second month of the contract. Now I've tweaked my backup program to save just what I'd actually need to reproduce completed work.

I back up text records to Microsoft OneDrive for nothing.

PerfectCaptain wrote in post #19150138
Is anyone backing to the cloud? I bought crashplan about 3 weeks ago but have 500GB to upload and its taking ages

Yes, one of my backups is to Crashplan. Backup speed will depend on your Internet connection's upload speed. I think the last time I had to upload a big chunk of data, it was about 1.5 TB and I had ~5 Mbps upload at the time. It took about a month running 24/7.

PerfectCaptain wrote in post #19150138
Is anyone backing to the cloud? I bought crashplan about 3 weeks ago but have 500GB to upload and its taking ages

I updated to Office365 and as part of that I get 6tb of cloud storage. I have uploaded many of the critical, absolutely hate to loose images to it as well as using it as a photo sharing site.

RDKirk wrote in post #19150149
I use Backblaze B2 for images, which I think provides the best bang for the buck. They charge by how much was actually stored that month rather than by set increments of storage capacity.

But I'm extremely selective about what I back up to it. Before I started keeping an eye on everything being uploaded by my back-up program, it had gotten to quite a large amount at quite a pretty penny the second month of the contract. Now I've tweaked my backup program to save just what I'd actually need to reproduce completed work.

I back up text records to Microsoft OneDrive for nothing.

B2 is cheap as far as the per-GB providers go, but it can still add up. I have the bulk of my data on Crashplan because it's a flat $10/mo/computer no matter how much data. With my data set approaching 2 TB, not counting the version history, it's much cheaper than B2.

The relevance of some data over time changes too. I have images from '04 when I began using digital capture over film. Which BTW I also had key images scanned and is part of that. Among those from '05-'10 I've gone back maybe a dozen or so times to retrieve those archived images. Like misc parts in your garage the moment you toss them, invariably weeks or months later you'll find a use/need.

For the most part any working images span maybe 3 years. As I've refined my shooting and processing, those old ones give me the chills in many instances as I spot better techniques to use.

PerfectCaptain wrote in post #19150138
Is anyone backing to the cloud? I bought crashplan about 3 weeks ago but have 500GB to upload and its taking ages

Cloud services can be good, there are some reputable ones that have not had major failings or breaches. Prices are reasonable if you consider what it is... fault tolerant, corruption tolerant, multi-layer data storage with backups being handled by a team with no software learning curve or hardware learning curve on your end to maintain it. The compromise is that it's remote, you need to encrypt if it's sensitive data, upload/download speed is going to be a big hoop to jump through if you're not in areas with well connected internet speeds, retrieval of data will take much longer, so down time can be extended; long upload times means the data is not protected that whole time. Ideally a cloud backup should be your 3rd physical copy, second to a local physical copy that is stored somewhere and not connected to the same system that the living data is present on. The cloud can be a great way to have that extra insurance of a 3rd physical copy to work out when two levels of fault tolerance fail. I would reserve cloud backup for very important low capacity stuff, not high capacity stuff.

Just keep in mind that your data should be encrypted when possible when storing elsewhere, as it could be subject to snooping or ransom, and that the data should not be your only backup in case the company is purchased, liquidated or simply goes offline for any reason.

Very best,

MalVeauX wrote in post #19150009
it's not always tested to be working and reliable

Probably 25 years ago I had a co-worker make a snarky comment about the backup she was required to do on a daily basis of a program that only she used. The program had it's own backup routine and it called for 3.5" floppy disks.
I asked her to show me how she was backing it up so she sticks a floppy disk in and hits enter and it churns away for a minute and then prompts to insert the next disk - at which point she hits enter again.
She was SUPPOSED to be backing up onto maybe 3-4 floppy disks and instead she was using one and just writing over and over to the same disk.
Her excuse was "that's how they showed me".
So we had never once had an actual working backup of her data since she started working there.
<bangs head on desk>

aphphoto wrote in post #19150519
Probably 25 years ago I had a co-worker make a snarky comment about the backup she was required to do on a daily basis of a program that only she used. The program had it's own backup routine and it called for 3.5" floppy disks.
I asked her to show me how she was backing it up so she sticks a floppy disk in and hits enter and it churns away for a minute and then prompts to insert the next disk - at which point she hits enter again.
She was SUPPOSED to be backing up onto maybe 3-4 floppy disks and instead she was using one and just writing over and over to the same disk.
Her excuse was "that's how they showed me".
So we had never once had an actual working backup of her data since she started working there.
<bangs head on desk>

Haha, NICE!

That's the idea though. Lots of folk buy into a "backup routine" or have a plan, but if they haven't tried to recover data from it, successfully, then it likely isn't going to go well unless they've recovered and tested it to work properly. It's like having a nice fat HDD in a vault with data, thinking it's great for a few years, pull it from the vault and plug it in only to find out the software that was used to backup to it wasn't actually backing up to it and updating files appropriately and so there's nothing to recover that is actually the latest form of data.

Very best,

aphphoto wrote in post #19150519
Probably 25 years ago I had a co-worker make a snarky comment about the backup she was required to do on a daily basis of a program that only she used. The program had it's own backup routine and it called for 3.5" floppy disks.
I asked her to show me how she was backing it up so she sticks a floppy disk in and hits enter and it churns away for a minute and then prompts to insert the next disk - at which point she hits enter again.
She was SUPPOSED to be backing up onto maybe 3-4 floppy disks and instead she was using one and just writing over and over to the same disk.
Her excuse was "that's how they showed me".
So we had never once had an actual working backup of her data since she started working there.
<bangs head on desk>

Well, at least you found out before you really needed the backups. Would have been worse if you had a failure and needed to restore, then discovered what was happening.