It's 2020, what is your backup solution?

gjl711 wrote in post #19150533
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.

I got called to look a computer that wouldn't start and turned out to have a completely dead hard drive. No worries, though. The only important thing on it was Quickbooks, which had been backed up to a flash drive. When I looked at the flash drive, all it contained was a copy of the desktop shortcut to Quickbooks. For all I know, even if they'd "tested" it, it would have appeared to work in their eyes.

mike_d wrote in post #19150556
I got called to look a computer that wouldn't start and turned out to have a completely dead hard drive. No worries, though. The only important thing on it was Quickbooks, which had been backed up to a flash drive. When I looked at the flash drive, all it contained was a copy of the desktop shortcut to Quickbooks. For all I know, even if they'd "tested" it, it would have appeared to work in their eyes.

Oh lord, precisely what I'm talking about. Yikes.

Gotta test those backup solutions...

Very best,

MalVeauX wrote in post #19150557
Gotta test those backup solutions...

I'm hoping that my buddy with the collection of all of his work product on DVDs is going through checking them. You know, since I recently told him that writing on them with a Sharpie wasn't a great idea and all. Lol.

Windows in general does some marvelous things during an OS update. (I say that sarcastically. ) On more than a few ocassions it has completely hosed the new version and I've had a couple old versions as well as restore points go into the wild blue. Nothing like thinking a software update is painless and easy. The update fails and you're faced with a MBR error or blue screen. Each month I cycle through the back-up OS drives for updates and test them to make sure they do boot the system properly.

I had that with the 2004 update where it blue screened afterwards. Between the backup drives it eventually did update successfully but if I had only that one OS drive, that would be hard. The last OS disc on hand is Win 7.

aphphoto wrote in post #19150621
I'm hoping that my buddy with the collection of all of his work product on DVDs is going through checking them. You know, since I recently told him that writing on them with a Sharpie wasn't a great idea and all. Lol.

Ugh yes, so many CD/DVD from the late 90's to 2000's were written on with sharpie!

Very best,

I got a 4TB external HDD, and Microsoft 1TB Drive.

I have a pair of 10Tb HDD drives.

One has been used for backups of my desktop and laptop systems,
while the other remains unused and unwritten to.
These will ultimately reside in a form of NAS of my choosing.

SATA in all systems in use at home, an ASUS something-or-another
from around 2008 fitted with a SSD, while the same goes for my
desktop and portable system from the same era: Intel Core i-7 3770K
with 16Gb RAM and over 2 Tb of storage.

As long as it's stored on a non-system drive, what's the concern?
I've got the data duplicated across many drives now, yet I still
don't understand the paranoia.

SkedAddled wrote in post #19156032
I have a pair of 10Tb HDD drives.

One has been used for backups of my desktop and laptop systems,
while the other remains unused and unwritten to.
These will ultimately reside in a form of NAS of my choosing.

SATA in all systems in use at home, an ASUS something-or-another
from around 2008 fitted with a SSD, while the same goes for my
desktop and portable system from the same era: Intel Core i-7 3770K
with 16Gb RAM and over 2 Tb of storage.

As long as it's stored on a non-system drive, what's the concern?
I've got the data duplicated across many drives now, yet I still
don't understand the paranoia.

If you have multiple physical copies, then you're fairly well off. It's not paranoia, it's avoiding loss and/or inconvenience. You have it covered. If you didn't have multiple copies, and something went wring with your single physical copy, that feeling when it happens is what you're avoiding, an the inconvenience of it.

Drives fail over time. Sectors go bad. Memory modules fail. There's no perfect solution at this time, so the key is multiple copies that are separate, as you have.

Very best,

I have a Flickr Pro account I use a "cloud" storage for the few images I would hate to lose. For local storage i have two external hard drives. One is a "working disk" where everything goes. The second only comes online when I do my weekly backup of the working drive. Currently taking a hard look at a RAID array. Recently added a Canon EOS 5Ds and the RAW files are huge.

I have 3 nas drives at home - the latest is a 4bay box but only 2 drives set in raid (or whatever 2drives at the same time is called).

Total storage is 7TB. I also have a cloud backup account which I sync the computer with. That’s got about 4Tb of stuff up there. Unlimited storage for around £6 a month.

I have accumulated numerous "pairs" of external drives over the years. I started out with a pair of 2T and my latest pair are 12T. I buy the largest size I can when the former set gets 75% full.

I download my pictures from the CF or CF express cards to the "Master" drive using "Downloader Pro" using the same directory structure and naming convention (Date Driven) and use "Allway Sync" to mirror to the 2nd or "Backup" external once a month or after I've finished a lengthy editing session........I initially tried several versions of RAID but that is more of a pain in the arse than it is worth. Every version of RAID I tried was constantly rebuilding or doing some other nonsense, preventing me from actually using the drives. Rebuilding large drives takes hours.

These drives are dedicated to pictures and Videos only and one is named "Master" the other "Backup"

HKGuns wrote in post #19164893
I have accumulated numerous "pairs" of external drives over the years. I started out with a pair of 2T and my latest pair are 12T. I buy the largest size I can when the former set gets 75% full.

I download my pictures from the CF or CF express cards to the "Master" drive using "Downloader Pro" using the same directory structure and naming convention (Date Driven) and use "Allway Sync" to mirror to the 2nd or "Backup" external once a month or after I've finished a lengthy editing session........I initially tried several versions of RAID but that is more of a pain in the arse than it is worth. Every version of RAID I tried was constantly rebuilding or doing some other nonsense, preventing me from actually using the drives. Rebuilding large drives takes hours.

These drives are dedicated to pictures and Videos only and one is named "Master" the other "Backup"

You are the only other person I've read online who also uses Downloader Pro...a hugely versatile application.

Agreed. I’ve been using it since 2008-ish or so......great little program and very flexible.

Well if raid is building all the time, something is wrong. I have yet to see any issues with my QNAP boxes. I was going to put 2 bigger drives in my PC but instead chose to use simple QNAP enclosure called TR-002. It is USb3.2, 2 drives in basic mirror config and now running Capture On directly from it. My cameras, 50 and 60MP ones and I don't see any issues.

HKGuns wrote in post #19164994
Agreed. I’ve been using it since 2008-ish or so......great little program and very flexible.

I used to use it too - but stopped for a reason, I can no longer remember, but was a few years ago now. I used to just import via lightroom, renaming the files as they came in. With the 1Dx3 I download either over wifi or ethernet to the computer - started with that before the card reader arrived and haven't bothered to change! I then just sync the folder with lightroom.