External hard drives vs DVD's

jmcder53 wrote in post #5944303
in the grand scheme, cd's and dvd media are relatively inexpensive.

HDD are cheaper per Gb.

jmcder53 wrote in post #5944303
even though a disc would be rated for 5 years, or 25 years, i'd still probably transfer the images to new media

I have about 550 DvD's as of now.
I can think of better ways wasting time then to copy all of them...

Images get backed up on an external HDD, and burned to two DvD's (Raw's on one, finished images on a different one).
If all three fail, that's probably the way it was meant to be.

true, didn't think about that. that is alot of dvds. i guess i'm thinking of the files produced by a 20d. 3mb for a fine jpeg, 8meg for RAW, but then when it comes to editing they can get on up there. i scanned some negatives that were damaged, just to practice repairing old photos for people. full resolution negative scan was 80mb. one that i did alot of photoshop to was right at 500mg. so i guess it can fill up quicker.
i'm kind of obsessive compulsive at times. I do right the date that i burned the disc, a working disc and an archive disc.
look at 10 years ago. noone could tell you how much a gigabyte is, now we are getting into terabytes. i'm sure disc technology will catch up to that one day. then those 500dvds, could fit onto 10 (i suck at math, someone else can divide and get the correct answer)

rklepper wrote in post #5941114
External HDD work very well, but you really need to have 3 drives. You should have an internal that is your working drive and 2 externals that are your backups. One stays at home and the other goes somewhere away from home. I keep my off-site backup at work.

Same thing I do. Still waiting for the day when one of the Externals take a nap though.

JohnnyG wrote in post #5941605
DVD's are not really good for storage due to their fragile nature and relatively small recording space. External hard drives are also a problem and offer very little extra protection as they can fail more often than an internal. An internal hard drive is really as good. If something goes wrong with the computer, you can remove an internal drive and put it in another computer as long as they're running Windows. I haven't yet found where that doesn't work..

...assuming the internal harddrive uses the same controller type which is in both computers -- otherwise your data is still captive in the harddrive. The ever changing harddrive controller standards makes the situation challenging. ST506, ESDI, IDE, EIDE, ATA, IATA, SATA, SCSI, SCSI 2, SCSI 3 since the 1980's alone!

joeseph wrote in post #5945998
best not to ask weka2000 about this, he's managed to lose a whole drive's worth of data this weekend due to mechanical shock to the drive while running.

Personally I had a 2.5" external drive fail a few weeks ago. No idea when it died exactly, just went to use it & it wouldn't spin up.

Internal and external drives are likely to use the same drive! The failure of external vs. internal could be no difference at all, if both live in the office and never move from that location.

I use the Firmtek Seritek/5PM external harddrive enclosure for multiple mirrored RAID setups using one of FirmTeks port-multiplier e-SATA cards to connect it to my Mac (its also Win/Linux compatible). Features two silent cooling fans with a warning system incase a fan should fail, as well as a number of other nice features. I keep an extra disk from the mirror offsite and regularly return it to the RAID mirror where it is automatically rebuilt so it is up to date.

I use a progam called SoftRAID to control the RAID setup - and I can't recommend this enough - its worked flawlessly for years, even through a drive failure and mirror-rebuild that happened a while back.

Drives will fail, but the chance of several failing at once in different places is small(er)

versedmb wrote in post #5911478
Right now I back up all of my photos on an external hard drive and I save another copy to DVD's.

The DVD's take a long time to burn however and so I was considering saving to two different external hard drives instead of DVD's.

What do you think? Are external hard drives not reliable enough to do this? - even if I use two different external hard drives, duplicates of one another?

aram535 wrote in post #5911823
HDD are nice because they are fast, but also can fail much faster than a DVD can.

The DVD is read-only, will probably last longer than the HDD and you can take it and put in a different location, parents house, safety deposit box, etc. HDD, if you had a fire or theft you'd lose it all.

I would say backup to a HDD and the DVD as you are doing now. If they are really slow to burn get a faster burner, even a external firewire or usb 2 if you had to (although internal would be a bit faster)

In fact the archival properties of DVDs are not well defined; they can degrade over time and become unreadable within a few years. A lot depends on storage temperature, orientation, humidity and any labelling added. I would steer clear of them except for shot term usage.

I use two 500Gb external drives stored (unpowered) in different parts of the house.

If necessary you can store one off-site also. Unless you are running a business if you have a fire or flood you have bigger things to worry about that data backup IMHO.

The procedure is to incremental backup/verify to one internal drive, copy/verify to a second internal drive (separate physical drives) and then copy/verify to the two external drives before deleting of the internal drives. This procedure means the system can back itself up to the internal drives without supervision and minimises the powered up time of the external drives.

In fact from the moment the images are copied off the CF card they always exist in at least two places, I copy to the main location on one internal drive and then a safety temp copy to the other internal drive before cleaning up the CF card. I can delete the temp copy after the backups have been saved.

René Damkot wrote in post #5946369
HDD are cheaper per Gb.

Are you serious? HDDs must be relatively expensive in the Netherlands.

Down Under, a 1TB drive (take a typical internal Seagate Barricuda 3.5") can be had for around $250AUD online. That makes 4GB per dollar.

As for DVDs, one can typically obtain packs of 100 for around $35AUD at large retailers and around $25AUD for 50 packs. That's around 9-13GB per dollar.

Considering other cheaper (lower capacity) combinations yield similar conclusions. Take a 250GB drive (must lower value) for $125AUD vs. a pack of 10 DVDs for around $8AUD. That's 2GB per dollar vs. 6GB per dollar, so DVDs win again. Now I chose internal HDDs, so DVDs win by an even bigger margin if we were talking about externals.

I'd expect that similar ratios hold for large markets like the US and Great Britain.

Now like I said in my previous post, I much prefer HDDs to DVDs for storage. But HDDs having better capacity value compared to DVDs is big news to me!

Over here, a LaCie 500Gb HDD (Brick) is about 100 euro's; 5 Gb per euro.
1Tb LaCie "Big Disk" about 170 euros: 5,8 Gb per euro.
a spindle with 25 Sony DvDs costs about 25 euro; 4,7 Gb per euro.
I don't cheap out on DvD's

Not a big difference however.

You can have as much tech as you like but if it's all kept in the same building then you are vulnerable to a total loss due to fire or theft. Keep those DVDs or external drives locked up at work or at a relative's house.

foxbat wrote in post #5960060
You can have as much tech as you like but if it's all kept in the same building then you are vulnerable to a total loss due to fire or theft. Keep those DVDs or external drives locked up at work or at a relative's house.

True off course, but I also agree with this statement:

Lester Wareham wrote in post #5952608
Unless you are running a business if you have a fire or flood you have bigger things to worry about that data backup IMHO.