I see dead drives

My day job is DAM manager for a large cosmetics company in the Dallas area.

Part of the job consists of backing up/archiving all of the RAW images from all of the photo shoots for publications and web.

Since there are sooo many RAW images from each shoot we are currently just backing them up to duplicate firewire drives.

In the past two years I have a total of four 1- terabye drives just stop working.

So if you are backing all of your files up to just one drive, please beware, they do fail.

Yep, never trust HDD. I back up to dual layer DVDs as well and will probably be moving to backing up to blu-ray soon too as the burners are now down to $200 and the 25GB media is just under $10.

ben_r_ wrote in post #6448769
Yep, never trust HDD. I back up to dual layer DVDs as well and will probably be moving to backing up to blu-ray soon too as the burners are now down to $200 and the 25GB media is just under $10.

I don't trust myself with DVDs

Using Nero I burn + verify and make 2 copies.
After they're burned, I open each to ensure pictures are viewable on a different pc than they were burned from.
One stays @ my house; the other goes to my parent's house

Two safer than one, yes. A way to also bypass the MTBF odds is to simply NOT POWER UP any drive that does not need to be accessed...the MTBF statistics are based upon a large number of drives all powered up together, and a statistical analysis of their failure rate. So beat the MTBF odds by simply leaving drives powered off!

I learned that the hard way. My 250 GB Seagate bit the dust with 1 1/2 years of photos on it.

Having been hit by failed drives before, i always back up once a week to an external drive (which is not connected to the power or the computer when not in use - cant be too careful with power surges or lightning)

I dont store any off site but if the worst happened and the house burned sown, i would have more to worry about than my photography (which is only a hobby after all).

Wilt wrote in post #6452819
So beat the MTBF odds by simply leaving drives powered off!

Not so, lubricants in the hard drives can dry up or sieze which can lead to premature drive failure. This is advice given by archivists who have drives in storage. They must power the drives up each year to test they are still ok. However if you get a hot swap backplane for SATA drives then this isn't a major issue (and it's what I use).

Whilst HD's do represent a good value to buck ratio for backups storage tapes are still the best media for long term. However this is expensive especially when looking at solutions like the Storageworks Ultriums.

Hard Drive storage has expanded faster than back up solutions. Hence the rise in popularity of NAS solutions for SMB and home users. Photography is a area where you need a proper back up solution and fall back solutions. Especially if you're running a business. Even a NAS can't prevent data corruption occuring, which can happen all too easily.

Well, if your concern is drive failure (and not user error, as in accidential deletes or viruses), you practically *have* to go the RAID route, IMO. For smaller amounts of storage RAID1 is fine; I personally run two RAID6 arrays (Well, technically, RAIDZ-2), after much testing.

Be aware that vanilla RAID does not protect against file corruption particularily well, as the controller doesn't know which copy is correct and which isn't. It only protects against complete drive failure or "loud" faults (where the drive reports a block as unaccessible). Silent faults will lead to silent corruption.

If you're serious about HDD storage, I recommend ZFS with all my heart. It will not silently corrupt data, regardless of the underlying hardware.

It can also, if you use snapshots, protect against accidental overwrites/deletes/etc​.

pretty decent raid5 boxes with say 4 drives, are quite cheap these days, by comparison to the time and media involved in doing the same thing any other way.

NAS boxes often come with web interfaces which allow you to run backups from other sources, so, if you want fairly cheap, and extremely convenient... get two, and have one back up the other nightly.

it's not quite a raid 50, but its much cheaper than a box that'll do a raid 50 for you, and really, we're not talking about modifying 200 gig of information in a day for most of us here. We do create a lot of content, but we do so over slightly longer time periods, meaning that nightly backups aren't what we might call infrequent.

to screw up 2 raid 5s backing each other up, you'd have to lose 4 hard drives (two in each) before getting the chance to replace one of them... that's not impossible, but quite bloody unlikely.

Those of us with colleagues in similar fields, and fat internet connections might consider getting hefty raid5s on either end, and backing both of them up to each other, via a throttled internet link. It may take all night to back up your evening's work if you're talking about a stack of raw files, but in case of fire, it's your best bet.

Faolan wrote in post #6453204
Not so, lubricants in the hard drives can dry up or sieze which can lead to premature drive failure. This is advice given by archivists who have drives in storage. They must power the drives up each year to test they are still ok. However if you get a hot swap backplane for SATA drives then this isn't a major issue (and it's what I use).

Sounds like we need to investigate directly with harddrive manufacturers, to determine if ANY lubricant is used at all, at the center hub, to see if it is merely urban legend among archivists!

Faolan wrote in post #6453204
Whilst HD's do represent a good value to buck ratio for backups storage tapes are still the best media for long term. However this is expensive especially when looking at solutions like the Storageworks Ultriums.

I used to believe this, too, as a number of years ago, magnetics was the only truly proven media with >50 years of actual history, rather than the 'accelerated' life testing. But it would appear that more recent factual deterioration had been uncovered for magnetic tapes, too! Now we need to wonder about the bonding of magnectics on harddrives, since they are not subject to the same direct physical contact like tapes (to itself, to heads, pinch rollers, etc.)

Wilt wrote in post #6453706
Sounds like we need to investigate directly with harddrive manufacturers, to determine if ANY lubricant is used at all, at the center hub, to see if it is merely urban legend among archivists!

No need to investigate when you can open one yourself.

There's lubricant on the spindle, and of course on the head mechanism, which is always moving at a frantic rate back and forth.

It would be interesting if there weren't any lubricant on a bunch of metal moving parts.

Wilt wrote in post #6452819
Two safer than one, yes. A way to also bypass the MTBF odds is to simply NOT POWER UP any drive that does not need to be accessed...the MTBF statistics are based upon a large number of drives all powered up together, and a statistical analysis of their failure rate. So beat the MTBF odds by simply leaving drives powered off!

I agree that if you don't have it running constantly but do run it at reasonably regular intervals (as someone mentioned the lubricants, I'm not actually sure how they're lubricated but spinning them up once in a while will keep things moving regardless) then hard drives are not only more convenient and easier to work with than DVDs, but reasonably reliable. I personally prefer multiple hard drive copies to having to rely on DVDs at any point at all. DVDs age and die and are susceptible to more things that makes them more fragile IMO than a hard drive you power up once a month or a few times a year and I'd rather go through cycles of replacing hard drives every two or three years than keeping track of a giant nuisance DVD collection.

If Blu-Ray were more affordable I'd use that however because thanks to its capacity it'd be much easier to work with and make backups on to.

milorad wrote in post #6453750
No need to investigate when you can open one yourself.

There's lubricant on the spindle, and of course on the head mechanism, which is always moving at a frantic rate back and forth.

It would be interesting if there weren't any lubricant on a bunch of metal moving parts.

I thought there might be tiny jewel pivots, like they used to do with mechanical precision watches in the escape movement.

Good point! I still would leave harddrives turned off, unless read/writing data to it -- to beat the MTBF stats -- and spin the thing up periodically to refresh the lubricants.

something worth mentioning I think, is that electronic equipment experiences both electrical and heat stress when powered on. That stress can be compared with a sack full of power-on hours. Certainly the balance is delicate between switching things on and off a couple of times a week to do backups, and leaving the damned thing on all the time.

The most likely time for a drive to fail will be at power-on time. That doesn't mean it won't fail anyway, just that leaving it off for two days, doesn't necessarily work in it's favour on day 3.