A thread everyone should read regarding backups

Over the years I've had 5 hard drives fail so I have all my important stuff on at least 2 back up drives, one of which I keep elsewhere. Over the weekend I got an ad from Dell selling what appeared like a very neat back up tool so I ordered 3 of them, 2 will be Christmas gifts and 1 is for me, and it's in use right now doing a full back up as a test. Here's what I bought.

http://www.clickfree.c​om/products_transforme​r.php

Here is my backup and archival strategy:

1. Copy files from the camera to my Mac laptop into a "Photo Archive XXX" folder.

2. This folder is backed up daily via Time Machine to another Mac in my house.

3. When the folder reaches around 4GB in size, I burn it to two DVD+Rs.

4. One DVD+R goes into a file cabinet at my house. The other goes to my office at work.

5. Before deletion from the laptop, I also copy the contents of the "Photo Archive XXX" to a directory on my home archive server, a Solaris box with a 500GB ZFS mirrored disk pool. This way I can access the files on my home network without having to touch the burned DVD+Rs.

6. As new storage technologies become available, I re-burn everything from the Solaris archive folders to the new media. I've already replaced all the CD-Rs with DVD+Rs. BD-ROM, or whatever takes its place, will be next.

I have lost hard drives. CDs and DVDs have gone bad. My computers have died. But I've never lost a file.

I have just this minute got off the phone to Warehouse Express after ordering 2 - 1 tb La Cie external harddrives. Not yet in stock, but expected "any day".

I am currently totally reliant on a single 320 gb Western Digital external hard drive and it has started to concern me. Particularly as I intend to swop my current 30D for a 1Ds mk 4 if and when the mythical beast appears (possibly 12 months time?).

I know nothing about LaCie. Anyone know if they are reliable. I know their monitors are considered Gods answer to photographers, but what about the hard drives?

No personal experience with them (Lacie) but I've read many a recommendation here & at FM that they are one of the best. I'll be adding one of their rugged versions to my list of back up drives in the spring.

My critical data is all backed up offsite. If I lost it, it would probably take quite a while to restore (over the internet) but I'd rather have that than the situation I used to have which was only a local backup (so quick restore but no protection against fire, theft, flood, catastrophic power surge, etc.)

Excellent write up, Tim. Good advice for others to follow.

I had already previously implemented backup procedures similar to yours. However, I'm having problems in one area: Norton Ghost. As opposed to saving an image as you do, I make a clone of the boot harddrive (on a spare drive). However, I have problems with ghost - it just doesn't work well.

Have you ever actually tried to use your image to replicate the boot drive to see if it works?

I am presently looking for alternatives. There's comments all over the net about Ghost's failures and many people say Acronis TI works well.

If you have not actually tried to make a bootable main drive and plugged it in and tried it, you may want to do so.

1. all processed photos get uploaded to smugmug which has unlimited hosting
2. all processed get put on extra external hardrive that is kept in house
3. also have apple's time machine running to cover everything that is on my computer
4. have backblaze online data backup running
5. have an additional external hardrive that stays in a bank safety deposit box with ALL processed and unprocessed photos.

Lowner wrote in post #9120139
I know nothing about LaCie. Anyone know if they are reliable. I know their monitors are considered Gods answer to photographers, but what about the hard drives?

I've been using Lacie drives since they were pretty much the only third party external drive available for Macs and they are as reliable as a really reliable thing giving a lecture on reliability at the Reliability Inc. reliability symposium.

Thanks Hank,

You mean.... RELIABLE...... then?

I have a 1TB portable hard drive with everything on, plus i have everything uploaded to facebook/Flickr/Picass​a so id be ok

Lowner wrote in post #9120139
I have just this minute got off the phone to Warehouse Express after ordering 2 - 1 tb La Cie external harddrives. Not yet in stock, but expected "any day".

I am currently totally reliant on a single 320 gb Western Digital external hard drive and it has started to concern me. Particularly as I intend to swop my current 30D for a 1Ds mk 4 if and when the mythical beast appears (possibly 12 months time?).

I know nothing about LaCie. Anyone know if they are reliable. I know their monitors are considered Gods answer to photographers, but what about the hard drives?

I've used a pre-prod 1D4, and the guy thought they were already in production. I don't think they're too far away.

CannedHeat wrote in post #9120352
Excellent write up, Tim. Good advice for others to follow.

I had already previously implemented backup procedures similar to yours. However, I'm having problems in one area: Norton Ghost. As opposed to saving an image as you do, I make a clone of the boot harddrive (on a spare drive). However, I have problems with ghost - it just doesn't work well.

Have you ever actually tried to use your image to replicate the boot drive to see if it works?

I am presently looking for alternatives. There's comments all over the net about Ghost's failures and many people say Acronis TI works well.

If you have not actually tried to make a bootable main drive and plugged it in and tried it, you may want to do so.

Yes, i've recovered from a problem using a ghost image, using the windows ultimate boot CD/BartPE. I tried to get ghost onto a standard ultimate boot CD but I couldn't work out how before I gave up.

Try DriveImage XML that I linked to above, but you'll need to find and test a way to recover it. I think it's windows only, so you might have to fiddle with things to do it, unless there's a dos mode program to restore with.

I double back up to to a Drobo and a nas device and ftp to my off site web server, I think I am bullet proof, but nothing is infallible.

tim wrote in post #9122622
Try DriveImage XML that I linked to above, but you'll need to find and test a way to recover it. I think it's windows only, so you might have to fiddle with things to do it, unless there's a dos mode program to restore with.

Tim, I use DriveImage XML in conjunction with BartPE (a Windows installation that runs off a CD -- BartPE creates the CD using your XP install disk). BartPE and DriveImage XML work together very well (there's a DriveImage "plugin" for BartPE).

gcflora wrote in post #9122711
Tim, I use DriveImage XML in conjunction with BartPE (a Windows installation that runs off a CD -- BartPE creates the CD using your XP install disk). BartPE and DriveImage XML work together very well (there's a DriveImage "plugin" for BartPE).

Oh yeah, I remember that now, that's the only reason I tried DriveImageXML - it was already on the CD I did both ghost and DriveImageXML as the back of my system drive is only 10GB (I keep that drive very clean) and options are good!

Has anybody ever used or can comment about Casper? I ran across it a week ago while looking for an alternative to the often-failing Norton Ghost 14.