Lost 10+years of work, Need advice on next back up plan

I'm using a Drobo now and planning to add 2TB drives later. I usually save 2 copies, one into a 1TB drive then copy to the drobo. Once all edit are done, the drobo copy will be kept and the other can be deleted if needed.

I built a file server for all of my files, it is my main storage system.
8x1.5TB in RAID6 running Ubuntu.

What I do is I transfer from camera to my desktop, do PP on desktop.
I keep an entire copy on my desktop, I back it up to my server, and maybe once a month make sure that my laptop has a full copy as well.

Does everyone back up their RAW files? Or do you just save high resolution JPEGS? What do you recommend?
I've been saving RAW's but it takes up so much space!

As a MAC user, I use Time Machine. It works effortlessly in the background and SAVED me when my hard drive pooped and just this weekend when Aperture 3 decided to wonk out and lost all my photo files. Panic attack.

I also use BackBlaze, an effortless online backup and storage with a nice user interface; similar to Mozy, but I could never get Mozy to work reliably.

Everything I process immediately goes to ZenFolio as a high resolution jpeg file.

I back up all my photo files, RAWs and everything on TM and BackBlaze.

i guess I need to look into this time machine, I have a mac, is SATA available for mac? Thats something I'm looking into. I don't really understand all of this.

I don't know what SATA is, but TM is sooo easy to use. Just plug in any hard drive, click on the TM in your applications folder to set it up, and you are pretty much good to go as it does it's thing all by itself. Keep the icon on your dock and click on it, then your screen will flip to the TM screen and you can see a visual stack of all your backups. When you need to restore, just click on a date or a page on the stack or a particular file (the interface appears exactly like your regular user interface), hit restore, and let it do it's thing. It's very cool.

SnapsbyPoteat wrote in post #10164810
i guess I need to look into this time machine

If you're running OSX 10.5 or later, you should have it.

Desktop towers from the G5 at least to the Mac Pro (and probably before) take SATA disks. eSATA cards are available for others, but FireWire is generally good enough for me.

SnapsbyPoteat wrote in post #10164646
Does everyone back up their RAW files? Or do you just save high resolution JPEGS? What do you recommend?
I've been saving RAW's but it takes up so much space!

2TB external disks can be had for <$200 if you can put up with USB; slightly more for FireWire. Internals are even less of course if you have somewhere to mount them. Really no reason to not keep raw (still not an acronym) files.

SnapsbyPoteat wrote in post #10164646
Does everyone back up their RAW files? Or do you just save high resolution JPEGS? What do you recommend?
I've been saving RAW's but it takes up so much space!

RAW files are digital negatives, JPG are digital prints. A photographer never burns or throws out negatives, as he/she can re-interpret a negative in a different manner when making another print. 1TB and 2TB harddrives and RAID 1 units are not that expensive and are a very worthwhile investment for having at least two copies of your data available. Many even keep a third copy offsite via removable harddrive, in case of catastrophe like fire or flood.

I back up RAW, TIFF and JPG, whatever exists in my photos directory tree gets backed up. Also test your backups periodically!

Wilt wrote in post #10165033

SnapsbyPoteat wrote in post #10164646
Does everyone back up their RAW files? ..

RAW files are digital negatives, JPG are digital prints. A photographer never burns or throws out negatives, as he/she can re-interpret a negative in a different manner when making another print. 1TB and 2TB harddrives and RAID 1 units are not that expensive and are a very worthwhile investment for having at least two copies of your data available. Many even keep a third copy offsite via removable harddrive, in case of catastrophe like fire or flood.

+1 -- Perfect answer.

Example of a bare 2TB SATA drive for $125.99 US

http://www.amazon.com …_53930_15326500​_pe_vfe_t1

I'm sorely tempted to get a couple and one of the Synology units mentioned earlier in this thread.

imahawki wrote in post #10135182
I use Mozy and have a 320GB backup image currently. It took a few days to do the original backup but now that that's done it runs every night and I never even know about it.

What internet provider do you have? I backed up at least that much to Mozy through Comcast and then the Comcast ****s called and said I exceeded my 250 GB/month limit. They said if it happens again they will suspend services for 1 year.

What that meant for me was that if I had failure, I would need to have Mozy send me my data on DVDs. That's expensive. In your case, it would cost over $200.

I decided that rather than pay $60/year and then several hundreds more to get my data I would just get external hard drives.

I ended up buying a 1.5 tb WD Sata drive, this will work with time machine right?? I'll use this for all my RAW files and then I'll use smugmug for my JPEGS.
and I think I might buy another external harddrive to keep off site in a bank or something, still debating about that.
Thanks for everyone's help and advice.

I changed to re bit this year...LOVE it. It backs up everything automatically as it goes into my computer