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03/18/2009 10:50:37 AM · #26 |
Originally posted by CEJ:
Oh, so the point of this post...I am very interested in these solutions as I will now go for something I have better control of besides the DVD angle. Well, as soon as I pay off the computer a bit. I like the Drobo idea...a little pricey at the moment. |
If you can find a USB DROBO the price is much less than then current Firewire version. |
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03/18/2009 10:58:16 AM · #27 |
| All my stuff is on an external drive. If it dies or crashes...I'm toast! |
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03/18/2009 11:09:28 AM · #28 |
Originally posted by smellyfish1002:
I've spent the last several weeks consolidating files from a number of computers onto one single 1 TB drive. I backed that up to external drives. As soon as I have everything consolidated (I still have a couple of drives to transfer over) I am going to back it all up at //www.carbonite.com. I want to get rid of the hundreds (if not more than a thousand by now) CD's and DVD's that have accumulated over eight or so years of shooting digital.
JD |
The online back-up service I mentioned in my earlier post was Carbonite. I used them for about three years and never had a problem. If I needed a file I would restore it. If I had stuff I wanted to store temporarily, Carbonite was very handy for that. BUT...and this is a HUGE BUT...when my laptop melted (and I do mean melted, as I stated it was a literal meltdown) the first thing I felt was relief that all my stuff was backed up on Carbonite. Well, when I fired up the temporary replacement, installed Carbonite, went to my back-up and selected the three or four most recent directories of photos to restore, it went through all the right motions. When the restore was complete, all I had on my system were empty files. I immediately contacted Carbonite via Support. I got no response. None. I tried the restore again using different directories, older ones that had been on their servers for at least a year, same thing - empty files. Again I contacted Support. No response.
Two weeks later when I replaced the laptop with a Mac, first thing I did was install Carbonite and attempt to restore my photo directories. Same thing, after waiting for the restore to complete all I had were empty files...right names, right folders, open images and received error messages on EVERY ONE - No Data! I contacted Carbonite again via Support and again got no response. I called them on the phone, never actually got anyone on the phone. Emailed them numerous times, never received a response.
Subsequently, I canceled my Subscription. About a week after canceling I got an email to take a survey on my experiences with Carbonite and why I canceled. I detailed everything in the survey. Still no response from them until just last week I got an email with an offer to re-activate my subscription with two months free. I again wrote them detailing my experience and problems with the restore. I got another email saying my backup would be available for 1 year even though I could not add to it, only restore. Well, I said to myself, one more try. I logged into the system, went to the backup they said would be there for 1 year, and it was gone. No files.
I wrote them one more time again detailing the entire experience right up to their last email, no response as of today.
I would be careful with Carbonite. I didn't have a problem with them until I actually needed to use the service the company provides. And I still have not gotten any response from them as to my restore problems or the lost backup that is supposed to be there for a year. |
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03/18/2009 04:45:41 PM · #29 |
Oh, absolutely. The mirror counteracts drive failure. The 2nd internal drive counteracts file corruption, as do the DVD backups. But, in all cases, you need protection against fire/theft. That is why one set of DVDs are kept at a bank. :)
Originally posted by Kaveran:
Just keep in mind that a mirrored setup is just that, mirrored and if you have any sort of data corruption that corruption willbe mirrored as well so an additional backup is still a good idea. |
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03/18/2009 05:42:41 PM · #30 |
thought id add my own personal set up in here:
i have a old PC i stripped down and turned into a server using raid 5: 4X180gb (so i can access pictures wherever easily even online)
i have a 500g external which i use for the most recent sets then use i like a kind of incremental system taking the new files and then when space runs down taking the oldest ones off so i have the most up to date
and i have some sets on my maain PC
and any work i use for my AS-level work i stick on discs...
i havnt lost anything yet :) |
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03/18/2009 07:34:23 PM · #31 |
HI.
I have gotten a couple emails asking about which MD5 software I use, do I figured I'd copy my response below (should have done that to begin with :) ).
Anyway, another GREAT use for MD5s is to make sure your original is still the original. If you edit anything in the RAW or JPG file, such as any of the IPTC tags, the MD5 will fail, indicating a change.
There are quite a few software packages out there. One very good one is Beyond Compare which will copy or move and do a hash check (or even binary) during the copy. It costs less than 50 USD I believe and can be run with the command line if you wanted to automate backups etc.
A free MD5 software program is //www.md5summer.org/ - MD5 Summer Checksum
Its manual, but its also free. I use the MD5 summer software, but I may be switching to Beyond Compare. Try MD5 summer first so you get a feel of what it does.
I'll add that I prefer to copy and check things manually. This way, I have full control over what was done. I'm psychotic when it comes to automated tools in that I'm afraid it will miss something. |
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03/19/2009 08:47:02 PM · #32 |
| Thanks again for this valuable information. I had no idea of the complexity involved in assuring safe backups of all my 8 years of digital photography files as well as business and personal financial data. It is obvious that a multi-tier approach is necessary to protect the data. I appreciate the suggestions. Although it appears that I have lost a year of photos, it is a small price to pay to gain the knowledge to prevent future losses. |
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03/20/2009 09:10:59 AM · #33 |
| If your interested in an MD5 hash to confirm... I use personal backup as an easy way to mirror files from one place to another (just a dumb mirror) but it has a validation option included with the backup. Other backup software do as well but this one is free and saves using something different for the MD5 hash.... |
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03/20/2009 11:23:39 AM · #34 |
Wow, good to know. This is the first time I've heard of a bad experience with Carbonite. I own a coffee shop/restuarant, and I use Carbonite for our financial record backup. Looks like I may go back to saving my record archives to a flash drive again. Maybe once a week instead of every day... If I lose a few days of financial records, I can deal with that. Losing photos of my kids, or worse, of a client's... Can't deal with that...
I'm going to look into the Carbonite thing more before I commit to it for my photos. I have everything backed up to an external HDD as well, but that does not help in a fire. I used to keep two external drive backups, and I would take one drive with me to keep at the coffee shop. That got very tiresome... If I only shot photos once a week or something, that would be fine. However, I typically shoot something daily. I used to use CD/DVD, but some of those fail over time. I have completely clean, unscratched DVD's that were burned and put into storage that do not work, even though I verified the burn on a different computer right after the burn.
A perfect solution would be to build my own server, and install it at my coffee shop. Then I could back up to it... I could be my own carbonite. I guess I should learn how to do that.
Originally posted by CEJ:
Originally posted by smellyfish1002:
I've spent the last several weeks consolidating files from a number of computers onto one single 1 TB drive. I backed that up to external drives. As soon as I have everything consolidated (I still have a couple of drives to transfer over) I am going to back it all up at //www.carbonite.com. I want to get rid of the hundreds (if not more than a thousand by now) CD's and DVD's that have accumulated over eight or so years of shooting digital.
JD |
The online back-up service I mentioned in my earlier post was Carbonite. I used them for about three years and never had a problem. If I needed a file I would restore it. If I had stuff I wanted to store temporarily, Carbonite was very handy for that. BUT...and this is a HUGE BUT...when my laptop melted (and I do mean melted, as I stated it was a literal meltdown) the first thing I felt was relief that all my stuff was backed up on Carbonite. Well, when I fired up the temporary replacement, installed Carbonite, went to my back-up and selected the three or four most recent directories of photos to restore, it went through all the right motions. When the restore was complete, all I had on my system were empty files. I immediately contacted Carbonite via Support. I got no response. None. I tried the restore again using different directories, older ones that had been on their servers for at least a year, same thing - empty files. Again I contacted Support. No response.
Two weeks later when I replaced the laptop with a Mac, first thing I did was install Carbonite and attempt to restore my photo directories. Same thing, after waiting for the restore to complete all I had were empty files...right names, right folders, open images and received error messages on EVERY ONE - No Data! I contacted Carbonite again via Support and again got no response. I called them on the phone, never actually got anyone on the phone. Emailed them numerous times, never received a response.
Subsequently, I canceled my Subscription. About a week after canceling I got an email to take a survey on my experiences with Carbonite and why I canceled. I detailed everything in the survey. Still no response from them until just last week I got an email with an offer to re-activate my subscription with two months free. I again wrote them detailing my experience and problems with the restore. I got another email saying my backup would be available for 1 year even though I could not add to it, only restore. Well, I said to myself, one more try. I logged into the system, went to the backup they said would be there for 1 year, and it was gone. No files.
I wrote them one more time again detailing the entire experience right up to their last email, no response as of today.
I would be careful with Carbonite. I didn't have a problem with them until I actually needed to use the service the company provides. And I still have not gotten any response from them as to my restore problems or the lost backup that is supposed to be there for a year. |
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03/20/2009 11:56:04 AM · #35 |
Just did a Google search, and it looks like Carbonite is HORRIBLE, based on the feedback that is available...
Now what to do???
I thought it was pretty cool, though, that the Google logo is done in the Eric Carl style (children's book author, the Very Hungry Catepillar).
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03/20/2009 12:11:13 PM · #36 |
| The two I have been looking at the past few days are Mozy and BackBlaze. So far I think I like BackBlaze better and have found better feedback for this than Mozy. But both seem to be liked by a lot of people. |
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03/20/2009 12:55:05 PM · #37 |
Well I'll try a little test with Carbonite. I have a two year subscription.
I have a 400GB backup, with 170 GB left to go. Backing up is very slow. It took over a month to backup 400GB. But it is good about giving priority to brand new files, which is exactly what I want.
I just picked a folder of photos at random and renamed it. I am now restoring it. (I could have also selected restore to another folder/drive, but it's the same to me.)
Will update later....
However, I don't quite understand how it works to get to your data temporarily from another PC, like I could when I used to have Mozy (which I quit because it was a resource hog). To get files on another PC, you have to "setup the PC" as the one you are using for Carbonite. But then wouldn't that mess up your entire backup already stored? Since all those files aren't on the PC anymore, they would be marked for eventual deletion, and who knows what it would do when you went back to the original PC. I wouldn't want to spend another month waiting for those files to backup again. |
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03/20/2009 01:05:48 PM · #38 |
Well, the horror stories may be true. I just did a small test of 37 files (three folders) which came from two different drives.
NONE of them were restored. No error messages were provided other than it was unable to restore.
I'll test some more, but I'd recommend staying away from Carbonite based on that. To be fair, I've used them before (I had a 1 year subscription just prior to switching to the Mac, and I know I was able to restore at that point. I didn't have offsite on the Mac, but when I switched back to the PC in October, I resubscribed to Carbonite.)
Here's their number if anyone wants to call (in case it's difficult to find, this was at the end of the feedback form):
Thanks very much for taking the time to provide us with feedback. If you need help, please contact our customer support team at 617-587-1100 or 877-665-4466 (Weekdays 9am-5pm EST) or email us for assistance.
Message edited by author 2009-03-20 13:25:48. |
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03/20/2009 01:21:31 PM · #39 |
Update. It appears they have a bug in their software. I was able to consistently restore any one file or group of files I selected.
BUT I COULD NEVER RESTORE if I selected a folder. Everything had to be at the file level, even if I selected multiple files.
In other words, if I selected a folder called "scripts", it couldn't restore it.
If I went into the folder, selected all the files, and told it to restore, all were restored, and were an exact binary match for the files that were backed up.
So it is indeed backing up, but they have a major bug in their software making a large scale restore next to impossible.
But hopefully that information will help anyone trying to recover important files. Try them folder by folder... (hey it's better than nothing!) |
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03/20/2009 01:23:18 PM · #40 |
Restore is faster than back-up since you are asking the system to give your files back so it is like 'downloading' - at least from my experience. I had no trouble using different computers to get files. As long as it was one or two at most. I have used Carbonite to backup a file at home where the subscription was and then at the office, restore that file to my office machine. Can't say how it works on the Mac since it would not successfully restore my files (as described above) and I removed the software.
I got some great info after that post in a p.m. and am researching that. I did take a 1Tb Mybook drive off one of my office machines and plugged that into the Mac as a precaution until I find an off-site/online solution I am comfortable with. But as a home use solution I like it better than the DVD solution and works great with Time Machine. Fast, seamless, EVERYTHING is there and easily retrieved.
If I decide to keep the Mybook at home, I am watching this site - Continuium as an offsite solution since it works in conjunction with Time Machine.
I think at this point I am not leaning towards BackBlaze or Mozy anymore (lots of reading over lunch) but am investigating this type of solution (thanks Skip.) |
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03/20/2009 03:12:57 PM · #41 |
A NAS is great first option but I am looking for a more feasible offline/cloud storage as a second layer.
The issues I have with the Mozy types are that they appear to limit what "unlimited" means - even above a slower upload connection speeds and I hate been stuck using their software tool. There also seems to be a lot of bad comments on actually restoring the data. Mozy also appears (from reading comments) to limit the amt sent each day after the for few Gb's.
I found Jungle Disk which is EXACTLY what I am after.... It's a software bootstrp that makes Amazon S3 or Rackspace vendor storage visible on the machine as a network drive. I could continue to use the same tool I do just to that drive and it should be transparent. Catch is the price... $2/mth plus storage by rackspace of $0.15/Gb/Mth (Amazon also adds upload and download bandwidth charges)..... If you have < 20G then it's a bit cheaper then the others.... but I am looking @500Gb, so not cheap. |
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03/20/2009 05:07:26 PM · #42 |
Originally posted by robs:
A NAS is great first option but I am looking for a more feasible offline/cloud storage as a second layer.
The issues I have with the Mozy types are that they appear to limit what "unlimited" means - even above a slower upload connection speeds and I hate been stuck using their software tool. There also seems to be a lot of bad comments on actually restoring the data. Mozy also appears (from reading comments) to limit the amt sent each day after the for few Gb's.
I found Jungle Disk which is EXACTLY what I am after.... It's a software bootstrp that makes Amazon S3 or Rackspace vendor storage visible on the machine as a network drive. I could continue to use the same tool I do just to that drive and it should be transparent. Catch is the price... $2/mth plus storage by rackspace of $0.15/Gb/Mth (Amazon also adds upload and download bandwidth charges)..... If you have < 20G then it's a bit cheaper then the others.... but I am looking @500Gb, so not cheap. |
For offsite storage which you don't need to update daily, nothing beats a pair of hard drives that you can alternate, taking the alternating one offsite every month.
Buy:
Thermaltake BlacX N0028USU Docking Station $34.99 shipped
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS Hard Drive $115 shipped
You can use one drive, but it's easier with two. Keep one in the dock, with some software to mirror your files and keep it up to date, and then once a month, put it in a little box, and give it to a friend to hold for you. And get back your old one from them, for the current month.
In this manner, without being in the cloud, you have 1 terabyte of your data (and system, if you like), safely off site.
Total cost with two drives: $265 and NO RECURRING COSTS.
Total cost with one drives $150 and NO RECURRING COSTS.
The only disadvantage is that you have a month of data "on site" if you only exchange drives every month.
You could combine that with low volume cloud storage for the month's worth of data, and you would save a lot.
Message edited by author 2009-03-20 17:08:42. |
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03/20/2009 05:21:02 PM · #43 |
Originally posted by Ken:
Mozy has free 2GB storage with automatic backups... |
At last Saturday's youth soccer match, I ended up with about 10 GB of files. Mozy is not an option for me.
I have two external drives (1TB each). What is on my computer's internal drive are freshly downloaded photos. I then make a first-pass through them with Adobe Bridge and delete the obviously bad ones (out of focus, missing subject, extreme over/under exposures, etc.
I copy these remaining originals to one of my external drives, using a folder named for the event, under a folder called "originals". I continue to post process locally on my computer. When done, I copy the post-processed and exported files to the external drive, under the top-level folder for the event.
Every night, a process runs that mirrors the first external drive to the second external drive, duplicating all the files/images.
Depending on the event, I will burn them on one or more DVDs. For the soccer match last weekend, I had to split the files onto three DVDs at 4.7 GB each, since I had just over 10 GB to burn.
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03/20/2009 07:06:18 PM · #44 |
| wait for holographic memory (found out about it today) no need for extra storage ever again |
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03/20/2009 10:04:19 PM · #45 |
If it were me, and I had the cash, and/or my income depended on my photography, I'd do this:
Local editing computer(s) having RAID 1 mirror. This protects what you're working on TODAY with redundancy. Upon project completion to Active storage on an RAID 5 server or NAS device. This protects what you worked on YESTERDAY with additional redundancy. Then, backing up the server to Tape/External HDD and rotate weekly offsite for full disaster recovery.
My suggested workflow would be like this.
Shoot, Transfer files via cardreader to Server store, AND to a working directory on Desktop and import into lightroom. Use lightroom for initial edits, and setup "chosen" photos for final editing in Photoshop. Completed Edits and files used to create them are stored in final project directory's on Server. Server is backed up, both RAW and FINAL files are saved and preserved.
I MIGHT create a DVD of each individual completed project folder if this was possible, but I'm concerned with "will I be able to read this disc in 10 years" and will I eventually be stuck without it. Less because of media degredation, and more by a "will drives still exist that can read this" By keeping an active server, the files are more transportable as tech changes.
Just my thoughts, I've setup companies with similar systems, and so far, the only problem I've run into is big enough media for everything.
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06/27/2009 02:50:53 AM · #46 |
I once came across the same problem and posted a similar post on dpchallenge. One told me come here to find good ideas. I can pick some good ideas here sure enough. And here i will share my idea that a friend told me. He told me to burn the photos to CD/DVD. And let me use the softare called photo to dvd. It is very good after using. I can also use it make photo slideshow.
Message edited by author 2009-06-27 02:58:46.
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06/27/2009 05:25:17 AM · #47 |
I store to "8" independent and separate Hard Drives in two different locations.
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