Comments on: Learning the digital darkroom – This just in, RAID is NOT a backup system

By: Online Backup

Online Backup — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:04:14 +0000

Interesting article. Backups are more important today then they have ever been in my opinion, if you loose your data and you cant recover it then your business is dead. Thanks again.

By: Steve Fogarty

Steve Fogarty — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:32:48 +0000

Just started backing up with BackBlaze. Interface seems much simpler, less options, than Mozy.

It estimates my upload at 7mbps, not the 10mbps I get from speedtest.net.

It’s first estimate for the initial upload was 727 days!

I then bumped the upload slider to maximum, and excluded some redundant directories.

It now estimates 22 days for initial upload.

it could work. Unless my HOA taketh away what it hath given …

By: Paul Burwell

Paul Burwell — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:24:26 +0000

Steve,

I’d kill for upload speeds of 10Mbps. With my Internet service, I get about 512Kbps. 10Mbps makes it entirely feasible I think.

By: Steve Fogarty

Steve Fogarty — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:51:25 +0000

I’m giving off-site network backup another try. Don’t tell my homeowner’s association, but (for reasons unkown) they’ve recently bumped up our bandwidth. Download is about 22mbps, upload is about 10mbps. I tried Mozy long ago and experienced what Paul talks about – never able to catch up. Mozy is right here in Utah, but I couldn’t talk them into letting me leave a seed drive with them.

I just downloaded BackBlaze, gonna try it for a couple weeks, see how far it gets with my terabytes of data …

BTW, RAID5 is not failsafe either. I had a nifty 2TB software RAID5 (Windows Server 2003) array, that I religiously backed up to a second 2TB RAID5 array. To fail, I would have had to lose 4 disks at the same time. What could go wrong, right?

I lost 4 of the 8 disks in one week. Lost a couple year’s worth of photos & data.

Recovery shops were talking $10-$15k just to look at it, no promises.

I’ve kept the 8 disks (4 good, 4 bad) wrapped in bubble wrap, waiting for the day I become fantastically wealthy.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:22:44 +0000

I have a couple of Drobos that I use for local backups and storage. I also store External Drives in the safe at my parents place. Another option for critical data is that I use Jungledisk and the Amazon S3 service. Monthly storage is very cheap .15 per GB but it does cost putting stuff there and accessing, but it is still reasonable.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:43:40 +0000

Yep. I haven’t test it yet, but I’ve heard of many other people doing something along these lines, so it should work. The pre-seeded drive is key though, and there’s no reason why it has to be a relative either. If you have an office or a good friend, they could house your off-site storage instead…

By: Paul Burwell

Paul Burwell — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:00:09 +0000

Sean,

That sounds like a really interesting solution. As long as both you and your father have reasonable Internet connections (in terms of speed and reliability) it sounds quite feasible.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:57:22 +0000

I have a very robust backup system involving multiples copies of my files in my house, AND at least one offsite copy at all times that I have manually backup (ie. go get the drive, back it up, and return it to the local offsite storage location).

I have been thinking for awhile about how to use an online offsite backup system, and had pretty much decided to work out a way to store a NAS server at my fathers house (ie. remote offsite copy, in a different province) that is online at all times.

The advantage of doing so is that I could seed the drives (ie. create the initial backup copy) at my house, and then take or send the NAS to his house. Incremental backups should be feasible to do over the internet.

The problem was that I hadn’t found an easy software solution to make this happen. I just found Crashplan at crashplan.com and I definitely plan to give them a try. If it works this would be much better than something like S3 or Backblaze, which could take weeks to seed and/or recover from. If I ever had a problem with the multiple copies at my house AND with my local offsite copy then I could have my remote offsite copy delivered overnight and pretty much be immediately back in business.

This solution is not without its own challenges, but it looks like a very good option for what I want to do…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:44:47 +0000

I agree 100% that raid is not backup. It’s a good hedge and can save a bunch of time, but for safest backup, you really should consider online backup at places like http://MyOtherDrive.com or Carbonite. Storing your files offsite protects not only against natural disasters, water damage, but also against theft. And more important you can begin to share your files with others once they are stored online.

By: Paul Burwell

Paul Burwell — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:01:15 +0000

Mike,

I think what you say is a great idea for small collections, but for large collections (I have over 1.5TB of images and it grows weekly if not daily), it just isn’t practical for someone making a lot of images.

Like I mention in the article, uploading just 500GB of images, will take well over 100 days at what for most people, is an unachievable upload speed.

If you someone could ever even have a real T1 equivalent, it becomes a lot more feasible. But until then, I think the average person is better to rely on themselves and their own backups then on some of the online solutions that are great for documents and spreadsheets, but less useful for digital photo collections.