# Backup Storage Upgrade Questions



## Replytoken (Sep 24, 2012)

It appears that I have been shooting more than I thought, and will soon run out of storage and backup storage.  At present, I am using a 500GB external USB-powered drive for primary storage of images, and two other 500GB external USB-powered drives that contain copies of my DNG and corresponding raw files.  While not the fastest arrangement, it has served me reasonably well over the past few years.  As my primary machine is a laptop, I was considering a couple of options to replace the current set-up and wanted would appreciate any advice before making a decision.  Briefly, the choices that I have considered purchasing are as follows:



three new retail-grade external drives
a new primary drive and a RAID 1 drive with two drives pre-installed
a new primary drive and a docking station with two slots (or two single-slot docking stations)
three single enclosures and three drives of my choosing (possibly enterprise-class)
an enclosure and a JBOD enclosure with two slots and three drives of my choosing

Unfortunately, at present, my budget is not as flexible as I would like, so I know that I am going to need to make some trade-offs (like speed and convenience).  The most important consideration for me is reliability.  This was the reason that I was possibly considering enterprise-class drives, but it seems they may have their own share of issues.  And RAID 1 seemed like a good choice for backing up my primary drive, but I keep hearing horror stories of drive enclosures that fail and drives that are not easily readable when they are removed from the RAID configuration.  I am inclined to "keep it simple" because I really do not have the time to "manage" my storage beyond backing up and verifying my files.  Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

--Ken


----------



## Victoria Bampton (Sep 24, 2012)

I like to keep my backups separate from my main working files (separate cables, etc) and run them on schedule.  Personally I wouldn't choose the last option.  I'd want to keep at least one of my backups disconnected from the computer in case of a massive power surge or tripping over the cable!  

So personally, I'd have a nice fast connection for the primary drive, plus 2 externals - one that's attached and backing up regularly, and the other that's detached and backed up mainly weekly or fortnightly.


----------



## Jim Wilde (Sep 24, 2012)

I do something similar: regular backups to one permanently connected external hard drive, one NAS, and cycled portable external drives (stored at MIL's).


----------



## Replytoken (Sep 24, 2012)

Thank you Victoria and Jim.  After posting, I thought more about my options.  I am tending to agree with skipping RAID and a multiple enclosure case, although my power outlet is already quite full.  So, now I need to decide what enclosure(s) to use and what mix of drives.  I would like to jump to 2TB drives if possible, and was thinking one each from Seagate, WD and Hitachi.

--Ken


----------



## ukbrown (Sep 24, 2012)

I keep it simple, one drive in the glovebox of the car (off site backup), one always attached locally for backup, one largeish (2TB ) as the working drive.

Carbonite backup to the cloud - 400GB and rising


----------



## Replytoken (Sep 29, 2012)

Well, I think that I have gone full circle on this, and am about to do another lap. :hm:  I considered buying three external enclosures with fans, and then buying three internal 3.5" drives.  Then, I thought that since my backup drives are only used for that purpose, why not just buy two external drives?  For my primary drive, I would still buy an enclosure w/fan and a fast internal drive.  Then, I considered buying one external drive and temporarily using both of my old backup drives, thereby sparing my wallet a big hit all at once.

So, today I was near Best Buy and for the sake of convenience, I thought I would pick up one 2TB external drive and figure the rest out later.  Now, I am not certain what came over my brain after I looked at their inventory, but I somehow waled put the door with a Thermaltake BlacX Duet and a version of a 3.5" Seagate Barracuda that has very little information on the web.  While I have not opened up any of the boxes, I am now having a bit of buyer's remorse, especially on the Duet.  There are a number of negative comments, all very similar, at newegg.com, and I am thinking of returning it, and possibly the drive.

I am tempted to pick up this WD drive instead[FONT=Arial, Verdana, sans-serif], [/FONT] WDBACW0020HBK-NESN, but then I realized that if it had no fan, it really is not much different than my buying an enclosure with a fan and placing in a 3.5" internal drive.  I feel like I am coming down with a very bad case of paralysis by analysis.  Any words of wisdom?

--Ken


----------



## ukbrown (Sep 29, 2012)

Work out what problem the new drives are trying to solve and buy accordingly.

Local disk is always faster than external storage unless you pay a lot more money.

I liked your original setup, simple, can take anywhere etc


----------



## KKH (Oct 20, 2012)

I use Sugarsync to backup to the cloud and sync to a second computer.  It works on the fly - no scheduling, no remembering to run my backup, no anything that might be forgotten by me.  As soon as I create/copy/modify a file it gets backed up in 2 places, with a maximum of 5.  As a bonus, I can work with my files on either computer, and I could sync to my iPad if I wanted to.  For files that aren't likely to change I copy them to the second computer and to an external drive.  Sugarsync isn't the least expensive choice for cloud backup but it's the only one that has all of the features I want.


----------



## Replytoken (Oct 20, 2012)

KKH said:


> I use Sugarsync to backup to the cloud and sync to a second computer.  It works on the fly - no scheduling, no remembering to run my backup, no anything that might be forgotten by me.  As soon as I create/copy/modify a file it gets backed up in 2 places, with a maximum of 5.  As a bonus, I can work with my files on either computer, and I could sync to my iPad if I wanted to.  For files that aren't likely to change I copy them to the second computer and to an external drive.  Sugarsync isn't the least expensive choice for cloud backup but it's the only one that has all of the features I want.



How much are backing up through SugarSync?

--Ken


----------



## KKH (Oct 21, 2012)

Replytoken said:


> How much are backing up through SugarSync?
> 
> --Ken



Right now I'm at 86.7 gig.  

K


----------



## Replytoken (Oct 21, 2012)

KKH said:


> Right now I'm at 86.7 gig.
> 
> K



Thanks.  Right now, I'm around 500GB, and quickly increasing.  I could only imagine how long it would take to upload my archive. :shock:

--Ken


----------



## Victoria Bampton (Oct 21, 2012)

I've got 700gb odd at Crashplan, and I think it took about a month to upload!


----------



## KKH (Oct 21, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> I've got 700gb odd at Crashplan, and I think it took about a month to upload!



Now I'm looking at Crashplan.  It might just do what I need, and at less expense.


----------



## Luimneach (Feb 2, 2013)

Can anyone recommend back-up software/regime for an iMac? Obviously there's time machine but also a multitude of 3rd party stuff out there such as carbon copy cloner/super duper etc.


----------



## clee01l (Feb 2, 2013)

Luimneach said:


> Can anyone recommend back-up software/regime for an iMac? Obviously there's time machine but also a multitude of 3rd party stuff out there such as carbon copy cloner/super duper etc.


Time Machine works well, It is free,  What more do you need?  On my iMac I have Time Machine running to a Firewire800 attached EHD. On my MBP (which often is not nailed down), I got a Buffalo 3TB Linkstation NAS and run Time Machine to it.  The NAS is both TimeMachine and iTunes Server friendly.

In addition to this local Backup plan I use Carbonite for the iMac.  At $60 per year for unlimited off site cloud backup, Carbonite can not be beat. It will only backup locally attached (internal) HDs for the Mac though. While TimeMachine will back up anything locally connected to the Mac. 

I use Time Machine to keep me honest and protect me from when I screw up.  Carbonite is for when fire, flood or pestilence strikes unexpectedly.


----------



## LouieSherwin (Feb 3, 2013)

Hi,

I use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. The convenience  of Time Machine for ongoing regular backups and the ease of restoring is unbeatable. Generally  I am not much of a fan of most of Apple's applications but they did it right with Time Machine.

I use CC to make a periodic bootable system disk for emergency recovery. Much easier to start with a month old copy of your system that to start from scratch try to do a full restore from Time Machine or even worse a cloud backup.

-louie


----------



## Brad Snyder (Feb 3, 2013)

clee01l said:


> Carbonite is for when fire, flood or pestilence strikes unexpectedly.



Yes, I've rarely had famine wreck a hard drive.

{Sorry....couldn't resist}


----------



## Victoria Bampton (Feb 4, 2013)

I use Chronosync for all of my regular backups - it'll also do a verified file copy between hard drives so I use it whenever I'm moving large amounts of files around.

I've used TimeMachine in the past and it worked great.  I only moved away from it because I wanted different backup frequencies for different files.

And Crashplan is my offsite backup - slooooooooow to upload everything the first time, but it'll do external hard drives.

I also keep a SuperDuper bootable clone (freebie version would work) of the boot drive because downtime at the wrong time could be a nightmare for me.


----------



## LouieSherwin (Feb 5, 2013)

Hi all,

I just wanted to add a note regarding Carbon Copy Cloner, it also does a verified copy. CCC uses the excellent rsync utility to make the actual transfer of files and rsync does a checksum compare for each file that is copied. It is in my experience one of the quickest backup utilities out there. While Chronosync is an excellent full featured tool CCC is the fastest. 

-louie


----------



## Luimneach (Feb 5, 2013)

Am I correct in thinking that most people house their Lightroom catalogue images on their machines internal drive?

Also, slightly off topic, I've always worked with CR2 files in canons DPP. Does it make sense to continue with this format in LR or are there benefits of converting to DNG?

Thanks
Matt


----------



## LouieSherwin (Feb 6, 2013)

Luimneach said:


> Am I correct in thinking that most people house their Lightroom catalogue images on their machines internal drive?



Hi Matt,

This varies by what equipment you have. I have a Mac Pro desk side so I am able to put my catalog and images on a pair of mirrored 3TB internal hard drives. If your working with an iMac or Mac Book then you probably will need to consider external drives if you image storage gets bigger than the internal storage. Just a note Lightroom catalogs will NOT work on a network attached storage unit, only locally attached, USB, FireWire, eSata or now Thunderbolt. 



> Also, slightly off topic, I've always worked with CR2 files in canons DPP. Does it make sense to continue with this format in LR or are there benefits of converting to DNG?
> 
> Thanks
> Matt



Opinions will vary here. I personally do not use DNG and Lightroom works perfectly well. Right now Lightroom and all the other third party raw developer applications all still work with the native raw data from almost every ditigal camera built. This likely to start changing as older less popular formats get dropped. For example there is a Kodak format that is not longer supported. As that happens for my images (I have a fair number on Olympus ORF images) I expect I will consider DNG format. But in the meantime I don't see support for CR2 or NEF being dropped anytime soon. 

I also happen to have the catalog option "Automatically write changes to XMP" turned on so that all metadata changes including ACR adjustments are written out to .xmp sidecar files for each .CR2 raw file. I did this initially to work with other external editors so that IPTC metadata in particular would always be seen no mater how I accessed the image.  For example if you want to still use DPP for some specific feature and not loose IPTC metadata then this make this possible. You can save the metadata for an individual image with a Cmd-S but you would have to remember to to that every time before opening it in DPP.

One feature of DNG that is often mentioned is the imbedded checksum. This is a good idea but there is not really any tools that take advantage of using it. I am only aware of DNG converter utility that actually reads it and checks the validity of the image. In any case this does not remove the requirement of using a backup that makes validated copies. 

Another feature is the compressed DNG recently announced by Adobe. Since I just purchased 3 TB internal hard drives for less than the 2 year old 1 TB drives replaced I am not pinched for disk space anytime in the near future. If on the other hand you have a very large library that is strictly archival then this could be an important feature.

This is my take on DNG. I hope that you find it useful.

-louie


----------

