I am a professional photographer and what I have in place is probably way to much for most, but I have seen what data loss can do to a company (I have an IT background).
Here is my largest concern (aside from the EMP previously mentioned :
Ransomware
I have seen this affect companies 4 different times to devastating effect. It goes in and encrypts all the files. All data on your network is hosed. That means if you have 3 drives plugged in to do backups - hosed. One of the backups has to be offline or in the cloud.
As a professional, the problems I have with the cloud is cost and bandwidth. I have some PSDs that are 2 or 3 GB in size alone not to mention all my RAW files. I currently have about 14 TB of data which would take way to long to upload to the cloud.
For the discussion here is my system and once again this is a fairly extreme example:
2x Dell R710 Servers with RAID 5 (RAID as mentioned before is not backup, but nice for speed and drive redundancy)
1x USB drive per server for on the network backups
2x USB drive per server for offsite backup (kept approximately 5 miles away)
Everything is transferred to backup every night via a Robocopy script
A monitoring program to monitor backup failures
All my final JPGs are kept in Zenfolio
The offline backup gets done weekly. I swap drives - put one on to backup and replace with the recent copy.
I have never had to go back to Zenfolio for files. I've never had to go back to the offline files. I HAVE had to go back to the online backup.
NOTHING is stored on my processing machine, everything is on the servers. Lastly, this backup system pertains to all my files, not just images. Invoices, receipts, tax docs, even my MP3 collection.
The monitoring program monitors for drives problems as well as backup failures. I've had about 5 or 6 drives go bad during this time. I've never had a drive fail before I was able to replace it because it almost always tells you its going bad before it does through the monitoring programs.
Also, I keep spare hard drives in stock. When one gets swapped out another gets purchased.
For my friends I always recommend 1x network or USB backup and 1x offline even if its at their work or friends. At the very least not connected to the network when the backup is not going to protect against ransomware.
I hope this helps someone. I am pretty passionate about backing up data as years ago I lost files I can never get back!
Here is my largest concern (aside from the EMP previously mentioned :
Ransomware
I have seen this affect companies 4 different times to devastating effect. It goes in and encrypts all the files. All data on your network is hosed. That means if you have 3 drives plugged in to do backups - hosed. One of the backups has to be offline or in the cloud.
As a professional, the problems I have with the cloud is cost and bandwidth. I have some PSDs that are 2 or 3 GB in size alone not to mention all my RAW files. I currently have about 14 TB of data which would take way to long to upload to the cloud.
For the discussion here is my system and once again this is a fairly extreme example:
2x Dell R710 Servers with RAID 5 (RAID as mentioned before is not backup, but nice for speed and drive redundancy)
1x USB drive per server for on the network backups
2x USB drive per server for offsite backup (kept approximately 5 miles away)
Everything is transferred to backup every night via a Robocopy script
A monitoring program to monitor backup failures
All my final JPGs are kept in Zenfolio
The offline backup gets done weekly. I swap drives - put one on to backup and replace with the recent copy.
I have never had to go back to Zenfolio for files. I've never had to go back to the offline files. I HAVE had to go back to the online backup.
NOTHING is stored on my processing machine, everything is on the servers. Lastly, this backup system pertains to all my files, not just images. Invoices, receipts, tax docs, even my MP3 collection.
The monitoring program monitors for drives problems as well as backup failures. I've had about 5 or 6 drives go bad during this time. I've never had a drive fail before I was able to replace it because it almost always tells you its going bad before it does through the monitoring programs.
Also, I keep spare hard drives in stock. When one gets swapped out another gets purchased.
For my friends I always recommend 1x network or USB backup and 1x offline even if its at their work or friends. At the very least not connected to the network when the backup is not going to protect against ransomware.
I hope this helps someone. I am pretty passionate about backing up data as years ago I lost files I can never get back!
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