Kind of a philosophical question... How much photo backing up is enough?

[Talys]

If you have a friend/family member who doesn't use their OneDrive for Business -- it comes free with any Office E3/E4/E5 or equivalent Academic or Government subscription -- you get 5TB.

I mention this, because very nearly 100% of the people who I know who have E3+ subscriptions don't use OneDrive for Business at all. I have to say 'very nearly 100%' because I actually use it myself... for backing up my photos (only), LOL.

You can also run OneDrive for Business concurrently with (regular) OneDrive; they play nice. Behind the scenes, they are quite different, as OneDrive for Business is based on SharePoint, but frankly, who cares for backing up photos.

 

[ethanz]

If you have a friend/family member who doesn't use their OneDrive for Business -- it comes free with any Office E3/E4/E5 or equivalent Academic or Government subscription -- you get 5TB.

I mention this, because very nearly 100% of the people who I know who have E3+ subscriptions don't use OneDrive for Business at all. I have to say 'very nearly 100%' because I actually use it myself... for backing up my photos (only), LOL.

You can also run OneDrive for Business concurrently with (regular) OneDrive; they play nice. Behind the scenes, they are quite different, as OneDrive for Business is based on SharePoint, but frankly, who cares for backing up photos.

And I don't think people need to worry about Microsoft going under any time soon and losing your backed up images, unlike other companies.

 

[lion rock]

I'm taking a pessimistic view.
Most of my photos are of no interest to anyone but me and myself. And I'm not going to live for ever. The life of an archival media would not need be longer than my lifetime. So, if I have several duplicate copies for use by me, that serves my purpose.
Sure, I may have some family shots I could pass to my daughter, and she'll have her means to save them for herself. Technologies in her generation may be far better than what I use, and I need not worry for her.

Onto my backups: I have four or five sets separate on a dedicated computer; three external drives in two locations; plus on my daily use computer. Maybe that's quite enough. However, I'm far from a diligent and organized person, these copies are not always in sync and not in the best organized manner (my fault,) so, sometimes I can't find a photo that I want.

I'm taking a fatalistic view that if I loose my photos (which I had before I had built several backups,) so be it. We loose things, we loose love ones, we grief. And yet we continue. I'm not going to dwell on. The present is important. Play is important.
-r

 

[lightthief]

I have two HDs in use in my computer and two USB-Disks that i mount only for the sync/restore.
I use YARC to sync all the disks. I start YARC manually when i want to make the sync to the second disk in the PC. Until that, i use the second disk to restore files i edit/delete/lost... on disk one.
Every three months i do a sync to one of the USB-disks. I switch those USB-disks for the sync so i have the older status up to 6 months. When i "loose" files and i notice that after 6 months they are lost.
When we leave the house for some days, i hide one USB disk inside the house, the second i put to my parents home.

I think, a mix of instant mirrored filesystems and a delayed backup, especially on diks that are not always mounted to the PC is a good thing. Think about an attack of your PC and all your disks become encrypted :-\

Lightthief

 

[Talys]

I'm taking a pessimistic view.
Most of my photos are of no interest to anyone but me and myself. And I'm not going to live for ever.

Alien archaeologists will recover your photographs trillions of years from now and they will form their understanding of a primitive carbon-based life form catalogued as 017177132, in an ambitious project to identify which planet they originally heralded from.

Onto my backups: I have four or five sets separate on a dedicated computer; three external drives in two locations; plus on my daily use computer. Maybe that's quite enough.

I think you're good

Backup durability is less important if you have multiple backups on media that you continue to write to, because backups are unlikely to simultaneously fail, and you are likely to detect media failures.

However, I'm far from a diligent and organized person, these copies are not always in sync and not in the best organized manner (my fault,) so, sometimes I can't find a photo that I want.

I'm taking a fatalistic view that if I loose my photos (which I had before I had built several backups,) so be it. We loose things, we loose love ones, we grief. And yet we continue. I'm not going to dwell on. The present is important. Play is important.
-r

This is the bane of digital photography

My data flow is: everything goes from SD card to archival storage into a dated folder, like, "2017-10-08". I use DPP to determine which photos have at least a small chance to be keepers, and copy those into regular storage, into a folder called Unsorted\2017-10-08. I don't delete a whole lot at this point.

On regular storage import through lightroom and I sort through them, delete and rename stuff, and move them from Unsorted, to for example, Birds\Eagles\2017-10-08. The finished product go into Birds\Eagles\JPG (or some other sorting, if there's a lot of processed ones of that category), all within Lightroom.

Automatically, daily, my regular storage gets backed up onto a removable backup hard drive and onto OneDrive.

When my archival storage is full, I copy its contents onto a cheap mechanical drive and reformat it (since 1TB SSD aren't cheap yet).

So, I normally have 3 hard drive copies and a cloud copy of my stuff, but most of that process is automatic, and the manual part is to keep organized, so that, I can, as you say, find stuff.

 

[lion rock]

I was thinking, I had a university distinguished professor (UDP) who worked in the Manhattan Project and he documented everything he did in notebooks as any engineer is trained to do. When he passed away, his office was cleaned and there were his 5 or 6 stacks of notebooks stacked to about 5 feet high. In the past, the library would archive the notes/published papers, but they determined that doing so would take up too much precious space, thus, they stopped doing it.
I have personally surplussed 3 slide projectors from one retiring professor, and there were over 10 trays of slides together with boxes of of his lecture slides. No one wanted them. These went to the shredder. It is a shame to see a lifetime of work going to the dumpster.
So, for myself, I am not going to fret over long term storage. There are so many things to do, to shoot.

Oh, I spoke to the UDP about his travels when he was visiting places. I asked if he took photos of his journeys. The answer was he didn't. It was all in his head the places he saw. He passed away at 96.
-r

 

[LDS]

And I don't think people need to worry about Microsoft going under any time soon and losing your backed up images, unlike other companies.

Yes, who would have believed Kodak would fail? Yahoo? Besides that, Microsoft - just like any other company - has a record of killing products/services as soon as they don't bring enough revenues - or change the term of service. Also, read the fine print about their reliability.

Cloud storage is still some kind of "battlefield", and the winners are not yet known.

 

[kaihp]

And I don't think people need to worry about Microsoft going under any time soon and losing your backed up images, unlike other companies.

Yes, who would have believed Kodak would fail? Yahoo? Besides that, Microsoft - just like any other company - has a record of killing products/services as soon as they don't bring enough revenues - or change the term of service. Also, read the fine print about their reliability.

Cloud storage is still some kind of "battlefield", and the winners are not yet known.

Exactly. The fear shouldn't be that MS, Google or Amazon goes down, but that they choose to kill, cripple, or limit the backup product to the point where it isn't valuable for you.

 

[ejenner]

Philosophically, I think you backup as much as you can deal with maintaining. My guess is that if you are thinking about this seriously, then you may well lose stuff, but hopefully you will say 'yea, that was the risk I was willing to take'.

If Denver gets nuked, I will lose my photos. Yea, OK.

Personally I have 2 backups of my oldest raw files, at least 3 of my newer ones (because I'm more likely to accidentally do something to them) and 4 backups of my jpegs between work and home.

I do from time-t-time randomly copy/read of raw files, but I can't check them all on both backups. So I could have a disk partially corrupt and then the other fail and loose raws. But I'm not prepared to go to really deep lengths.

 

[scottkinfw]

Hi Kit.

I don't think that is a philosophical question, and as you can see there are a lot of backup strategies. Personally I think of it in a binary way. Do I care about a pic or not? If I care about it, it will get backed up. I have lost data along with pics in the past and it is painful.

Now as to specifics.

I use Drobo's. Specifically, I have a newer 5D3 with an accelerator and a total of 70 TB. I have a second 5D. Whenever I go on a shoot, I put the keepers in their own file, with a master file titled with the year. I also use the Drobo for my LR Catalogue.

There are 5 disks in the unit and I get notified if there is a problem such as a pending failure. If there is a failure, there is redundancy. Also, I can swap out a drive for a larger drive if needed. I can back up to the original drive too.

Anyway, that's how I do it. Main thing is that I feel very secure with RAID. Also, I use my 5D3 to directly edit the pics in LRCC. I use a 13" MBP with limited storage, so I absolutely need the RAID for that reason alone. Works well, never a problem.

There are a number of other RAID/servers out there, and also configurations, including ones that let you set up you own personal cloud so you can access the data from any internet enabled device.

Hope this helps.

I recommend back up to RAID and you will be set.

scott

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

There are a number of other RAID/servers out there, and also configurations, including ones that let you set up you own personal cloud so you can access the data from any internet enabled device.

Hope this helps.

I recommend back up to RAID and you will be set.

scott

This is not so safe as some think.

None of the consumer NAS units are very secure, and opening them to the internet with the weak security is very dangerous. It takes a huge amount of time and effort to keep ahead of the exploits that hackers are using, and NAS security is months or years behind.

With new Ransomware attacks being launched frequently, a user needs to understand that they seek out and attack / lock any files on any attached device, so relying on a NAS for backup is not a safe plan.

If your NAS can take snapshots, then so far, the snapshots cannot be compromised by Ransomware, and you can restore the files to a previous time. Don't forget to use the feature.

 

[alvarow]

I keep everything on a local disk 8TB and a copy of it on Google drive ... whenever it goes to the disk from the card Drive syncs it, same with changes ... and a Google keeps revisions too. Expensive but works great.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

It happened, my wife's SSD crashed and burned about 3 weeks ago. Everything on the 1 TB SSD was lost.

Fortunately, I had multiple backups, (Disk Images), one was only 4 days old, so I burned it to a hard drive while waiting for Sandisk to respond.

I've never had a company been so slow to react, it took them a week to respond with a request for information which was not available because the drive was dead. Then another few days before they told me the return was approved and to use the return address being sent in a separate e-mail. It never came, so I had to ask them to send it, after two weeks of this, I sent it off to them and have yet to hear back.

In the meantime, I bought a new SSD, it came in 2 days, and I reinstalled to it from the backup. Its been running fine for 2 + weeks. I had a couple of SSD's in reserve, but had gave them to my daughter.

Its going to be hard to convince me to buy anything from Sandisk. Lexar has always had 1st class customer service, too bad they are going away.

 

[alvarow]

Its going to be hard to convince me to buy anything from Sandisk. Lexar has always had 1st class customer service, too bad they are going away.

We’re going off topic, but I urge you to take a look at Crucial... not the fastest around, but reliable, supports hardware encryption on Windows and great service from support. I buy from them or Intel.

 

[privatebydesign]

4 bay RAID 5 NAS, with snapshot and checksummed file transfer. Plus a HDD in another country with all the important RAW files on it.

My commercial images have a short shelf life (typically two to three years) and little value historically so I don't care about 90% of the stuff I shoot.

 

[Orangutan]

Plus a HDD in another country with all the important RAW files on it.

Easier & cheaper to put that HD in a safe deposit box at a bank a mile from home. Barring a very major major disaster (earthquake, volcano, Martian attack) that HD will be both safe and accessible.

 

[notapro]

For me, backing up photos once a month or so seems to be enough--or after a shoot with 200 or more images.

I'm using modest backup storage--A Western Digital two-disk system in RAID 0 (My Book Duo), 8 terabyte capacity.

 

[Orangutan]

For me, backing up photos once a month or so seems to be enough--or after a shoot with 200 or more images.

I'm using modest backup storage--A Western Digital two-disk system in RAID 0 (My Book Duo), 8 terabyte capacity.

Years ago I read one of those Q&A articles on backups, and one of the questions was "how often should I." The answer was "how much data can you afford to lose."

If you're a pro you probably need to backup every shoot to multiple storage media. If you're an amateur, you get to decide for yourself how valuable the photos are.

 

[privatebydesign]

Plus a HDD in another country with all the important RAW files on it.

Easier & cheaper to put that HD in a safe deposit box at a bank a mile from home. Barring a very major major disaster (earthquake, volcano, Martian attack) that HD will be both safe and accessible.

You'd think that wouldn't you?

The locations are over 1,000 miles apart yet both got hit by the same hurricane earlier this year. The backup got hit by two hurricanes and two floods and the entire country is devastated, for what it's worth I haven't lost a single file.

 

[Orangutan]

Plus a HDD in another country with all the important RAW files on it.

Easier & cheaper to put that HD in a safe deposit box at a bank a mile from home. Barring a very major major disaster (earthquake, volcano, Martian attack) that HD will be both safe and accessible.

You'd think that wouldn't you?

The locations are over 1,000 miles apart yet both got hit by the same hurricane earlier this year. The backup got hit by two hurricanes and two floods and the entire country is devastated, for what it's worth I haven't lost a single file.

That's very fortunate. For most people, though, a bank vault will be plenty safe.