UKC

I've just had a large external hard drive die on me. I have a Time Machine backup so no great shakes, I can recover the data. But, it has made me realise that all my eggs are essentially in one basket. What does anyone use for failsafe data storage? For example backing up your irreplaceable photos.
Does anyone have experience of online (cloud) data storage? any recommendations? comments?

In reply to Ice Nine:
I have back up HD's for music, photos and time machine. Once a week I take them to the house and do an incremental backup and then put them back in the car. Next day they go back into the office drawer. I try and minimise the time the two sets of disks in the one place. Got it's flaws obviously but it's cheap and simple. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the incremental back ups.

In reply to Ice Nine:

cloud would work out somewhat expensive.
My personal method is to use two external hard drives with one of them in use at any time, the other gets dropped off at my parents.

So generally I have my internal drive, backed up to external weekly or so and then an offsite copy every couple of months.

If i thought it was truely irreplaceable would stick into MS cloud (get 5 gig free) temporarily while i waited to swap the external HDs.

In reply to Ice Nine:

I've been using computers since the time of floppy floppies (1979). I don't really trust magnetic media for very long term storage (though I was able to read a file stored on an audio cassette in 1981 recently).

As there used to be a high annual cost in film of taking photographs I decided I would simply stop downloading photos for storage and just file the SD cards when full as they are comparatively cheap and have no moving parts. Periodically I'll copy in to refresh and there you have it.

In reply to Ice Nine:

Hi,

I use Google storage for my photo's, 5gb is free, however I upgraded for the pricely sum of £3.50 per year for 20gb.

I use Picasa to upload my photo's directly from my camera to PicasaWeb (Googles photo storage), which eliminates the need to have external HDD's, or faffing around with other programs to backup. Once your photo's are on cloud, you can login from anywhere and view them.

I have a Windows Home Server, and every month or so back it to an external hard drive and keep that at work. So I have 3 copies of my photos: original PC, Windows Home Server and off-site backup.

In reply to Ice Nine: The cloud might be nice - currently it is two terrabyte drives - but both are in the same place and thus vulnerable to fire/theft if not mechanical pain.

In reply to Ice Nine:

Primary - 4 TB NAS setup as Raid 1 to give 2TB storage (two hard drives in the NAS)

Secondary - 2 TB single drive NAS. Daily auto differential backup

Tertiary1 - external hard drive, weekly backup
Tertiary2 - internal PC hard drive, weekly backup

Secondary and Tertiary1 drives leave the house when we go away.

NAS on wired network, wifi not up to required speeds for photos & video

Not completely fool proof, but goes a long way.

Cloud storage not viable for >1TB of files/video

Hope this helps

Chris

In reply to Ice Nine: In line with what others have said really, I use a selection of drives and some back-up software (I use Allways Sync but there are many others). The system I use is as follows

1. Drive attached to PC b/u daily or even more regularly so pretty good if the hard disk fails

2. Similar Drive up in the house (at home for most people). I swap this with the one attached to the PC about once a week.

3. One at a friend's - swap with the most up to date of the other 2 whenever I see them.

If I'm away long term, I often take one with me too - surely I can't have my car/house and friend's house done over all at the same time?

This way is actually quite cheap.

In reply to Ice Nine:

I'd never trust the Interwebs with my pictures

All the stuff I'm working on goes on my laptop, backed up to external HDD. Also on both is my portfolio. Once I've finished a project/shoot/etc it's backed to to CD/DVD. Not the best method I suppose but it's worked well for me.

In reply to Ice Nine:
Primary - 6TB NAS, 4 drives configured as Raid 5 so 4.2TB available.
Secondary - 1.5 TB Ext HD,
Tertiary 1TB HD off site, but not really refreshed often enough. I'm very happy that I'm protected against device and drive failure, like others its the fire and theft scenario (the offsite backup thing) that I need to find a better answer to. And no cloud doesn't work for large volumes of RAW images. I suppose I could back up JPEG versions of my best images to cloud (not so many of them!)

Paul

In reply to Paul Evans:

Yep, it's fire and theft that worries me too. Drive failure isn't hard to protect against.

A fire safe could be an option.

In reply to ChrisJD:

Keeping one tucked away safely in your car would be a cheap way round that one...

In reply to Tom Hutton:

I try not to leave anything valuable in a car!

In reply to Ice Nine:

the cloud ?

In reply to Ice Nine:

What kind of drive was it that died on you? Are you sure it is the drive and not the power supply?

Is your Time Machine backup on another drive?

In reply to Ice Nine:

You have a great Photo Gallery

In reply to ChrisJD:

So do I generally. But hidden, so they don't attract theft, these drives aren't really valuable at all. Unless your house gets done/catches fire on the same day as your car gets done/catches fire, they are really only worth the cost of the drive.

Upon saying that, some fireproof chests are quite cheap but the proper safe's are expensive really.

In reply to Ice Nine:

Not particularly great solution here, but better than nothing. In short the more important the data, the more copies and the wider they are spread.

In our case:

Primary Storage - PC Drive 1
Secondary Storage - RAID Array on Server - stuff copied there once a month or so.
Tertiary Starage - External Hard Drive, stuff copied once every month or so.

I am painfully aware that all of these are on one site, in fact they are all within 10ft of eachother.

I do have off-site storage for some data, but not all by any means.

I did wonder about doing a deal with the neighbour and him putting a server in my basement, me doing the same with his, and running a cat5 pipe between them across the ground between the buildings, and backing up there.

In reply to John_Hat: Sounds great but wouldn't it just be better to get the neighbour to look after one of your drives?

In reply to Ice Nine:

Thanks for all the suggestions. My drive that died is a 600GB LaCie, I tried different power cables from similar drives but no joy. By all accounts the very audible clicking noises were a sign of impending drive death. I have a new 3TB external backup but have yet to decide on my strategy for safe long term data storage. Keep the suggestions coming.
Cheers all