Storage & Backup

[bobbarley]

What are you guys doing about storage/backup for your computer systems?  Lot of you are keen photographers, so guessing you have a backup system in place to avoid losing your photos?

Really impressed with Time Machine since I started using the Mac.  I had an old 400GB IDE hard drive lying around, so got a cheap USB caddy for £8.90.  Popped it in and boom, 400GB of backup space.

I've also ordered a NAS drive, should be here in a few weeks, can pop up to two 2TB drives in there, then back up anything over the network.  Doubles up as a sever for pretty much everything as well, so handy for hosting websites, (legal) torrents, print server etc etc.

[Jay]

Well, none as an automated backup. The best pics being uploaded to Skydrive and have duplicates everywhere, most of my stuff is not yet backed up. I've got the hard drives for it, just no space in the computer 

Oh and don't rely on Time Machine backups, I've seen them go wrong and been advised by a Macaholic to use a proper utility.
If you do so wish to use TM for your NAS you may need to run a command or two in Terminal to allow it to create the sparse bundle on a network share.

[Ridg]

I use a HP Micro server http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

This is a 4 bay system that comes with 1GB Ram and 250GB drive and no OS for £130 (after the cashback).

I stuck an extra 4GB Stick of ram in and 3 2TB drives, two of these are configured as RAID 1 array which is used to store my photos, music and video (recorded footage).  The third drive is used for non-essential backup like movies and client backups (my desktop and laptop (redundancy isn't needed as it's a copy of the client machine).

My backups are handled by windows home server 2011, this is a stripped down version of server 2008, but still lets me run IIS, SQL server, automated backups, file permissions, utorrent basically anything you would run on Win7 or Server 2008  I've also got a robocopy script that synchronises a direct copy (not contained in a .VHD file) of my photos any photos I'm working on locally.

Mine is also configured as a DLNA media server running media centre and TVersity allowing 1080p streaming to the PS3 (my whole house i covered by a gigabit ethernet).

Given the price and flexibility of these servers I'd recommend them to anyone.

[stfc_gti]

i have a 2tb and a 1 tb hdd to store backups of media i allready own. (honest)

[damien010685]

I use a HP Micro server http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

This is a 4 bay system that comes with 1GB Ram and 250GB drive and no OS for £130 (after the cashback).

I stuck an extra 4GB Stick of ram in and 3 2TB drives, two of these are configured as RAID 1 array which is used to store my photos, music and video (recorded footage).  The third drive is used for non-essential backup like movies and client backups (my desktop and laptop (redundancy isn't needed as it's a copy of the client machine).

My backups are handled by windows home server 2011, this is a stripped down version of server 2008, but still lets me run IIS, SQL server, automated backups, file permissions, utorrent basically anything you would run on Win7 or Server 2008  I've also got a robocopy script that synchronises a direct copy (not contained in a .VHD file) of my photos any photos I'm working on locally.

Mine is also configured as a DLNA media server running media centre and TVersity allowing 1080p streaming to the PS3 (my whole house i covered by a gigabit ethernet).

Given the price and flexibility of these servers I'd recommend them to anyone.

+1 awesome bit of kit i have exactly the same setup 3x 2tb drives and upgraded to 4mb ram for the money u cant go wrong

[bobotheclown]

Well, none as an automated backup. The best pics being uploaded to Skydrive and have duplicates everywhere, most of my stuff is not yet backed up. I've got the hard drives for it, just no space in the computer 

Oh and don't rely on Time Machine backups, I've seen them go wrong and been advised by a Macaholic to use a proper utility.
If you do so wish to use TM for your NAS you may need to run a command or two in Terminal to allow it to create the sparse bundle on a network share.

Jay

What sort of things go wrong with TM backups? I've been using it to backup all of my 6 month old son's photos and don't want to lose them.

[Ridg]

Well, none as an automated backup. The best pics being uploaded to Skydrive and have duplicates everywhere, most of my stuff is not yet backed up. I've got the hard drives for it, just no space in the computer 

Oh and don't rely on Time Machine backups, I've seen them go wrong and been advised by a Macaholic to use a proper utility.
If you do so wish to use TM for your NAS you may need to run a command or two in Terminal to allow it to create the sparse bundle on a network share.

Jay

What sort of things go wrong with TM backups? I've been using it to backup all of my 6 month old son's photos and don't want to lose them.

Any backup solution that relies on one single drive is going to fail at some point.

Consumer grade drives only carry a 3 year warranty with enterprise level drives 5 year, on average a drive will last much longer than this but you'd be stupid to put your faith in a single drive, given that on average 10% of drives will fail add to this the failure rate associated with the NAS / TC.

If you want a robust solution then you need to start backing up to at least two different places to create a redundant copy and even then you've got the "what if your house burns down" "what if you're burgled" factor.

That said if you've got a copy of the photos on your PC and the TC then you should be ok, personally I wouldn't rely on this though.

[Jay]

Well, none as an automated backup. The best pics being uploaded to Skydrive and have duplicates everywhere, most of my stuff is not yet backed up. I've got the hard drives for it, just no space in the computer 

Oh and don't rely on Time Machine backups, I've seen them go wrong and been advised by a Macaholic to use a proper utility.
If you do so wish to use TM for your NAS you may need to run a command or two in Terminal to allow it to create the sparse bundle on a network share.

Jay

What sort of things go wrong with TM backups? I've been using it to backup all of my 6 month old son's photos and don't want to lose them.

Any backup solution that relies on one single drive is going to fail at some point.

Nail. Head...

If you want a robust solution then you need to start backing up to at least two different places to create a redundant copy and even then you've got the "what if your house burns down" "what if you're burgled" factor.

That said if you've got a copy of the photos on your PC and the TC then you should be ok, personally I wouldn't rely on this though.

Data Protection Manager server  I've got to get around to sorting mine out, the motherboard on 1 of my PC's blew up (which was going to be my DPM!)


bobo, I'd make sure you have TM backup and a copy on your main computer and else where. Get a Hotmail/Live account and use the 25Gb in Skydrive as an offsite sort of backup.

I've personally seen problems with a TM to Time Capsule backup where we got some arbitrary error restoring some files, and also backing a different Mac at another clients site - we thought it was the external drive, swapped it over between 3 different drives and had the same errors on different files and the same files, we told them to make sure the graphics they had been working on were stored on the server for the normal backup to deal with them as a safe guard (they SHOULD have been working on them on the server anyway as that's what it's there for), it would always be random files they were working on in their Desktop or profile folders - and hadn't had open at the time of backup either and would consistently fail. There's loads of info on how/why TM can fail, then there are the 'unsolved' cases many people seem to suffer. Even reinstalling the OS from scratch didn't resolve it entirely.

[bobotheclown]

Jay, cheers for the advice. I have copies of the photos on 3 separate drives at the moment. One on the desktop machine, on the laptop and on on a separate time machine drive. Am in the process of uploading the photos to a box.net cloud storage which has 50Gb capacity which hopefully should be enough.

I know so many friends who have lost their photos of their kids growing up and have regretted not backing up. You can always re-install applications and operating systems and you can always convert all your music from your CD's again but photos of loved ones are irreplaceable.

[DubFan]

I have a d-link NAS box with currently a 1TB drive in. This is my main backup.

All my photos of family/kids are uploaded a personal gallery on rented server space, so if my house burns down, I still have all the photos.

I might actually take a backup on a drive and keep it at work for another off-site backup.

Drives fail all the time, I've lost photos and data in years gone by and never want to again, so I try to be careful about backing up.