Online/cloud backups?

[Kayos]

Just re-checked Kayos' original post. Sugarsync probably isn't an option for 1.2TB as it would come in at a whacking $55 a month
So while fftopic: I hope my response above is useful for people with slightly less storage requirements.

Unfortunately shooting digital in raw and scanning negs at my scanners native resolution gives me some eye watering file sizes, 1.2tb is my main (and growing) dng folder, these are smaller than cr2 files but still not small

I am working on a canvas for a friend, a shot of the Alhambra in Bradford, its made from about 20 separate shots all merged, now its down to a single layer it's 1.5gb...

I've taken @Robotstar5 up on his offer of the nas, it will be less offsite than the last one but still away from my house should the worse happen

I do take advantage of my unlimited Flickr storage, but I can only store jpgs, and I have to do a manual export from Lightroom

 

[Kayos]

Also just looking into amazon photos, amazon drive is £55 per year and it's unlimited, I've heard amazon cloud is used by some pretty big companies?

 

[skotl]

Yup - as Mr Fuzzy says, Amazon (with their AWS service) are one of the two huge players in online storage and compute (the other one being Microsoft's Azure).

Spoiler: Disclaimer

Other manufacturers are available, including other huge organisations like EMC and IBM but the main players are Amazon and Microsoft - industry analysts like Gartner have that view, too

 

[mangocrazy]

How difficult would it be to buy 2 or 3 external hard disks (or more if you're really paranoid) and ask close friends/family if you can store one of the HDDs at their house. Keep one in your house and rotate them each month/week to ensure minimal data loss even if your house burned down. There's a lot to be said for simple, low-tech solutions (says someone who's been working in IT since 1975).

 

[skotl]

How difficult would it be to buy 2 or 3 external hard disks (or more if you're really paranoid) and ask close friends/family if you can store one of the HDDs at their house. Keep one in your house and rotate them each month/week to ensure minimal data loss even if your house burned down. There's a lot to be said for simple, low-tech solutions (says someone who's been working in IT since 1975).

I think it depends on how disciplined you are. Most people, I suspect, (including me) would swap the disks every week for a few weeks, then it would fall to once a month or so, or longer.
Plus, the chances of losing your files to fire or malware are lower than losing them because you do something stupid like overwrite them. Having a tool that automatically and silently saves new and updated files to the cloud, and maintains a few versions of each, offers huge peace of mind.

Horses for courses, of course

 

[Kayos]

My now broken nas was at a friends house, his is still at mine (we both have fibre broadband) however I only realised it had an issue when I went to retrieve a backup to check my good raid drive

I suddenly went from having 3 copies to 1.....

New plan is 3tb raid1 in the pc as my import drive (big files get moved to he ssd to be worked on) nas in my neighbours outbuilding and see what I can upload to amazon photos before I spend money on online storage

 

[mangocrazy]

Yes. RAID plus offsite NAS should cover most eventualities.

 

[Kayos]

So thanks to all who have helped me with this

New setup is 2x3tb raid1 in the pc as my storage
2x3tb raid1 in the nas I got from @Robotstar5

I'm looking at Amazon Drive for £55/year, as drives get cheaper I may move to something like 2x10tb drives in the machine and just have Amazon drive, one day we might not even have local storage beyond the boot drive....

 

[roofman]

Dont want to go off topic here but ime finding it very hard after reading all this to remember how we ever survived without sticks,drives and clouds...all i seem to remember was biscuit tins under the stairs and ones memory or storage capacity was based on more biscuit tins given at christmas and waiting 2 weeks for your pictures to be developed from the local chemist to fill even more tins...anyway carry on as you were..

 

[Kayos]

Dont want to go off topic here but ime finding it very hard after reading all this to remember how we ever survived without sticks,drives and clouds...all i seem to remember was biscuit tins under the stairs and ones memory or storage capacity was based on more biscuit tins given at christmas and waiting 2 weeks for your pictures to be developed from the local chemist to fill even more tins...anyway carry on as you were..

117k photos would be one big tin

I also shoot a lot of film and have binders full of negatives, but a medium format colour negative is about a 300mb scan

 

[HockeyNomad]

I run a nas, computer backs up every few days to it, spent a bit of money on it after previous data losses, I now have a number of backups to restore from, backups are all drive images so I can just burn to a drive insert into the affected computer and go takes approx 1 hour this way.

Ithe latest back up is corrupted I can go back up to 10 backups until I get one thats right, as well as a fresh install image that I take after computer is setup originally, saves time reinstalling all your software.

I also use a synced folder, for all my live documents that backs up in real time when on the network, so even if those aren't current on the backup image I can get the latest version from the nas.
I have 4 x 4Tb drives in a raid 5 configuration in the NAS, giving protected 12TB of storage. Only protected in event of a single nas disk failure though.......
Since I've done that setup I've only done a dry run test to ensure the system worked, since spending the time and money on it I've never needed to use it.

 

[colnerov]

Hi, For those using Amazon for storage be aware. -

http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/news/a830471/amazon-quietly-scraps-unlimited-data-storage-deal/

Colin