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Best Way to Back Up Photos and Video?
jsalbre writes "I do a lot of digital video work, and my wife is a professional photographer. With raw DV from the video camera using up 11GB/hr, and raw images from the digital SLR using 7MB I'm quickly using up a lot of space. I currently back up all my important files each night from one harddrive to another, but I now have over 200GB of irreplaceable data (more than just DV and photos, but those make up the largest chunk) and I'm having to exclude the "less important" irreplaceable files as my backups have started failing. Several people have suggested backing up vital unchanging files to DVD (video, images,) and continue backing up frequently accessed files to harddrive, but with recent studies showing that optical media doesn't last very long I don't want to come back in a few years and find that all my backups are useless. Not to mention that some of my DV files are larger than even a dual-layer DVD, and it would be near impossible to automate backup to DVD. How do other Slashdotters back up their important data? I'd appreciate distinction between methods for frequently accessed files and for infrequently accessed files. Any suggestions will be highly appreciated!"
Let's face it, one method won't fit all, so I hope your search proves fruitful. That said, here's what I do.
I have a 'cheap' system (sub 500) that acts as my data server. It houses 3 DVDrom drives, and a DVDRW drive, as well 1 200 GB drive. (the processor speed and ram really aren't too important, but for curiousity, it's an athlon 2000+ with 512 meg of ram). It runs gentoo, and I essentially pull the files to burn to DVD over the network weekly, and I keep the stuff I don't access alot on DVD, and the stuff I do access alot on HD -- but I primarily use the HD for holding images waiting to be burned.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
To a hard disk in a USB enclosure. Better yet, but more expensive, to a NAS box.
I concurr. For digital media, I would definitely do two of at least two different back up strategies.
First that comes to mind is Tape backup. They store huge about of data, and are very cheap these days, and have been proven to last for a while. Keep a good backup schedule, and keep one copy of the tapes offsite.
Secondly, I'd do optical. Optical's cheaper, but it's also not as long lasting, and takes longer to make the actual back up.
Thirdly, I'd do RAID. Mirror all the files onto a second set of hard drives. If you really want to get paranoid, mirror onto two sets of drives, and once a week swap out a copy of mirrored drives from a fireproof location.
If your data is truely irreplacable, then this is a good regiment. But it's also very expensive.. so you'll have to make up your mind.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
(other than the continual confusion of "backup" and "archive") is that the same people who talk about how unreliable CDR/DVDR discs are for longterm archival purposes seem to be the same ones who advocate buying a portable firewire drive for every project and putting it on a shelf until the client calls with changes.
Something about that seems horribly backward.
That said, Exabyte still rocks my socks
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Mod parent up "brilliant."
In the digital world, there's currently no such thing as an archive. There are backups that last for quite some time, but I seriously doubt any of them will last forever. The only reason any of these backups last so long is because the people creating them put some serious effort into keeping the data safe - and even then, what's to say it's not going to fail tomorrow?
You're right about the 21st century becoming a second dark age. Half the time, it proves extremely difficult to find web-published articles from two years ago, never mind what someone was putting on the web 15 years ago. Servers come and go as those involved become disinterested with the media they created. But, the difference between a print magazine going belly up and a dotcom media source going belly up is that the printed magazine will still exist while the data from the dotcom will likely never be accessible to the public again.
In the case of personal media, digital is a disaster. My grandparents still have stacks of photos documenting their entire lives, as do my parents, as do my parents for me. However, my photo collection currently suffers a gap which will never be recovered, specifically 1997-2000. During those years, I used a digital camera, and I left the photos on a working hard drive for safe keeping - alas, when I went to retrieve some files off of the drive when I wanted to go back and read a paper, I discovered the drive had committed suicide in a year without use. Yeah, that sucks.
Currently, the best way to back up data is RAID - and that's not even backing the data up, it's just making it more persistent. When you move to another machine, move all of the data to the new RAID. Repeat forever. To be extra safe, have a backup RAID just in case the first one suffers from a catastrophe.
Why is digital media troublesome? Books rarely render themselves unreadable while sitting on shelves, and are likewise rarely destroyed when dropped. Carving something into rock requires a bitchin' act of god to get rid of. But the deleting of a file, or the death of a hard drive, can wipe vast amounts of history out of existence, both in a personal and societal sense. Without an ability to permanently archive digital data, none of the data from the digital age will exist in the future.
-agent oranje.