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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!"
Why not make two optical backups. Store at least one in a fireproof safe. For the massive files, you might have to invest in one or two hot swappable drives you can use as 'tapes', storing one in your safe. Mirroring might help.
File -> Print
i think you might want to take a look at tape drives
Well, it's expensive, but maybe you can find a deal on an LTO2 or SAIT tape drive on Ebay. These babies boast 200GB and 500GB of native storage respectively . The transfer rates are nothing to sneeze at either.
And as long as you store the tape properly, it should last a long time.
I typically take the edited footage and back it up to another miniDV tape from the computer (using my miniDV camcorder). I then lock the tape to prevent accidental erasure and store the tapes offsite. For photos, I'm taking my chances and burning them off to DVD. I also periodically make digital prints and send them to my parents and sister, who live in two separate locations. Worst comes to worst, at least they have a hard copy available should I lose the original digital version that I have on my computer.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
(i have no experience in the matter) you should place all the un-changing files on a hard-drive which will then sit in a draw and is only plugged in when required. I have been lead to believe that this will reduce the likelyhood of harddrive failure to close to 0. Then you can setup a RAID type setup for you changing files.
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
Not from TFA, from TF synopsis:
"Several people have suggested backing up vital unchanging files to DVD (video, images,) and continue backing up frequently accessed files to harddrive"
They've already considered hard drives. Since he's dismissed hard drives and seemingly all forms of optical media, the only thing that I can think of for this article getting posted is that the submitter *really* wants Slashdot to tell him that "Yes, it's ok to mortgage the house to buy that new Network Appliance SAN you've been drooling over."
"How do other Slashdotters back up their important data?"
I memorize it.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Tell that to my bosses.
Except for one server which we don't even own, all of our servers (about 10) are RAID "backed up".
One of these days is gonna be really fun.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
since when is tape archival quality? It's barely backup quality. I've had way more properly stored tapes fail than I have properly stored optical media.
Treat optical media like magnetic media (store in cool dry place) and use high-quality media and you'll get far better results than tape.
Add in the speed at which tape drives become obsolete and tapes hard to obtain, while CD's are still readable. And I've found optical to be a superior archive medium.
If you examine the study cited you'll notice that the study is for optical media in harsh conditions. Additionally they specifically state "It is demonstrated here that CD-R and DVD-R media
can be very stable (sample S4 for CD-R and sample D2 for DVD-R). Results suggest that these media types will ensure data is available for several tens of years and therefore may be suitable for archival uses."
One thing good about paper & film is they withstand decades of storage vs. years of normal magnetic storage. Photos and films from the late 1800's/early 1900's are still around whereas you're really gambling with current storage media.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
(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
Rename all of the files so they have filenames like "Teen_Lesbian_fff_Hot!Hot!Hot!.avi". Now make them available through your favorite p2p service. Even better, prepend these files with short snippets of pr0n. You'll find that years later you can kick up just about any p2p client and you'll find your files are still available.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
A friend of mine recently started a small business to address exactly this need. His product is a Linux based RAID box that plugs in to a home network, and supplies reliable storage via samba.
http://www.permastor-us.com/
"Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." - Linus Torvalds
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is the pot calling the kettle black, though. Is there a support group out there?
I keep reading comments about how CDs/DVDs are unreliable. Here's a great trick i use to make sure my data is safe: i always include 50-100mb of parity files on each DVD. The disc would need to be REALLY messed up to be unrecoverable.
At work we have to archive Broadcast Quality TV Shows (Yes, I work in a TV station). These are 50 Mbit/s for the video plus at least another 4 Mbit/s for the audio. Needless to say this takes up a lot of space. For this, we use LTO-1 tapes that store 100GByte per tage uncompressed (compression gets us zilch with the video and audio). The tapes have error correction that we pay attention to. If there are getting to be too many errors we replace the tape and have the info copied to the new tape. Since we have so many shows, we are moving to LTO-3 tapes that store 400GB per tape. The LTO tapes are expensive. However, as long as you do not do constant reading from them and use them as a true archinve they should be fine. For massive redundancy, put the same files on two different tapes. Also, the reader/writer is a little expensive, but you only need one. Also, LOT-3 drives can read/write to LTO-1 tapes (only as 100GB, not 400GB). Write speed is pretty good to, being above 14Mbyte/s. Shelf life in a temperature/humidity controlled environment is pretty long. A bank vault should be pretty good as well.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
First that comes to mind is Tape backup.
So what you'd suggest is that he downloads the video from the MiniDV tape to the computer, then archives it onto backup tapes. Why not just keep the original MiniDV?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
While I love raid, RAID is not a backup - raid is about availability and consistency. So if you delete one item in a RAID it is SUPPOSED to be lost to the entire array.
/. readers, but it's two 1-line scripts and I've seen them on here before :)
/etc belongs in "current"
In everything I've read, the moral definitely seems to be harddrives, lots of harddrives, for price performance. I'm assuming you have a reasonable LAN or can set one up.
Here's the setup I haven't finished implementing yet: PLEASE give me any comments about it to help me improve my setup.
1. Setup a file server using at least one big, inexpensive disk. (This can also be a desktop as long as it can reasonably serve files.) This is your "USE" server.
2. Separate you files (on a per-directory basis) into categories based on how frequently they are changed. The important consideration is: 'If a file is changed/deleted from USE how long should I wait delete a file in the backup' Personally, I only need two categories. "current" = a month or so depending on disk space and "archive" = never (family pics, videos, etc.)
That means that if I delete something in my "current" tree _AND_ I don't notice for a month, my backups will delete it and it's gone forever.
3. Setup a 'backup server' using at least one inexpensive hard disk. Set your backup server to login to your USE server and sync your files.
It should be able to do both "full" (copy everything) and "incremental versioning" = "IV" (if something is changed, keep BOTH copies, marking them appropriately) backups. Neither of these kinds of backups should ever eliminate any information automatically - they should just add information.
4) For me, I'd run:
1) An IV backup of "archive" every night.
2) A full backup of "current" every week.
3) An IV backup of "current" every night.
4) A job that deleted the oldest backups of current every week.
Notice that I'm _never_ running a full backup of "archive" but I'm also _never_ deleting the backup.
Notes:
rsync or rsync over ssh is my preference for doing this kind of backup. It works very nicely, but I'm too tired to get it right just this minute so I'm leaving IV/full backup commands as exercises for other
cron is fine for setting it up automatically.
wget has similar functionality to rsync for a website and you don't need any privileges.
I think most of
Do make sure you log the output of your syncing software. Also make sure you monitor disk usage. If you want to be fancy, it could keep all of the full-backups of "current" until space is short (with a reasonable margin) and then always delete as many of the oldest ones as it needs to to make enough room. This means your number of snapshots will vary with disk space - some people think that's evil.
This system scales reasonably well - for more size add more harddrives per server and/or more servers. For redundancy add more backups per live copy. As long as you can keep it organized and your network handles it, there's also no reason a USE server can't be served by two backup servers or a backup server can't also serve several smaller workstations - or any combination thereof.
Do not add multiple harddrives to a backup server for redundancy. These servers are essentially free and you get much more redundancy (and some scalability) if you use two backup servers. With a setup like this, any server should only have one copy (excepting multiple versions of the same tree)
You could just do a full backup of current every night or whatever, and you could have many possibly more complicated "current" backup schemes. But for me the total size of "current" is massively smaller than "archive" so it's really not important. Remember, having more of these isn't more redundant - they're all on the same drive.
This backup server should generally run no services except possibly ssh and certainly shouldn'
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Could be a number of reasons to do the seemingly illogical double-hop method.
First, the new data may have been processed (edits, color correction, etc).
Second, the backup media may be better rated for long term storage. I'm not familiar with MiniDV, the stuff I work with is all DLT and HCART2 under Veritas Netbackup, at 200GB raw/400GB compressed per tape.
Third, it may be helpful to have the indexing done for him by a good backup program.
However, as I say, I work with Netbackup. To say it's pricey is an understatement... but it's changed my views on what's a "workable" backup system to only liking enterprise grade stuff.
This might sound obvious.. I'm a photographer.. I have a 2 bay firewire drive set I use for "HD" backup of my photos and video. Its 700 gig. I also burn DVDs.
When I backup my stills onto dvd I use jpeg 2000, its lossy but really not that bad once the image is in a good state.. I did some tests in college on jpeg/jpeg2000 vs tiff (uncompressed) of the smae image to see how much is lost. Not a lot it turns out. I love uncompressed images, but the loss when storing as jpeg isn't so great to matter unless you do a lot more manipulation. I'm also still shooting film which can always be rescanned at a later date.
However, you shouldn't backup all the DV (raw video) you dump on the computer. The original tap e can act as the backup. its still on the tape even after you dump it into the computer. Label it and set the right protect notch. Voili, instant backup footage.
I'm assuming you edit this down and give the client a dvd/video. Just keep a DVD copy for yourself. Thats all they can really ask you for. If they come back at a later date, because the dvd is bad try yours. If that doesn't work you have to go back to the tape and redit and recharge.
I have been in the same position the Author discussed, and I have come to ONLY negative conclusions. In a few words, and I hate to say this, but buddy:
WE'RE FUCKED.
Digital is a loser's proposition. backing up to analogue or even digital data on analogic substrates (such as DV tape) fail. Simply nad purely.
The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.
Also, a RAID assumes a continuity of several things that are not likely to be continuous:
With Video:
Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables.
With Audio:
sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.
Basically all of it points to very bad places.
I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper, our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.
Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work. Archiving the 21st century will be impossible. To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age - not only for the holocaust of the die caused by the failure of the petroleum based economy, but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on /.
His problem of saving personal video is just the tip ofthe iceberg. His problem is the problem of our very civilisation, writ small.
That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org/ is really great for backup of Unix-like systems. The ability to hardlink identical files allows me to store hundreds of daily full images of 100GB of sources to a single target 250GB hard disk. Rsync is very smart about moving only changed data over the network, resulting in speedups of 10x to 100x. This allows me to do full backup on my offsite colo without using a lot of bandwidth. Note that Rsync is great for Mac/Unix/Linux, but it does sometimes have problems with windoze clients. But then, so do I ...
Dirvish (originally written by jw schultz) is a Perl wrapper around Rsync. It facilitates the scheduling and management of Rsync based backups. We have a fairly active mailing list and contributions from around the world (open source is so cool!).
Backups should be safe against:
Backups should be automatic (or they will not get done) and cheap (hard disks are cheaper than tape, and much cheaper when you use hard linking). Rsync stores the data in a file system closely approximating the original, which facilitates restores.
If a cheap electrolytic filter capacitor dries out in your power supply, and the 5V output decides to start making a 15V squarewave instead, everything in your computer case will get fried. Including every one of the RAID disks. External USB enclosures (or airgaps!) protect against host and power supply failure.
If I was really paranoid about protecting my data, I would run a long ethernet cable to a nerdly neighbor a few houses away, and put a second dirvish server there. While I do rotate my drives into ziplok bags in a fire-resistant safe, the maximum credible accident (a furnace explosion) would tear open the firesafe. If I was paranoid and rich, I would use a high bandwidth VPN connection to a big disk in a colo machine in a different city.
The best backup is server-pull, frequent, automated backup onto multiple R/W media in multiple places, and frequent checking of that data. The closer you can approximate this, the more secure your data will be.
Keith
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
While RAID was originally meant for data security, availability, and consistancy, it has a lot of other applications that weren't in it's original design.
First of all, disks are *so cheap* these days, hard drives are a more than acceptable backup medium. As disks tend to be identical in size and construction if you buy in batches, disk-to-disk backup is quite the good system, just as long as you don't always keep the disks in the same location (aka, not even on the same controller! *gasp*)
Secondly, you went into a lot of specifics that I didn't care to; a lot of backup systems are custom tailored to the situation.. so while this kind of system might work great for you, I doubt if it would work so well in this case, especially. Digital media tends to be very non-compressible, very volatile media. That being said, operations like MD5 are very crucial to insure the data from one location matches another, which means even more precautious MD5 storing measures. You're also dealing with larger files which means rdiff is almost entirely out of the question.. I could go on and on about different, application specific schemes, but I feel I did good enough with suggesting three different mediums and to have at least two copies of two of them, preferably in 4 different locations.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
These are the only ones I can trust to be around in 100 years or more.
*All* digital images get written to CD-Rs are are stored in a commercial document-control facility. But the ones I really want to keep get written to film.
Best Buy can have you arrested
You people don't get it do you. RAID is not for archival.
It is to survive a hardware failure &/or increase speed. It
is not meant as a backup device to archive data. Accidentally
delete a file and its gone from your RAID. Accidentally
overwrite a file with same name, the original is toast. Lose
two drives in your RAID array, good chance your data is gone.
As others have said, optical may not be as reliable as once
thought, and is not practical for large files. While tape
suffers from drive obsolescence, the media aging rate is
fairly well known and less random than optical and can be
planned for.
For the past five or six years, I've been taking my data, applying steganography techniques to encrypt it into the background of porn images, and then distributing those images via usenet and a few porn sites I've whipped together (ok, ok, the bangbus videos.)
At any time when I need to recover the data, I just use google to find someone with a copy of my data, download, decrypt, and voila!
This is my cheapskate's Network Storage Device!
Infomation now is much more perminant than it was in the past, and digital has improved this a great deal. The amount of information we generate these days is enormous, far more than ever before the digital age. Thus it's not supprising much of it gets destroyed. For that matter, most of it isn't worth saving anyhow.
Books are not such a perminant media as you might think. They wear out, and can be destoryed. A good example is the Mayan Codices. Records seem to indicate there were thousands, however Spanish priests burned them as "works of the devil" during the European conquest of the Americas. Today only 4 remain.
Digital data can be so perminant because it is so easily copied. Perminance of data does not come form trying to make a single, eternal copy, but from having many copies all over the world. Digital data can be copied for essentially zero cost very easily. Thus it's easy to give it a great deal of robustness. Also, as new formats come out, you simply copy and convert the data. I have data on my harddrive today that orignally existed on 5.25" floppy for the Apple II. It has simply been copied and converted a number of times.
Finally, it's not like book are going away. On the contrary we publish millions of works a year amounting to billions of books.
You seem to have a false sense of perminance, as though in the past things were archived forever. That's not the case, actually, most data was lost, that's one of teh reasons we have such an incomplete picutre of history. You don't even know all that was lost, because the record of it even existing, if there was one, is also lost. What has survived is by chance, or by effort, not because we had some wonderful archival system.
You don't have to have something on an immutable, indestructable medium for it to survive. The Nordic Legends weren't written down for centuries, yet today we still have them. They were passed down, as an oral traditon for generations. There was no perminance to them other than stories in people's minds, yet they've durvived thousands of years.
The video files that your NLE uses are exact duplicates of the data your camera writes to DV tape. Take a hint from that and just save your DV tapes. All modern NLEs work with EDLs (edit decision lists), so save your session files, overlays, transition parameters, etc to a CDR and push the lock-tab on your master tapes. Keep your tapes labelled and organized so you wont have a problem finding them again. It's trivial to recreate your project at that point, and it thankfully isn't MPEG-compressed on a video DVD.
Alternately, all modern NLEs have 'export to tape' functions. Just record your final product back out to your DV deck or DV camera and make a master archive on tape.
A HDD will last about 10 years with constant use, but just sitting on the shelf in a dry enviorment it should last pretty much forever. Optical media on the otherhand slowly reacts with the air and light.
Anyway the big problem with optical is that you can only store 4.7 gigs on a DVDR, which is nothing to this guy. HDD's and Tape are the only possible solutions for this guys problem. I'd go with two HD's on firewire or USB2.0 and storing atleast one of them off site at the end of the day. Tape can be ok too but what is the seek time like on todays tech? If he is looking for one clip is he going to have to ff through the whole tape?
The answer to me seems like some form of software raid setup for write once only to external HD's.
God, root, what is the difference?
No.
They are a minimally acceptable backup media for short-term storage.
Consider the fact that with tapes, you really just have to worry about tape errors. If the tape drive fails, you can use another.
With hard drives, you have to worry not only about errors on the drive, but about hardware failures in the electronics as well.
In 10 years, that hard drive will probably be dead no matter what you do. But a properly stored tape backup would still be around.