CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

I had a long drawn out post typed up about my NAS and how much should be RAID 0 and how much for RAID 1 but decided to simplify it.

What are YOU doing to backup your digital pictures, home movies, files, music??

[Eat your heart out WAN!]

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 3:45 am Post subject:

Shoot film

Zebu Fellenz · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 2567

My music and photos are backed up on three hard drives in my PC and I have copies that are updated every month on two other PC's.

I have been looking at building a NAS though, both to simplify storage and make te files more accessable. I'm trying to become better at making backups after my last incident where I lost my entire music collection of 30+ gig.

This will be an interesting thread to follow.

Zebu Fellenz · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 2567

ecrabb · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 4:31 am Post subject:

Greg,

I voted "Offsite manual backup", but soon it'll be both that and the "RAID 1" options as a combo.

Until this summer, I had been doing only periodic backups to DVD-R and storing them offsite at my office. That worked well until this summer when I started shooting with the D300. Yikes. 12MP RAW+JPEG burns space just a LOT faster than did the old 6MP JPEG images... My "digital photography" folder is now over 50GB, and that's just from July to now - 6 months' worth. The Offutt AFB airshow set all by itself was about 20 gigs, I think. The last few YEARS of shots fit on a couple of DVD-R's, but clearly that isn't going to work, now. So far, I've just been keeping a copy on an external USB/FW drive, but the plan now is to go to a RAID 1 NAS like you have - that'll be my on-site backup. Then, I've got a couple of 160-240 gig drives laying around. I'm going to put them in cases and rotate them from home to office every couple of weeks or so and rewrite. That'll cover all the still photography, so that the only thing I'd lose in the event of a catastrophe at home would be a couple of weeks worth'.

Video... That's a whole other story. I've got probably 50-60 DV and HDV tapes. The problem isn't the size of the storage... Drives are relatively inexpensive and 50 tapes is probably only 500 gigs or so. The problem is finding the time to capture all 50 hours. I haven't figured out when I'm going to it, but I'm considering picking up a couple of terabyte drives JUST for capturing all the video... At least the video all pretty safe on the tapes for the near future, as long as the house doesn't burn down. Once I capture it all, I'll send the tapes to the old man's house with him and those will be my "off-site" backup. For the price, I'll probably buy another drive and send one with him, too - just to cover all the time it will take to capture it all.

SC

CRT_Ben · Joined: 28 Aug 2006 Posts: 1684 Location: Northern Virginia

RAID 1. I bought one of these a microcenter:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0290245

So far I only have two 250GB disks in it, and it runs on it's own ATX power supply, just an older one I had laying around. Not the prettiest, but you can't beat the price for what can be expanded to 5x (1.5TB?/whatever) drives. Right now I'm running it off of a cheap Rosewill PCI RAID card that has both internal and external SATA ports. In the future I'll be upgrading my desktop to a MB that has a bunch of SATA ports, and I'll buy some more disks and probably do RAID 5.

ecrabb · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 4:37 am Post subject:

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

I like living life on the edge I mean if I loose a few pictures of my cats who cares? If I had kids I would feel different. I am amazed at how dumb Joe Sixpack is about backups they simply don't realize everything get be gone in the blink of an eye, I do backup work stuff, turbo tax some Excel spreadsheets.

Personally I hate raid, because it seems they follow no standard format. You can't simply throw a raid formatted drive in any pc and have it be readable.

Mike

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 5:43 am Post subject:

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 5:49 am Post subject:

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 5:53 am Post subject:

Chuchuf · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 548

I consider important stuff that which I cannot easily replace. In our case that consists of:

1. Music (I would hate to have to re rip)
2. Digital Pictures (home movies and stills)
3. Computers
4. Mac has another HD which Time Machine backs up to

So in my case, I back all the above to a drive on a server except for the Mac. In the case of the music, pictures and home movies I also re-back them up again to an external drive.

But I am now considering an alternative scheme to simplify this and insure that the important stuff is guarded.

I did some tests with FreeNas over Xmas and am pretty pleased with the results. So I am considering setting up a FreeNas box with raid 5 and maybe 3-4 HD's for backup of Music (freenas can do iTunes serving as well as SlimServer), pictures and home movies, and automated computer backup's.

As for regular movies, I just am not considering that stuff mission critical and don't intend to back it up or loose storage doing a raid server. I do take precautions and use lots of fans blowing over the HD's in the server to keep them cool. But I know, HD will fail and I will loose some of that.

Terry

Chuchuf · Joined: 11 Mar 2006 Posts: 548

**kal** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 3:13 pm Post subject:

I do offsite burnt DVDs for photos.

One thing that has me worried is that CDs/DVDs are *NOT* archival quality. You'll never see any place that archives data using burnt CDs/DVDs since they just don't last.

There's a good chance that 20-40 years from now if I try and view a photo on a CD/DVD the disc just won't be readable.

So I'm not entirely sure what the best solution is.

Kal

drice1234 · Joined: 07 Oct 2006 Posts: 1309 Location: Allen, Texas

I scan in my important documents and save these as well as videos and photos to an external hard drive periodically. I then keep this in our safety deposit box at the bank. Another thing I have done is to video tape the entire house with commentary on the more expensive items that I also store on the external hard drive. A couple of people that I work with have had their homes burn down in the last two years and it was a major hassle for them to come up with the list of everything that they had lost. With many of the items they didn't realize they were missing until they went to use them months later and by that time it was to late to file a claim.
Dan

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2009 4:02 pm Post subject:

Clone your brain?

CRT_Ben · Joined: 28 Aug 2006 Posts: 1684 Location: Northern Virginia

stgdz · Joined: 07 Dec 2008 Posts: 107

I use mozy http://mozy.com/ for my backups, its great because of two things

1)its automated, backups happen every night
2)The software config will go through and pick out the important files, my docs, mail, and contacts.

Its great and has all ready come in use once so far this year, for 5 bucks a month the piece of mind is worth it.

For my network backups I am thinking about building a 3x1.5 terabyte windows home server.