Storing/Backing Up Pictures

[Dwayne27]

OK photography experts- what do you guys do to back up your pictures? I hear the ideal thing is to pay for a nice external hard drive... but I am too poor/cheap. I have been backing them up 4 gig at a time on the spare stack of blank DVD's I have.

Has anyone used any of those free online storage sites? skydrive.live.com offers 25 GB of free storage for each windows live ID you have. Any thoughts on those?

[Mike]

Online backup is ok, but I don't prefer it due to the amount of time it takes to upload / download content. For my backup, I've created a 40GB partition on my main hard drive and keep a copy of my photos there. That way, if I ever have to redo the OS, it stays untouched and locally available. I also keep a copy of all them on an external HDD, and backup to DVD every 4-6 months or so. I've got about 35GB of photos though, so online and DVD are not the easiest options for me. For 4GB, I think online would be good for you.

[Mikezauner]

I'm daring. I have a 3 disk 750GB RAID0 array with no backups. if any one of the 3 disks fails, all my photos are gone. Yeah I work for a web host and sneer at customers who don't keep backups, and yeah I'm hypocritical, but oh well. >

[Mike]

Wow that is risky. Especially since the third drive only adds a very small percentage of improvement in performance compared to a 2-drive array. I recommend RAID 5 for you Mike! Increased read / write speeds, comparable to a 2-drive RAID0 array, with with a parity bit stored on each drive, giving you error correction and recovery.

[Mikezauner]

Yeah, I know. My problem is I need the storage. I'm down to < 200GB left on the array. since it's 3X250gb drives, dropping one as a parity storage would really cause issue, plus I'm using OS X's software raid, which isn't near as cool as hardware raid, but ehh. I'm planning on upgrading to 3X1TB drives on RAID 5 eventually. just won't happen right now.

[Dwayne27]

Alright then- apparently everyone is too cool for free online storage....

[ExpUt]

I'm using a Maxtor 160GB external drive, think I found it online for ~$90. Its setup to do automatic downloads but I just randomly do backups rather than leaving it connected all the time.

I just scored a POS desktop console, my plan is to put a terabyte drive in it and just store it in the basement (remote desktop it when I need to do any maintainance), I'll have it doing a ghost backup every night.

Many of my photos are backed up on my website server but I did have a scare a couple of weeks back. My computer got nailed with a virus, it attacked everything, system restore files, driver files, etc. Nothing would touch it. I backed up everything to the external drive, you guess it, the virus installed itself on the driver of the external HDD. Thankfully after a reinstall on the computer, McAfee was able to quarantine the issue and my data was saved. I can't tell you how much sleep I lost over all that, all my company invoicing, pricing, etc was on that computer. I'm resolving myself to do a better job backing things up.

[Mikezauner]

Yeah. That's one of the many reasons why I no longer use windows at home. Got a few linux machines, plus my main Mac Pro running OS X. Haven't seen a virus since I last used windows 98 back in late 1999.

[Mike]

Running Vista Ultimate x64. Haven't seen a virus on my system. Ever.

[Mikezauner]

I know things have changed a lot in the windows camp since 1999, namely microsoft doesn't turn a blind eye to security any more, however, I started out life as an Apple guy with an Apple IIE back when I was 8, so I'm somewhat partial, plus any time you can get a quadcore xeon with an OS where I don't have to come home after supporting people's computer problems all night and fix my own computer problems is a plus.

No defragging, no scandisks (HFS+ will manage itself entirely unless there's a power outage), no viruses, no nothing.

My only annoyance is the programs that play hide and seek with me. I'll see an icon bounce ONCE in the dock at the bottom, by the time I look at it, it's quit doing it, so I look at it for a minute, get annoyed, and leave it. Few seconds later, *BOUNCE* "wha?" *nothing* "bah." *BOUNCE* "DADGUMMIT! WHAT?!" -- almost like it's playing mind games with me.

Considering that's my biggest annoyance, I'd say that's pretty good.

I've had good luck with hard disks anyways. first computer with a hard disk was when I was 11. had 2 drives fail, and one DOA out of about 15 hard disks in 12 years.

[Mike]

Well you'll find yourself in quite a large crowd of mac haters here I run OS X on my PC for Final Cut Studio, but outside of Final Cut, I have no need for a Mac OS. 90% of my apps are not available in non-Win environments, and nobody in their right mind runs high end apps in emulated environments (wine, virtual pc, etc).

[Stuart]

Running Vista Ultimate x64. Haven't seen a virus on my system. Ever.

Virus, whats that? Vista Ultimate x64 is my Uber Shield.

For data storage I use a Western Digital Passport 500GB Portable USB Hard Drive. Its my Kruft bucket.

All my Mac is good for is checking the mail.

[Mikezauner]

So I see the mac hating. That's alright. Y'all just don't know better.

[Mike]

Na, we just choose to have superior hardware and do more things than run a select handful of applications. I've had my years of G3 - current mac experience, and no thank you to any more.

Standard mac user reply: "Ya'll just don't know better" Its the same every time!

[Stuart]

So I see the mac hating. That's alright. Y'all just don't know better

Hey, Mac bashing aside you do pack a Sprinfield XD .45 so you aren't completely nuts