TP: Keeping your digital photos safe, storage & re

Need to increase storage on my home PC (150+ out of 160GB mirrored in use !) Shopped around a little, thinking of a USB attached Raid-1 setup but ran across a good deal on this:

Buffalo Terastation Terabyte NAS

While 500GB mirrored (raid 1) would give me 250GB usable space, for twice the price, I'll have 1TB Raid 5 which gives me 750GB usable storage (and single drive failure redundancy).

My photos (90GB) will be transferred over immediately to free up primary HD space. I have a 60GB iPod (20GB worth of CDs ripped to date; many more to go). But we also have a new (as of XMas) SD camcorder. 2GB is 25 minutes. I don't anticipate filling the drive, but if I bought 250GB, immediately dumped 90GB onto it, then started saving more photos and video, I could see surpassing that before *too* long.

Updates: Terastation installed easily, but had to figure out why I was getting "no network path found" ... that was due to my firewall, so I added the IP address of the drive to my "trusted sites" list. So far, I've only had time to do a complete backup of my Photo catalog (which took about 4 hours one day !) And magically, I can look at them from my laptop wirelessly :) That backup is only there in case I mess something up while trying to move photos within the Elements 5.0 catalog from one drive to another. That's next when I have a little more time.


Edited by CTYankee - 03 May 2007 at 20:24

my suggested disk setup is:

one small but fast drive for system installation
two large drives in RAID1 for data storage

nowadays drives are cheap and mother boards come with RAID support.. I think everyone can afford just another hard disk to protect their photos:)

i also take DVD backups, just in case.

USB hard disks of quite large size are very cheap these days...

Bob

Right, for me the ultimate stratgey here is off site and regular

I run my main image machine and do not store images on its hard disk.

The is my drive set-up:
- 300G firewire ... called Alpha100 - this has all my a100 images and nothing else
- 200G firewire ... called KM577 - this has all the images from my Dynax 5D/7D/7D time
- 500G USB2 drive has ALL the images on it ... but that is not ON, that is on once a week for updates and then removed and stored in another room

So, I have there: working a100, mostly off 577, on-site 500G

Also - all RAW images are on DVDs ... I file to CD after each shoot. Then when there are enough shots, make a DVD of them.

Off-site. This is a 2nd 500G USB disk, that is in my locked draw at work, in a building with 24/7 secrutiy guard ... :>

Risk ... once a month I'll drive to work with my home 500G swap them over and then come home with the older 500G ... do the updates. I NEED (today) about 360G of storage. So this will work until the end of this year.

Also on the 500G is a back-up of my websites. Including the previous sites I've since killed off.

So I can't have a mirror. at the mo. running 5x computers with different stuff on them. Inlcuded on that off site backup is my 40G iTunes db.

One day I'll get some sort of drive unit with bays so I can hot swap in/out and take a little of the admin out of this.

(hence I'm keen to move to ONE system at some point, and do this a little neater)

and I would rather haev 3x seperate 300G drives than one 1T drive ... at the mo, money makes better sence to have several, and 300/400G is the better price/gb ... plus you can factor in a failure.

Edited by dCap - 20 April 2007 at 22:27

dcap - you need a server!

I have a small machine thats always on, and have a pair of 160GB disks in that mirror'd (raid 1) to support my pics and critical documents. I also have a couple other disks, a 120GB for the system and webserver/email, 120GB for backups and archives and a 320GB I use for recording TV onto.

With disks prices so cheap now it makes sense to buy two disks and mirror them I think, its so much easier than taking two copies in software, although dcap you have a great plan with an offsite - it worries me (server is in the garage where its cooler and it can be noisy on its own) what would happen if the lot was stolen - maybe its time to buy that 500G offsite like you!

I think its close to being really affordable to run a proper raid at home, in the UK www.scan.co.uk have a range of cheap SATA raid bays that take up 2-3 5.25" drive bays and support 3-5 SATA disks in raid, as long as you have a controller to run them. The problem with this is its power hungry, and noisy as well, and not something you would necesarily want under your desk all the time, or on 24x7.

Just need the price of those 500G SATA's to drop a bit further before I put 4 in a a RAID5 I think as my next upgrade!

I'm with CTYankee - Buffalo TeraStaton is the best stuff on the market right now for the money. Fry's has 1TB unit for $529 right now, which is a great deal.

For those of you burning to DVD and perhaps even the ultra-paranoid who are using discs, you want to use some form of redundancy.

So when you dig the disc up and 10% of it is unreadable... you won't care.