Hard Drive for back up?

[mstark70]

I was do a lot of RAW photography for my family portrait work and I need to get an external hard drive to back things up on. I was wondering what brand and what size I should consider getting. I do not want to spend a lot of money but need something to get these files off my computers storage. Thank you.

[Gonzo13]

What is your price range, and how much data are you trying to store, and are you trying to back up the data or are you get it completely off your computers hard drive? Have you though about getting Blu Ray burner and putting them on discs? I would say DVD but being 4.7 gig it takes alot of them to backup alot of RAW files.

[FDCPR]

I'm sure someone will weigh in on this with recommendations for brands. For me I don't look at brand so much as I do features. You need to determine what communication you're going to use. I use a variety of external hard drives, mainly use networked drives for my business needs. For the photography obsession I have, I do multiple copies of each photo to three different drives. The largest drive is a network drive and is used to keep what I call the masters backup. I have a firewire 800 connection to a one tetra byte drive that I located my Aperture library on, another USB connected drive that I pull the photos into from Adobe Bridge. Speed is your friend when accessing the photos, fire wire 800 is faster than fire wire 400 and USB, fire wire 400 and USB are equal. Networked drives can be fast depending upon your network usage and speed, the newer SATA connection is very fast but not all computers have the option to connect externally that way. No matter what you get you are still stuck downloading them to the computer via USB most of the time and at least for me that is slow.
Bottom line, pick the features you want most and find one that suits you. Hope this helps a little.

[LoveDSLR]

There are some choices:

1) Any brand that is on sale.
2) Popular brands such as Western Digital MyBook or Seagate FreeAgent.
3) Network-Attached Storage (NAS) such as D-Link DNS-323.

[mipo]

Hi,
I am using multiple external hard drives & DVD's, waiting for BlueRay.

And I do a regular refresh of all data on the hard drives because..... hard drives are NOT permanent storage devices.
They may fail anytime.

[mstark70]

Originally Posted by mipo

Hi,
I am using multiple external hard drives & DVD's, waiting for BlueRay.

And I do a regular refresh of all data on the hard drives because..... hard drives are NOT permanent storage devices.
They may fail anytime.

So what is safe? I have heard that disks fail (never had it happen to me yet) and now hard drives also fail? So what is the safe bet for long term storage? I am dealing with clients memories here as well as my own. And how long should I keep clients images on hand?

What is the difference of regular CD-R disks and Blue Ray?

I just want to do what is best and going to be my safest bet but not cost a fortune.

Thanks again!

[FDCPR]

Michelle it all depends on your use. Everything will eventually fail and you have to take steps to minimize the impact to you. You can get as complicated as you want, NAS storage with redundant mirrored drives will keep multiple copies of everything you place on them. Setting up redundant mirrored drives is not cheap, but over time neither is burning disks. If you take into account every cost involved in creating disks they can be very expensive. Everyone seems to forget that it takes time to burn disks, time is money, and you still have to store them. For photography I honestly don't like burning disks, and never see this done with data in the business world. For business it is redundant NAS, tape drive backup, and online backups, we keep ten versions of everything that are updated in real time. I suggest two external hard drives, one of which is the backup and the other the working disk. If you are really worried about loosing images then look into an online data backup service. Some of these are reasonably priced, the one that comes to mind is Mozy. It is relatively a small monthly fee that will put your images into a secured redundant system for backup. This is totally for backup only, you still have to keep the images to allow your work to continue. If you have a crash, then you can restore from the online service.

[LoveDSLR]

Suggested Backup/Archive strategy.

For simple operation, you should get a good brand external drive (USB, Firewire, eSATA or NAS) and a DVD/BD burner.

After you have transferred your images from memory cards to your computer, you should back them up onto the external drive.

Each edited image should be saved in generation (DSC_0001, DSC_001A...DSC_001Z etc.) and backup them up when possible.

Archive images from your external drive onto DVD/Blu-ray regularly and stored the discs in another location. Make sure you use brand name discs as well.

BTW, Blu-ray = 25/50 GB storage. That is what I'm using right now.

[mstark70]

Well, you have all given me a lot to think about and ponder. Thank you all very much for the input and advice. I find it all very helpful and informative.