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NacMacFeegle
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PostSun Sep 30, 2018 12:06 pm 
For years now I've just been buying a new hard drive every time I started running low on space or felt a bit paranoid about my lack of backups. It's gotten to the point where I have literal stacks of external and internal hard drives, and only the vaguest of organizational systems. Cloud storage isn't really a good option for me due to the sub-par upload/download rates I'm stuck with, so I decided on an DAS (Direct Attached Storage) system from Drobo, in which I will initially install 2 four terabyte hard drives, which I will expand upon as needed (up to 5 drives). This will be my secondary storage system after the terabyte of solid state storage on my laptop on which I will just store material I am working on at the moment. I then plan to clean up my old external hard drives and use them as backups to be stored at a remote location. So what I'm curious about is what everyone else uses to backup their photos/videos? The Cloud? DAS/NAS? A disorganized pile of dusty drives?

Read my hiking related stories and more at http://illuminationsfromtheattic.blogspot.com/
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Jaberwock
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PostSun Sep 30, 2018 4:36 pm 
I too once had a sprawling collection of external drives with thousands of photos I didn't even know existed. I had so many photos they were unusable, despite my neurotic tagging/organizing. Everything was organized, but unapproachable because of the sheer number of photos. I decided to dramatically reduce the number of photos I store. Over the course of 2+ years I chronologically went through and flagged every photo I wanted to keep (in Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) then deleted everything but the flagged photos. I deleted entire trips, entire vacations, etc. My collection of photos went from terabytes to around 15 GB. Suddenly I could pull up photos from trips easily and only have the ones that I enjoy looking at and enjoy showing other people. This also let me turn on iCloud photo backup and enjoy peace of mind auto backups for $1/month. My internet connection is also terrible, but the iCloud backs up continuously/opportunistically (automatically while I sleep). my 2c...

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trumpetsailor
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PostMon Oct 01, 2018 10:03 pm 
Present plan: 1. Shoot on large SD cards, don't delete anything (until Step 5) 2. Copy SD cards directly to disk when I get home. 3. Occasionally mirror the disk to an external hard disk -- ~once a month, more often if there are images of particular value or if Step 5 is about to be invoked. 4. Continuously trickle the data out to a Backblaze B2 repository, via duplicity. 5. When the newest SD card is full, reformat the oldest SD card and repeat. This way, there are always duplicates somewhere against single-point failure, and often three or four copies, one off-site (eventually). My plan prior to this system was to keep the files permanently on the SD cards, switching them to read-only once full and purchasing a new SD card. SD cards are *way* less expensive than film. When both the size of image files and the rate at which I created them grew, this became financially unreasonable, and the more sophisticated system above emerged.

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Bedivere
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PostWed Oct 03, 2018 1:40 am 
I have been using a WD My cloud drive attached to my router as NAS. I find the interface frustrating and it's been acting glitchy lately so will soon be replaced by a Synology dual drive NAS. that's as much redundancy as I feel I need.

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Sore Feet
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PostWed Oct 03, 2018 6:36 pm 
I bought a cheap external 3.5" HDD enclosure and a couple of 2TB internal drives. One of them is my primary scratch disk, the other is in the enclosure. I download all my pics to the internal drive, do the necessary pruning of the rejects, then copy the keepers to the external and then power it off. Currently sitting at about 640 GB worth of pics (and I need to trim that down considerably still). Certainly not a totally fail-safe scenario, but it was a much cheaper solution than an external RAID enclosure or a NAS type system like a Drobo or a Synology, and my primary concern is drive failure or file corruption rather than losing something in a fire or the like, so not having an off-site external backup isn't a concern at the moment.

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pasayten
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PostThu Oct 04, 2018 5:16 pm 
Spent last winter transferring everything to One Drive (MS Cloud)... over 43,000 pics... and all new pics get stored there also. With a decent folder structure I can access any pic, new or old, in just a matter of seconds... either on PC or my cell phone... Love it... :-)

Happy Trails... pasayten
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NacMacFeegle
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PostFri Oct 05, 2018 6:08 pm 
Jaberwock wrote:
I decided to dramatically reduce the number of photos I store. Over the course of 2+ years I chronologically went through and flagged every photo I wanted to keep (in Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) then deleted everything but the flagged photos. I deleted entire trips, entire vacations, etc. My collection of photos went from terabytes to around 15 GB. Suddenly I could pull up photos from trips easily and only have the ones that I enjoy looking at and enjoy showing other people. This also let me turn on iCloud photo backup and enjoy peace of mind auto backups for $1/month. My internet connection is also terrible, but the iCloud backs up continuously/opportunistically (automatically while I sleep). my 2c...
stun.gif lol - that would kill me! I love the idea of brutally cutting my collection down to only the best, but whenever I try it's too painful a process to bear. The big problem is that even a poor photo has the ability to bring back hidden memories. I take so many photos that if you stuck them all together you'd have a pretty complete timelapse of my life! They are basically a visual journal, and I know that when I'm old and my brain is failing that even the ugliest image will be priceless to me. What I will do, if ever I find the time, is to cut out the duplicates, the component parts of composite images, but even then I will probably keep a backup of all the originals.

Read my hiking related stories and more at http://illuminationsfromtheattic.blogspot.com/
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Opus
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PostTue Oct 09, 2018 6:24 pm 
I also use a WD My Cloud setup. It has dual 4 terabyte drives and a RAID setup so something would have to kill both the drives in order to lose all my data. It's been going for nearly 3 years with no issue now. I keep the current years photos on my laptop drive and each year move it off onto the WD setup. Everything also gets backed up nightly to the WD system in case my laptop dies. Accessing stuff on the My Cloud is pretty slow since it's connected via wifi but I don't need to go back to old files all that often.

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pcg
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PostWed Oct 10, 2018 10:33 am 
I bought a StarTech USB3 external cloning dock that holds two internal drives. I keep my photos on one internal 2TB drive in the dock. Once a week I clone it to a second internal 2TB drive in the dock. USB3 speed is fine for me. My ultimate goal is to do what Jaberwock did...

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nordique
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PostFri Oct 12, 2018 1:58 pm 
Since 2005, I've just put my photos up on Flickr, where the images are all labelled and organized: over 91,000 images total.

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BigBrunyon
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PostFri Oct 12, 2018 4:22 pm 
Aaah I just throw em up on the Goog Drive

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Backpacker Joe
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PostSat Jan 26, 2019 3:38 pm 
I have four four terabyte drives I keep everything backed up on. One I keep in my spare microwave too. up.gif

"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide." — Abraham Lincoln
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iron
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PostTue Jan 29, 2019 1:01 pm 
i put 1 photo on a CD and store each CD in a nuclear bomb rated safe stored underneath yucca mountain. i hike to the site once a week to add more CDs. i also store photos with NASA via telekinesis. they export the data to a depository on the moon, which is also backed up on a rover on Mars. you can never be too safe.

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joker
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PostWed Jan 30, 2019 11:23 am 
I back up frequently to an internal drive (i.e. that computer has two copies of files). Using ViceVersa, which executes the copies and also checks that the execution went properly. In addition to all my RAW and layered files (PSD/PSB/TIFF), I also back up my Lightroom Catalog. Less frequently, I back up to an external drive which goes out in the shed in the back yard (i.e. protection in case of house fire, but not in case of Sonoma-like brush/forest fire event). May add in a cloud option but haven't done so yet - the startup for that will be a honking huge wad that will eat my bandwidth cap up for a month or two...

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awilsondc
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PostSat Feb 09, 2019 4:40 pm 
Lol @ iron. Actual LOL reading that. Nice lol.gif I just use a backup hard drive that I just keep in my dresser. Need to get more serious though. Thanks for the tips!

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