Ok ya'll, I just started shooting weddings and I need a good backup hardrive, but don't know which one to get. I want to get a good one, but PLEASE go easy on me- I'm pretty broke and in debt... (oh yeah, "starving photographer, will shoot for food..." lol)
Any suggestions?
Also, tell me how to use it, do you backup your whole FOLDER of images or just the originals (Raw, JPEG, whatever you shoot in?) I usually have 1 folder but there are subfolders under that (ie. originals, jpegs, blog/web images, slideshow)

I would really appreciate ya'lls feedback

Love the OSP fam!
Lauren

Hi Lauren. If you search the archives for the words backup, drive, firewire, drobo, mozy or wiebetech you'll get a bunch of posts that dealt with this.

Everyone has their preferences when it comes to drives and any big name company should be fine. I prefer Seagate/Maxtor because they offer a five year warranty (which they honor).

I would recommend you backup your entire folder of images (i.e. all subfolders). That's the whole point of having a backup... so that everything is safe. You should really consider keeping your backup drive off-site in case something catastrophic occurs at your home/studio.

Depending on the number of weddings you shoot you could get a Time Machine from Apple.

If you want something more robust and not really needy as far as configuration I would go with the Drobo and a couple of 750 GB drives.

its called a time capsule... :-)

but yeah, apple's where it's at.

Get a Drobo. All the cool kids have one

I meant a Time Machine... that way she could go back in time to not delete the images she wanted backed up...



Good catch, Mr. Meeks.

Hey Lauren
I'll go easy on ya but tell ya the real deal truth cause this is too important. You need to start right from the get go. Especially if you are shooting weddings. Hard Drives will fail! I believe you can't be too careful. Ask anyone who is a top professional and you will probably think they are overboard but that is part of the reason they are still doing a great job and earning their clients trust.
I back up all RAW files on one drive(in my opinion, never delete). I back up all chosen files for wedding as originals on a second drive. Then I have the proofs which are on that drive but also on Pictage for good. So that is at least 2 backups of originals and 2 of proofs on a total of 3 drives (including Pictage) Many people do their own off site storage which is a good idea. Right now Pictage is that for me, very soon, I will do the same so it is totally in my control.
Quality hard drives today still only cost ~$.50 per gb so no matter how much or in what format you shoot, spending $10-$20 per wedding to make 100% sure you have backups and all originals is a no brainer.
Did I mention Hard Drives fail? They do. I did a lot of research and trial and still have had it happen to me. I hate Lacie Drives. They have problems mounting. I tried MyBook. Unstable, did not always mount but eventually did. Annoying. My latest purchase has been Seagate Free Agent Pro drives. One recently did not mount and never did. As in, could not access it at all. I had to use Data Rescue II to recover all images. A 2 day stressful and highly inconvenient ordeal. I did have all proofs and most originals backed up (again Pictage) but if I wanted to start those event's albums with the originals I would have had to re-edit the wedding and then try to match up the numbers from online. Nightmare!
My next step in searching for a bullet proof system is going to be internal Raid System.

I say all this to just say, when you are starting is the necessary time to start right. And don't ever say it won't happen to you. Unless you invest in quality hardware and plenty of it. Btw, burned discs are not a long term solution. The "film" that carries the data can erode and be useless.

So on the negative side, don't use drives above. I think the solution lies more in mirrored backup (Raid) or multiple copies more than thinking you can find a drive that will never fail.

Hope that helps. We all want to save money but this is one of many areas that is too important to cut corners.

would love to hear from others...

I have 2 of these:



Buy.com puts them on sale periodically. I paid $755 each.

They have a 1TB one right now for $555

Personally, I would stay away from MyBook drives.
I have some of them, and they're my 3rd string backups, but I can't stand them. They're unstable, and I should just huck them.
The stupid POWER CABLES even suck. The power rating on the 2 power cables I have for my 2 MyBooks (500GB and 750GB) have the exact same amps/volts/etc and the same connectors-- exact!! Yet, if I use the wrong power cable on the wrong drive, it works for a minute or two then starts wigging out. The USB connection would go in & out really quickly then just die all together. So I had to label the power cables ("500GB POS" and "750GB POS") with sharpies so I could get them to & connect for more than a minute.


I have those Buffalo servers set up as mirrored RAID, and they've worked really well so far. I had to restore all of my stuff (data, PS actions/textures, all business files, etc) from those backups a few months ago, and it worked very well.

~Carey

haha no prob. But good suggestion about using Time Machine. It backs up everything on all of my macs.

My main workstation (one of 5 macs in the studio) is an 8 core Mac Pro running 4 hard drives. Here's how they're set up for backups...

Hard Drive 1: 320GB - Operating System, Programs, E-mails and Documents

Hard Drive 2: 750GB - RAID Slice 1 - All client images and Lightroom Libraries

Hard Drive 3: 750GB - RAID Slice 2 - All Client Images and Lightroom Libraries (Drives 2 and 3 are a mirrored pair, so if one drive fails, all of my files are still on the other one and I can re-build the RAID with a new drive)

Hard Drive 4: 1TB - Time Machine Backs up a copy of Drive 1 and a copy of the RAID set to this drive. ALL files are duplicated to this drive and any changes are added upon creation. I can go back to any recent point and restore a file from it. If I delete something accidentally, or if a file gets corrupted or saved wrong, I can restore it. If my entire system crashes, I can back up both the RAID and my entire system from this drive.

I also back up every single job's RAW files to DVD before they're touched by any piece of software. I'll soon be backing up to Blu-Ray discs to narrow my disc usage from 5 DVDs to 1 Blu-Ray disc per wedding. All DVD's and Blu-Ray discs are kept off-site.

It's pretty simple, you just need to stay on top of backing up from the get-go as has been said. Remember that hard drives will fail, remember to have a contingency plan and a copy of at least the RAW files from every job on hand on non-hard drive media. If you aren't willing to back up in a way that completely covers your ass, you shouldn't be shooting weddings.

Are you using a Mac?

If so, this is what I do.

I have a Mac Pro set up almost just like Trevor, but my backups are external drives.

drive 1 internal is 320 for the OS and programs
drive 2 internal is 500 for Raw, JPG and other media

Then i have a cheap 320 external drive set up for TimeMachine backing up drive 1 only. (this is an old IDE pulled from an old computer. Put it in a $20 USB enclosure). I keep this connected all the time and let time machine do its thing.

I have a 500GB MyBook that cost me about $100 that contains a full backup of the drive 2 internal. I use carbon copy cloner to copy all the data over, and I keep this drive in a fire proof safe and I plug it in manually whenever I upload new files. This isn't a full off site solution, but it's alittle safer than leaving it connected all the time.

Then my plan as my storage needs grow is to buy two additional drives at a time, so say a 1TB internal, and a 1TB external MyBook.

If you're not using a mac, there are other backup software solutions, but I don't really know anything about them. I used the same general workflow when I was using a PC and the only thing that was different for the media backup was the process of moving the data to the external drive. I used an rsync command running inside of cygwin. I can give you more details on setting this up and automating this in windows if anyone is interested.

I must say though, carbon copy cloner is MUCH faster than my rsync script was at detecting what data is different and needs to be moved over.