The most reliable device for long term backups?
Dabhand16 said, 1713789780
There is no one silver bullet. Best practice is to have multiple backups across different media both on site and off site.
I once had an issue with my main imaging drive and lost quite a lot of images. Not worried as I had two backup drives but when I got the first one out there were an awful lot of corrupted files on it. That did worry me! The other drive was OK so all good in the end, but it showed me that you can't rely on one type of media.
Somersetman said, 1713790326
Being able to read your backup in the future depends not only on the integrity of the backup media but also the future availablilty of the drives/interfaces needed to read that media.
If you are really serious about long term (archival) storage you need to plan to verify and re-write the archive media every so many years, with a review of whether to switch to a new technology each time that re-write is done. You can also help yourself by archiving several copies on diverse types of media so you have the best chance of backing the long term winner :-).
Edited by Somersetman
waist.it said, 1713791955
Somersetman said
Being able to read your backup in the future depends not only on the integrity of the backup media but also the future availablilty of the drives/interfaces needed to read that media.
If you are really serious about long term (archival) storage you need to plan to verify and re-write the archive media every so many years, with a review of whether to switch to a new technology each time that re-write is done. You can also help yourself by archiving several copies on diverse types of media so you have the best chance of backing the long term winner :-).
Edited by Somersetman
I think that is part of the philosophy behind the Millennial Disc. Most 120mm optical disc readers/writers are backwardly compatible. CD's can be read on DVD drives, DVDs can be read on Buray drives and so on. By agreeing this international standard, a standard that works on latest standard BDXL Bluray drives, means that future 120mm optical disc drives should be backwardly compatible with today's M-Disc long-term archives.
At least, that's the theory. :-)
brewster said, 1713794850
My tuppence worth…
Hardware: If I had only once choice today, I'd go with remote offsite backup and leave all the responsibility for storage media and uptime to one or more professional services, e.g. Backblaze teamed with Amazon Prime. This assumes good internet connectivity, e.g. fibre or 5G.
Software: My bigger worry would be format obsolescence — for example, I have business documents, videos and scans I can no longer read thanks to software changes, proprietary formats etc. Over the decades I've lost much more data through format obsolescence than through hardware issues. All my photos are in proprietary formats (e.g. Sony RAW, Canon RAW, FUJI raw, et al) and that leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable right now. Sure, these are big companies so they'll be around forever🤞but even they update formats and leave legacy formats un/under-supported. I don't fancy updating 40TB of images and stuff to e.g. DNG and the like; hopefully the backup companies will provide services that do that for me automatically sometime soon, along with obvious stuff like AI processing of my library for tagging, analytics and the like.
Unfocussed Mike said, 1713825997
I'm still in the process of backing up my last shoot pics...
This is reminding me of installing Linux in the early '90s. 30+ floppy disks I think. But I was a student so no fancy BASF and Verbatim for me -- bulk nonames!
waist.it said, 1713829354
Unfocussed Mike said
I'm still in the process of backing up my last shoot pics...
This is reminding me of installing Linux in the early '90s. 30+ floppy disks I think. But I was a student so no fancy BASF and Verbatim for me -- bulk nonames!
I remember installing Debian that way back in the mid 90's. Bloody awful. Mind you Windows NT4 wasn't much better. And IIRC, OS2 used even more floppies that either of the aforementioned. I remember how glad I was when LiveCD came along. In fact, I became a big Knoppix fan for a while. :-)
Edited by waist.it
franky.fine.art said, 1713835537
I use my older hard disks as backup medium. I have a few boxes with about 40 drives in total, some really old and only 500GB in size.
Some of them are “snapshots”, meaning they represent a point in time and I never update them. They protect me against files getting corrupt on my master drives, and getting backed up all over the place. Like it was said above: make sure you don’t have perfect backups of corrupt files.
Also make sure you’re backing up all that’s needed, I once discovered that an important part of my work was actually not getting backed up due to a mistake in my backup procedure.
Hard disks to fail after some time, so make multiple copies. Over the years I’ve had about 10 hard disks dying.
As cloud backup, I’m very very pleased with Backblaze. Very affordable and a serious company. I only have about 2Mb upload internet, so it can take a long time for an initial upload, but I do this from a separate computer that’s running all the time anyway
Morgan said, 1713854455
more_m_photo said
Thanks all, but I don’t need advice how many backups and where, just which storage medium is going to be the most stable
… and it’s c 5TB and to be stored as long as I can get away with
Edited by more_m_photo
The best long term storage solution is still Tapes has been since the 50s and is still going strong today, most data centres will be backed up on tapes somewhere along the lines.
This definatly not cheapest nor the most expensive its also the slowest 5TB will take you a few days to transfer to a single tape but tape drives will be the most reliable for long term storage and they litterly last forever, you should be able to get a tape drive for around £1,000-2,000 + £50-100 per tape but you'll probably only need 1-2 tapes anyway.
2nd option to this would be a NAS Drive again will set you back roughly the same as the Tape drive but will be more useful in the long run, a Raid6 Capable pre made NAS or you can make one yourself will give you 2 disk failures before you start loosing data, this again wont be cheap but more utilitarian than the tapes as you can also use it to edit from on the daily as well as offering backup.
3rd option being cloud storage, for a consumer this is probably the easiest and cheapest, it wont offer much redundancy be it beyond whatever the cloud service offers you but it its definatly the easiest, MEGA is probably one of the cheapest with 8TB costing around £172 a year,
Gothic Image said, 1713855493
Morgan said
3rd option being cloud storage, for a consumer this is probably the easiest and cheapest, it wont offer much redundancy be it beyond whatever the cloud service offers you but it its definatly the easiest, MEGA is probably one of the cheapest with 8TB costing around £172 a year,
Backblaze is $99 per computer per year for unlimited storage. I'm currently 5TB through a 17TB upload thanks to my snazzy new toob symmetrical 900Mbps fibre connection.
Morgan said, 1713855957
Gothic Image said
Morgan said
3rd option being cloud storage, for a consumer this is probably the easiest and cheapest, it wont offer much redundancy be it beyond whatever the cloud service offers you but it its definatly the easiest, MEGA is probably one of the cheapest with 8TB costing around £172 a year,
Backblaze is $99 per computer per year for unlimited storage. I'm currently 5TB through a 17TB upload thanks to my snazzy new toob symmetrical 900Mbps fibre connection.
I'm off to have a look at that plan thank you :), im 12tb into my MEGA business account, if you have a good upload cloud is definately hassle free.
Not for the faint hearted but I'm just building one of these with 4 4TB NVME drives
Should be fast enough to edit off of :).
Gothic Image said, 1713857208
Morgan said
Not for the faint hearted but I'm just building one of these with 4 4TB NVME drives
Should be fast enough to edit off of :).
My editing drive is a 2TB NVME in a PCI slot of my HP Z440, main storage is a Netgear NAS with 4 20TB drives in it.
brewster said, 1713858120
Gothic Image said
Morgan said
3rd option being cloud storage, for a consumer this is probably the easiest and cheapest, it wont offer much redundancy be it beyond whatever the cloud service offers you but it its definatly the easiest, MEGA is probably one of the cheapest with 8TB costing around £172 a year,
Backblaze is $99 per computer per year for unlimited storage. I'm currently 5TB through a 17TB upload thanks to my snazzy new toob symmetrical 900Mbps fibre connection.
Not only is a year of unlimited Backblaze storage trivially cheap, it has one-year versioning free and a Forever versioning option which is similarly well priced.
Morgan said, 1713858273
Gothic Image said
Morgan said
Not for the faint hearted but I'm just building one of these with 4 4TB NVME drives
Should be fast enough to edit off of :).
My editing drive is a 2TB NVME in a PCI slot of my HP Z440, main storage is a Netgear NAS with 4 20TB drives in it.
Netgear NAS are fairly bullet proof, I found an old one in my garage has to of been 10 years old booted it up the other day still fine mind it only has 4 1TB Drives in and also took me a good hour to access it lol but still I was surprised it lived tbh lol.
HP Z440, Xeon 1650? you should have enough PCIe lanes to slap some more NVME drives in at some point :).
My current editing drive is an ASUS hyper card with 4 2TB Drives in Raid5, with the exact same card as a back up, relatively cheap ish option.
Morgan said, 1713858457
brewster said
Gothic Image said
Morgan said
3rd option being cloud storage, for a consumer this is probably the easiest and cheapest, it wont offer much redundancy be it beyond whatever the cloud service offers you but it its definatly the easiest, MEGA is probably one of the cheapest with 8TB costing around £172 a year,
Backblaze is $99 per computer per year for unlimited storage. I'm currently 5TB through a 17TB upload thanks to my snazzy new toob symmetrical 900Mbps fibre connection.
Not only is a year of unlimited Backblaze storage trivially cheap, it has one-year versioning free and a Forever versioning option which is similarly well priced.
It does look cheap but I have a sneaking suspician that they'll want to go down the business account route rather than an individual, just wiating to see what there computer limit is, I have 7 computers of my own that all share the same MEGA account.