First and foremost, I want to mention that this article/blogpost/guide is a long time in the making. Not that I have been working and preparing my comments for a number of months, but that it has been on my mind for probably one year now. A lot of friends and colleagues have asked me a...
Tag Archives: backup
Posted in Business, Personal
Tags: assets, backup, data, drobo, esata, hard drive, photographers, photography, raid, superduper
Alessandro Di Sciascio - Spencer, great post, very informative! I’d like to mention three things:
1. On a Windows box the probably best software to do what you are doing is SyncbackSE. I’ve been using it for a few years and it’s great. It also supports versioning which you mention as one of the benefits of Time Machine
2. I either didn’t read correctly or I see a hole in your strategy that would be RIDICULOUSLY EASY (and very inexpensive) to close up. Is it true that off-site backups only really happen about 1x a week when you swap one offsite for another and take it home? If so, wait for a sale on a Western Digital Passport drive (I got a 320gb for about $60 after rebates) and then set up your sync software to sync a few predetermined folders to the WDP … I keep all the recent work in a folder called NEW (subdirectories for the different clients inside) which gets sync’d to the WDP… then I hook the WDP to my offsite PC every day and the sync software makes a copy onto the offsite PC. This way new work is on the working drive, on my WDP (which is pretty much always on me) and on the offsite PC.
3. You don’t mention how you keep older stuff safe. If you rotate backups every week, presumably overwriting the two week old backup with the latest and then wash-rinse-repeat in a week, you run the VERY REAL RISK of data corruption making it into your backups without realizing it. A file, or folder you’re done working with goes bad on your Mac … you then backup and the old (good) version gets overwritten… once two weeks have gone by it’s bye bye data. I was dealing with this issue by burning onsite and offsite DVDs in addition to the backup strategy. Now I think I’m going to stop that and rely intstead on Zenfolio’s data warehousing for that purpose.
Diane Stredicke - Spencer,
Thank you for such a valuable write up. I am fairly new to the complexities of backing up as a photographer. It’s a very intense process because of the overwhelming amount of space that raw files, tiffs and full size jpegs take. I use my iMac hard drive as my operating and applications hard drive, I have a Drobo filled with 4 1TB drives that I use as a working drive (all images). I have a single 1tb drive that I run Time Machine on for my applications/system drive. I have another 1tb drive that I backup image files to from the Drobo. Once that is full, I move on to another 1tb drive as a backup.
I know this system won’t work forever. I am really interested in the Sans Digital setup you mention.
I have already bookmarked this and am sure I will return to your article many times.
Jason Prezant - Spencer,
This is way too complicated. I’m giving
up photography forever.
But you sure seem to know your stuff!
Sam Hassas - I am but a mere mortal in the face of you Specer in understanding all this stuff. Thanks for the dope write-up my friend. I will refer all that ask about storage here. I’ve copied this exact set-up
I want Spencer’s babies! I’m sure a firm hand shake will do however.
Spencer - Danny,
Very valid points made! I’ll have to keep track of all the additional comments / questions that people have and respond to those in a future article. I think the PS scratch and also LR catalog are very good points to cover, things that most people are clueless too but can make a pretty big difference.
dannyROD - Spencer, great write up! Very informative, in-depth explanation of technical details that many folks don’t have the time to learn on their own. One suggestion / request I have is for you to consider covering a few more bits and pieces that were left out.
How do you organize the files on your personal / business drives as far as folder hierarchy goes (personal documents, contracts, invoices, RAW / edited jpg / blog-sized photo organization, music, etc.)?
How long do you keep client images for, and, if longer than the life of your drives, what do you do with them afterward for archiving?
Where do you designate your scratch disk for Photoshop / Lightroom catalog and cache? How do you organize / maintain / backup your LR catalogs?
I’ve got a system that works well for me, this is just info that I think a lot of people could benefit from on top of this well-versed article. Also being a hands on do-it-yourselfer, I’m also curious to hear about other folks’ workflows and systems to find out if there’s a better or more efficient way to do something =). Thanks for the write up!
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