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Note from July 2007: my backup process has changed much since this was first written. With the increasing number of people getting into digital photography, the question of backing up pops up very regularly amongst amateurs and professionals alike. Although pros have a lot more at risk than amateurs given that their images are their bread and butter, amateurs share the same risk of losing precious image files as pros due to an accident, equipment failure, or circumstances beyond their control (fire, earthquake, etc.). Recent reports indicate that depending on the quality of your optical media (CDs and DVDs), you may risk your files being unreadable within a short few years after burning. From what I can gather, it is not the brand name of the media that dictates the quality, but where the disks are manufactured and one plant in Japan is regarded as being the best for producing reliable optical discs. I cannot recall the technique to tell by the manufacturing code where the discs are manufactured, but it’s probably a Google search away for those interested. This is for regular aluminum media, but the acknowledged best for long-term stability and reliability are discs made with gold. Kodak use to sell gold CD-Rs for a higher cost than regular CDs, but no longer now and I’m not certain if gold CDs can be readily available for the regular consumer. It’s just as well though as CD-Rs with their 700 MB capacity is pretty limiting in these days of 16 bit Photoshop editing capabilities that can see little 6 MP image files balloon up past 100 MB depending on what kind of editing you’re doing, e.g., multiple layers. More and more photographers are moving to DVDs for backing up their files, but DVDs are an unknown quantity too because they have not been around long enough for any long term reports to be produced. Another popular method of backing up are external hard drives that are plugged in to download to their capacity and then turned off and stored away for that unlucky day of catastrophe to your main system drives. Some users, so concerned with backing up, will have duplicate external drives and store one in at least one off-site location just incase of fire, theft, or otherwise. While multiple drives are a pretty good idea, doing so becomes costly, but for the professional, a small price to pay for the peace of mind knowing that there is ample redundancy to protect those precious money making images. For the amateur, a burden that is likely too expensive to contemplate. Related to backing up is the use of RAIDs, or redundant array of inexpensive disks, as another popular method by professionals and serious computer users to protect against the inevitable hard drive crash. There are different RAID configurations, but the basic premise is that you have multiple drives in your CPU box, one of which is your real primary drive that you work with day in and day out, while the other drives are there to backup the primary’s data and be redundancies incase the primary crashes and goes down. In such an event, your data is still safe on a redundant disk and in more complex RAIDs, the redundant disk is also backed up by more redundant disks incase it too crashes. I’ve seen a bare RAID array meant for a professional graphics system and was impressed by the dozen or so 120 GB drives stacked for major redundancy. While the “I” in RAID stands for inexpensive, having so many drives in a more complex array is far from inexpensive and RAIDs are generally more complex than necessary for the amateur photographer to deal with. RAIDs are also suppose to provide an improvement in system speed due to having two drives write data simultaneously versus one drive writing the same data, but one report over at StorageReview.com indicates that when comparing fast standalone SATA drives to a RAID array, there wasn’t any meaningful performance improvement. I don’t know enough about RAIDs to comment objectively, but up until I read that report, I was considering a very basic RAID, not so much for backing up, but for the performance gain. I’m not likely to bother with a RAID now though. From everything I’ve read and digested of various postings at some forums, this is the plan I’ve devised for myself:
I also plan to forego the ready-made external drives such as Maxtor’s One-Touch drives unless they come with a built-in fan to keep things cool. It may not be as big of a risk for the external drives used solely for backup, as they would only be on intermittently, but for primary storage drives on for long durations, heat build-up is of concern and needs to be addressed. My initial thoughts on aluminum casings used by the Maxtor One-Touch was that the metal casing would act as a heat sink to keep the drive cool, but it appears that heat still builds up very quickly in such drives. Having come across and purchased an external ADS case for my 120 GB drive, I plan on buying more of these cases for my future external drives thanks to their having small fans at the back to provide some measure of cooling. To be sure, the fan is small, the case is large, but the costs are reasonable if you shop carefully (I bought mine at Costco for CAN $70, but saw them sold for CAN $100 elsewhere) and it gives me peace of mind.
Why the use of an external drive for primary storage versus just using another internal drive? Buying another internal drive was my original intention to supplement my current dual 74 GB drives, but given that you’re looking for redundancy and security, after some thought, it just didn’t seem to make sense anymore. If you’re going to the trouble of having external back drives and burning DVDs, etc., etc., it did not seem logical anymore that you would risk a large drive inside the same box that you have attempted to make redundant. The risks being that your power supply in the CPU could go pffft, just like that, which can result in all of your drives becoming glorified paper weights with all data lost. With an external drive, you only power up when needed, otherwise, it doesn’t face the same risks as the primary internal drives. USB 2 and Firewire make for speedy access and the additional cost is only for the external case to house the drive. What are the real world risks of meltdown or hard drive crashes? Probably not that much despite all the postings and complaints found on the ‘net. It is always the case that those that have suffered, or feel that they have suffered are more compelled to post their negative thoughts and comments than the many more who have not suffered anything. In all the years I’ve been using computers, I’ve experienced one hard drive crash and one stick of bad RAM, but zero power supply problems, from cheap boxes to expensive, custom built ones. But, I think this relative luck has more to do with regular upgrades to my computers than absolute quality, because I’ve never owned and used a computer long enough to really test the mean time to failure ratings for any component. The longest I’ve owned any one computer was seven years for my last 386 box (with a whopping 25 MHz CPU), but that 386 was not seriously used after I graduated from university and only saw intermittent usage, especially after I bought a Pentium 120 in 1995. That original Pentium holds the record for the second longest ownership term until 2000, when I spiraled into the nefarious world of continuous upgrading thanks to buying an Epson scanner that required a USB connection. Shoehorning a USB card into that old Pentium caused it to wheeze and gasp for life, as it couldn’t recognize this new fangled technology. Then it was onto a Pentium II, a couple of Pentium IIIs, and now I’m onto my second Pentium 4. Since 2000, the running average has been a new computer every year, which in itself would be a bank-busting exercise if I didn’t have a generous family member providing me those boxes at great prices. Otherwise, I’d likely be typing this up still on that original Pentium. So other than the 1990s when I did own a couple of computers for a relative length of time, all my other computers haven’t been around long enough to get comfortable with in casa Leong. But that has changed with my last upgrade, as this box was built to actually last longer than the one-year average. Maybe two, even three years is what I hope for, which should be well within the life of all the major components inside the box, but backing up is insurance for those “what if’s” that we have no control over. It does not mean the end of computer upgrades and purchases, just that I’m good enough now to wait out what’s going to happen with dual-processors and 64-bit operating systems. In this digital age, backing up is now a bit of process with two-stages of external hard drives and optical media, as becoming the popular method. A word about optical media, many people express much concern for the life and durability of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, but really now, a single CD-R and DVD-R discs cost less than a buck each today. Yes, it takes some time to burn 4.7 GB of data onto a DVD and I don’t like it as much as the next person, but it still represents a media that is less vulnerable than a hard drive with all those moving parts and spinning platters. To store 120 GB of data is going to take about 25 DVDs, a cost of CAN $20 if you shop around for the cheapest discs, which I suggest only for secondary copy purposes. That’s a pretty small cost to be paying for added security, and I just don’t see the point of grousing and worrying about a disc worth less than a buck. Even if those discs go bad after five years, well, make sure you have a backup process in place to take that timeframe into account. And seriously now, are you really going to be needing to access a disc created on August 18, 2004, on August 18, 2009? My point being that as part of the backup process in place, I would expect that you would do full backups at regular intervals. While some people do this daily or weekly, which is pretty anal by any standard, doing a full backup on perhaps a bi-annual or even annual basis should provide you with at least five additional copies of your files during the five year interval between that original August 18 disc being created, to the time that you need to access it. Hypothetically:
The above is of course very simplistic and fantastic (as in fantasy), but relatively realistic as far as the process is concerned for this digital intensive age. It’s simplistic in that for those photographers seriously needing Lacie’s one terabyte external hard drive, are not going to desire to burn 212 regular DVDs on even an annual basis. Even with the new dual-layer DVDs, that’s still over 100 discs, and I know I would not want to sit down to conduct such a project. I don’t even know how to approach backing up that much data beyond getting a duplicate terabyte drive to backup the first. For me with a very non-prolific number of files, burning DVDs and buying external drives as I need them will work fine for me, and I suspect for a number of other amateur photographers working digitally. I wasn’t that concerned with the duplication of discs offsite, but I can see the value of such as just another method of security and insurance, whether I keep the second backups at work, or at a relative’s house. When a newer media comes to market, once it stabilizes and becomes widely adopted, I’ll backup files on the new discs while the old discs can still be accessed and read by the hardware. This will avoid having to retain a collection of old media that would soon become unviable, e.g. floppies drives in favor of flash memory in USB keys. As I stated earlier, continuously updating your equipment is nefarious, but difficult to avoid as new technologies come to fore. If you wish to remain relatively current, you’ll update regularly enough to avoid the hassles of system meltdown. But then again, there are plenty of stories out there of people using Jurassic era Apple IIe boxes, original IBM PCs, or Tandy computers. A bit more recent and people are still employing their old 386 and 486 boxes as printer servers or simple e-mail boxes. For those interested in monitoring the relative health of their hard drives, apparently all hard drives manufactured within the last few years have a SMART feature built-in. SMART stands for self monitoring and reporting system and is a feature of most current OS' too, but the trick is you need a little application to unlock the secrets contained in the hard drive. An FAQ about SMART is available here. Below is a screen shot of one of the many applications available either as freeware or low cost purchase. Utilizing SMART might just give you enough warning of an impending hard drive failure. If you know the brand of drive you have in the computer, check the brand's web site as it may have a free application available. I was surprised to see a Hitachi brand drive in my Toshiba notebook, since Toshiba is a large hard drive manufacturer.
Having just read your latest vignette on backing up files. I would like to point out several errors and omissions which whilst not critical are important to consider when generating a backup strategy. I
appreciate that the majority of readers are not expecting a full overview
of raid system but your description of raid systems is somewhat misleading. As you have said the reality of the situation is that hardware failures occur infrequently. The biggest danger that we face is based in software caused either by viruses or corruption, these problems can be the most difficult to discover since they only become visible when you try to access the file. For this reason it is important to generate an independent copy of the file as quickly as possible. This is where automated, incremental backups come into play. Incremental backups allow for the creation of backup sets which only contain the changes since the last backup, this provides a degree of protection against accidental overwrites or deletions. Virtually all of today's software allows the backup process to be automated so that the only requirement is for the user to insert the appropriate media and with the use of incremental backups the amount of data stored in single event is reduced to manageable proportions. For example with the use of an external hard drive is simply a matter of switching on the drive at the end of the editing session and starting the backup software to run an incremental backup and then automatically shutdown the PC. Whilst the above are factual statements and therefore hopefully easily accepted my next comment is a little more personal. Your site is widely read and more importantly many people including myself respect your opinion and accept you advice as that of an expert. Therefore your description of daily or weekly backups as 'anal', may not be setting the right example. I appreciate that these comments refer to full backups but since you have omitted any discussion on incremental backups they could be misread. I would suggest that you add a few words regarding what should happen between backup. I would like to offer some opinions on suitable software but as a fully fledged geek I may not be the best person to suggest software which is suitable for less experienced users. But for those of a more technical persuasion I could suggest a small freeware program called xxcopy. Using it I have written a batch file which runs two separate backup processes one to an internal hard disk on a separate controller and the other to an external drive. This process is automated using windows scheduler and runs overnight and when complete shutsdown the PC. More important than these details is the fact that it has allowed me to create a backup hierarchy in which I can see the incremental changes in my files so that if I should get a corrupted file (for whatever reason) I can track back to find the last good copy. The output from the program looks something like this. Source (working) directory
Backup Directory
Similar results can be obtained from any number of commercial and freeware backup programs. In the prevention is better than cure vein users would be advised to ensure that their PC's are generally well maintained by running chkdsk regularly, ensuring that virus scanners have the latest virus definition, running spyware utilities such as AdAware or Spybot and ensuring that they have latest drivers and software patches. In addition to software maintenance investing a few bucks in a surge protector can go a long way to ensuring a healthy system. I'm sorry if I sound preachy but having spent too many years in IT, I know that too many ways to lose data but with a little effort the chance of irrevocable loss can be massively reduced. Finally, I would like to congratulate you on an excellent site. You have managed to present a variety of subjects in an informative and entertaining manner. Best of all you've managed to avoid the usual overly opinionated stance of most web sites and forums. This makes these comments more difficult to writes since I feel that I'm being critical of someone who has taught me a lot. |
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Edwin's
Vignettes -
Backing Up Files
