Computer Data Backup Plan?

[hellosailor]

Actually our friends at the Library of Congress have done extensive research on archival media for their own purposes, and they have put a number of CDs and DVDs to the test.

If you are burning CDs you want a particular dye type patented by a particular company recently bought out by JVC, "JVC Taiyo Yuden" premium line. Highest quality on the market and best archival properties because of the dye, which they own the exclusive patent rights to. Not cheap.

DVDs, I don't know who's they have settled on. But with either media, you can figure that within five years there will be a new standard with 10x higher capacity, so it mays to simply migrate your backups to the 10x "smaller" media every five years, to clear up shelf space if nothing else.

Any decent brand name will last more than five years if stored properly.

[Chipg]

If it were me I'd use a Raid with two 1 TB drives (then store it in a water tight pelican case) that mirror each other and then a cloud backup once a month. Your first cloud backup will take a long time but after the first one it won;t be too bad because it will only upload the changed files, not all of them.

[Dustymc]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

Actually our friends at the Library of Congress have done extensive research on archival media for their own purposes, and they have put a number of CDs and DVDs to the test.

If you are burning CDs you want a particular dye type patented by a particular company recently bought out by JVC, "JVC Taiyo Yuden" premium line. Highest quality on the market and best archival properties because of the dye, which they own the exclusive patent rights to. Not cheap.

DVDs, I don't know who's they have settled on. But with either media, you can figure that within five years there will be a new standard with 10x higher capacity, so it mays to simply migrate your backups to the 10x "smaller" media every five years, to clear up shelf space if nothing else.

Any decent brand name will last more than five years if stored properly.

How precisely does one declare something new to be archival? Isn't that pretty much what's happened with every turns-out-to-be-not-so-archival thing since the first person noticed that scratching in different kinds of dirt with pointy sticks lasted different amounts of time?

Taiyo Yuden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[SunDevil]

For simplicity and automation, I use an Apple Time Machine as my wireless router. It is the best backup solution I have ever used. But, it would need a solid state drive for use on a moving boat.

I use external USB hard drives, and have started to buy that parts to allow one to run inside of a pelican case (not in hot conditions if the lid is closed). But, I'm not sure of any automatic software for Windows. This is just for storage of large .CR2 picture files...

[Dustymc]

Originally Posted by SunDevil

For simplicity and automation, I use an Apple Time Machine as my wireless router. It is the best backup solution I have ever used. But, it would need a solid state drive for use on a moving boat.

I use external USB hard drives, and have started to buy that parts to allow one to run inside of a pelican case (not in hot conditions if the lid is closed). But, I'm not sure of any automatic software for Windows. This is just for storage of large .CR2 picture files...

Time Machine is software, and a router is hardware, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

Newer USB HDs seem fairly happy in boats, cars, and bouncy little airplanes - or at least they have for me so far. The old LaCIEs certainly didn't like being jostled around - or much of anything else....

Part of successfully archiving things is, along with the hardware, making sure what you're archiving is itself archival. cr2 is a dynamic proprietary format - even if your hardware is perfect, you're likely to not be able to do useful things to your pictures in a decade. You might consider converting to DNG, which is an open RAW format. Along with being an open standard, DNG is compressible, so you can save some disk space while maintaining control over your data.

[Pat Ross]

Originally Posted by Dustymc

Time Machine is software, and a router is hardware, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

Newer USB HDs seem fairly happy in boats, cars, and bouncy little airplanes - or at least they have for me so far. The old LaCIEs certainly didn't like being jostled around - or much of anything else....

Part of successfully archiving things is, along with the hardware, making sure what you're archiving is itself archival. cr2 is a dynamic proprietary format - even if your hardware is perfect, you're likely to not be able to do useful things to your pictures in a decade. You might consider converting to DNG, which is an open RAW format. Along with being an open standard, DNG is compressible, so you can save some disk space while maintaining control over your data.

You are making my point as to why I use Carbonite. Just when I have it all figured out software changes and other systems are the better choice. It seems a never ending requirement to stay software savvy which though I enjoy is not what I want.

I like the idea that if anything or all craps out I have little to be concerned about. I get a new computer or use another from another site and have access to everything to include setup, with my email messages, in a new computer.

[s/v Jedi]

+1 to the Time Capsule, which is hardware that works with Time Machine which is software. These two are the standard solution that gives 100% of what you want.

I have a 3TB Time Capsule. While on the move, like when underway, I don't need to make backups but would use the Time Capsule nonetheless. It's easy to mount it shockproof.



ciao!
Nick.

[Dustymc]

Originally Posted by Pat Ross

You are making my point as to why I use Carbonite. Just when I have it all figured out software changes and other systems are the better choice. It seems a never ending requirement to stay software savvy which though I enjoy is not what I want.

I think you are absolutely correct: Things change, sometimes quickly. If you can't keep up with that yourself, pay someone who can to figure it out for you. That's much of the usually-missed point of cloud computing: Rather than paying $100,000 for an expert consultation, you can pay $20/month to share "your" team of experts with thousands of other people with similar problems.

I make a living not losing stuff. I have to know a fair bit about the technology in order to help people make defensible decisions, and about 90% of that is knowing what I don't know. The DNG recommendation I made, for example, was made to me by the professional photographer and museum curator we brought in when we first decided to take a couple hundred thousand images and keep them forever. I'd have used TIFF; I'd have made a terrible mistake. (Among other things, that decision would have cost us about 5 petabytes of additional storage that we'd have had to buy, maintain, and back up.)

[Pat Ross]

Originally Posted by Dustymc

I think you are absolutely correct: Things change, sometimes quickly. If you can't keep up with that yourself, pay someone who can to figure it out for you. That's much of the usually-missed point of cloud computing: Rather than paying $100,000 for an expert consultation, you can pay $20/month to share "your" team of experts with thousands of other people with similar problems.

I make a living not losing stuff. I have to know a fair bit about the technology in order to help people make defensible decisions, and about 90% of that is knowing what I don't know. The DNG recommendation I made, for example, was made to me by the professional photographer and museum curator we brought in when we first decided to take a couple hundred thousand images and keep them forever. I'd have used TIFF; I'd have made a terrible mistake. (Among other things, that decision would have cost us about 5 petabytes of additional storage that we'd have had to buy, maintain, and back up.)

Most interesting. I have all my business related images, multihull evals, database, Cal's Evals, ads etc... with Carbonite. It is much easier for me and the price is very right after having spent money using other systems that failed. The good thing is they failed while the main drive was functioning fine, so nothing lost but twice was too many for me.

[Ex-Calif]

Originally Posted by Dustymc

Time Machine is software, and a router is hardware, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.

Newer USB HDs seem fairly happy in boats, cars, and bouncy little airplanes - or at least they have for me so far. The old LaCIEs certainly didn't like being jostled around - or much of anything else....

Part of successfully archiving things is, along with the hardware, making sure what you're archiving is itself archival. cr2 is a dynamic proprietary format - even if your hardware is perfect, you're likely to not be able to do useful things to your pictures in a decade. You might consider converting to DNG, which is an open RAW format. Along with being an open standard, DNG is compressible, so you can save some disk space while maintaining control over your data.

Ahhhh... My first digital camera was a ricoh. Who knew .rc1 formats wouldn't survive - LOL

I spent a weekend converting two years of photos to .jpg before even converters were lost forever...

For personal family photos I didnt need tiff.

[CarlF]

I'd be surprised if you were happy with Carbonite while cruising. I carry both a Verizon 4G and ATT 4G hotspot. Some days neither will deliver better than 200kb/s. Sometimes you start out with good speed - then in five minutes it degrades to a crawl or stops entirely. Even so, you get to 5GB very quickly.


I use Time Machine and two standard USB drive's (not mirrored, I just alternate - Time Machine figures it all out). I store one drive in a waterproof box.

I've never had one fail due to boat motion. Maybe it's because it's not powered up except for backups and I don't do backups when things are so rough that I might barf on my computer

Carl