What backup method does everyone use?

Hodders im just looking at the DS414 seems expensive for just an enclosure at the moment :( £300 odd.
 
^^^
It is. I would rather wait a bit and get a couple of 8tb Seagate USB drives. Then use the windows equivalent of time machine (Genie) to to make backups to each of the drives separately every hour or so. Then you can avoid raid altogether as often it's just another liability yet people think they are safe and can end up losing ALL their data..
I use raid, but I only use either software raid 0 or software raid 1 and use multiple normal disks to back them up..

I was previously looking into getting something like a drobo, but having read allot of user stories of them losing ALL their data due to partitions randomly vanishing, it kind of put me that type of solution.
 
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Minstadave said:
Home server backs up all the laptops and PCs, all files are mirrored using drivebender. All the important stuff is copied to onedrive.
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This

I'm a tad concerned that a fire let's say could destroy everything that is not on cloud
I'm considering keeping a hdd external drive offsite but aside from work have no where to put it
 
Mp4 said:
Hodders im just looking at the DS414 seems expensive for just an enclosure at the moment :( £300 odd.
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If you see it as a simple drive enclosure then it is expensive, but it is more than that. It is a bare bones linux server capable of running a variety of hardware based raid file systems.

One you have that, you have apps facilities that can all run on top.

I rate it. £300 is not cheap, but my clients expect their photos to be safe, for me it is a no-brainer business expense. If I were an amateur I would probably go for a big internal HD and a 2 or 3 of big external HDs in enclosures, 1 or 2 always offsite.
 
I can seem to get DS414 for £250 second hand.

And have EaseUS backup now which I will do today and backup

genie at £50 seems expensive for what it is.
 
Mp4 said:
genie at £50 seems expensive for what it is.
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It is, but it's the closest you get to time machine which is a brilliantly simple/powerful backup solution. I was going to get Genie, but the cost was just another thing that tempted me to switch over to the dark side.

If you are planning on sticking with windows for the long haul, then it's probably worth the £50.
 
Currently I have a microserver poplulated with 4x3TB drives, the drives are pooled together using Stablebits DrivePool, my Photo share is set to duplicate over an additional drive. The great thing about DrivePool is that in the event of a hardware failure on the microserver, the data will be readable on any other system.

Also running Stablebits Scanner which monitors SMART info and emails me if anything not nice occurs with the drives.

I also have a 1TB Google Drive plan which syncs any thing critical.

I'm in the stages of building a 3U 12 drive ZFS NAS based system. I have everything in place but the drives, the project has taken a bit of a back seat at the moment due to funds.
 
Mp4 said:
Well I had never heard of Genie Timeline before and looks brilliant! So might invest in this as well as EaseUS.

& thats a brilliant idea about the Catalogue to Google!
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GTP is very good, hold on for a few weeks it's nearly always on offer, I think I paid around £30 for it. You will probably find it better to just backup to drive everytime you exit, at least you know the catalogues are backed up online that way.

Genoma said:
What performance you getting with the catalogue on Google Drive?? I would have thought that would be terrible?
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It's surprisingly good! Obviously drive needs to be installed as a desktop application, we have 30MB fibre here though so that probably helps. I can happily do customer viewings in lightroom from drive without there being any waiting for images to render.


An Exception said:
^^^
Not sure how Tommo does it, but I do it in the following way.
Store and use catalogue locally as you normally would. Have backup software scheduled late evening when no one uses internet, to copy and overwrite a copy to the local Google Drive folder. Google Drive then detects change and back's it up online.
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That would be my preferred plan.

However I have the unusual situation where my weddings are as a partnership, with Liam living 40 miles away in Manchester. This means that we both need access to catalogs at all times. Currently we edit in 3 different locations and computers, my home computer, my work computer, Liams home computer.

It took us ages to get a system that we were happy with, but we now give each wedding its own catalog (so we can work on different weddings at the same time), my only concern is the speed of my online back up, it seems to be limited to 100KB/s which sucks on fibre.
 
I shall wait for Genie, but in the mean time shall look at Synology.
 
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I really do need to get NAS drive as I use HDD within my PC Tower.
Photo HDD is 1TB which get backed up to 2TB HDD which contains doc, video, photos and other files.

Then when I remember or can be bothered I copy the PC 2TB HDD to another 2TB HDD in a Hard Drive caddy.

Which NAS drive is worth looking at
 
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