Image Backups - what do you use?


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Royce

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Aug 25, 2003
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Well it finally happened last night. Was getting my image library organised and found that one of my image CD's was no longer readable. It was a TDK black CD and no more than 12 months old. Luckily I had backups of all the images on the CD on my old notebook.

Now I have 2 copies of the images backed up to DVD-R.

So my question is this - what's your backup strategy? I've read a lot about how unreliable CD's can be and that Gold CD's are the best for archival purposes, but there's no Gold equivalent for DVD. Is DVD-R safe for archival? CD-R is very limiting when shooting RAW (700mb vs 4.7 gb for DVD).
 

Royce said:
Well it finally happened last night. Was getting my image library organised and found that one of my image CD's was no longer readable. It was a TDK black CD and no more than 12 months old. Luckily I had backups of all the images on the CD on my old notebook.

Now I have 2 copies of the images backed up to DVD-R.

So my question is this - what's your backup strategy? I've read a lot about how unreliable CD's can be and that Gold CD's are the best for archival purposes, but there's no Gold equivalent for DVD. Is DVD-R safe for archival? CD-R is very limiting when shooting RAW (700mb vs 4.7 gb for DVD).

Back up on an external hard drive
 

Yes, I also recommend to backup on external hard drive. In fact I backup on 2 external hard drives myself, just want to be 200% safe.
 

As all hard drives will fail eventually (normally on the day after their warranty expire), so for backup purpose I use 1 IBM and 1 Seagate. :cool:
 

are you saying that IBM and Seagate harddisk drives are unlikely to fail after one year ?
 

Astin said:
As all hard drives will fail eventually (normally on the day after their warranty expire), so for backup purpose I use 1 IBM and 1 Seagate. :cool:
But how long do you plan to keep your backup on the drives you currently have? I mean for archival purposes, I would want at least a 10 year lifespan (preferably longer). I would imagine by then new copies would need to be made.
 

I have backup all my images to 2 sets ... CDR format

1 at home and 1 in the office :)
 

1 set on CDR, 1 set in my X-drive, 1 set in office, 1 set on my PC, 1 set in my laptop.

KS enough? :)
 

espn said:
1 set on CDR, 1 set in my X-drive, 1 set in office, 1 set on my PC, 1 set in my laptop.

KS enough? :)

Wah... u super... :bsmilie:

I backup 2 sets on CDRs/DVDRs and 1 set on RAID.
 

reachme2003 said:
are you saying that IBM and Seagate harddisk drives are unlikely to fail after one year ?

When I said "all hard drives", I meant IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Fujitsu, Hitachi, etc.

BTW, have you ever seen a hard drive that never fails? :bsmilie:
 

Astin said:
When I said "all hard drives", I meant IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, WD, Fujitsu, Hitachi, etc.

BTW, have you ever seen a hard drive that never fails? :bsmilie:

Sure. I've only had 1 harddisk that failed, and that was in 1992 or so, and it was a refurbished unit, so I don't expect much from it.

All my other harddisks have never failed. I've always "retired" them when their capacities became too small to keep them in the PC. I've various perfectly working harddisks in my cupboard, with capacities ranging from 100MB to 4GB. My current harddisks in my PC includes a 40GB Maxtor which I bought for $500+ quite some years back. Still going strong. So techinically speaking, all these harddisks have never failed. Yet.

Having said that, I advise against keeping backups on harddisks. In the unlikely event of failure, you lose EVERYTHING, unlike DVD-R or CD-R where you only lose 1 disk. Besides failures, other accidents like power surges, virus, or disk crashes or disk corruption can wreck havoc with your backup harddisk. Think twice before using a harddisk as backup.

As for people with backups on laptops, office, etc, this is only applicable if you don't have many photos. It's hard to imagine backing stuff up on your laptop if you have 20-100GB of photos. With ever higher resolution cameras, pictures are getting bigger all the time.
 

Well... i guess its good to have multiple sources for backing up...:)

for me... i stored them in external hdd, CDR, home desktop and office. :bsmilie:

cheers
 

I'm looking for trouble man.... :embrass:

I only have one copy of all the fotos in my RAID 0, which has bad sectors... :cry:

Think after reading this thread, time for some backup action...
 

AReality said:
I'm looking for trouble man.... :embrass:

I only have one copy of all the fotos in my RAID 0, which has bad sectors... :cry:

Think after reading this thread, time for some backup action...

In pro speaking terms, you need to "develop a backup strategy". :cheers:
 

I backup to an external harddisk and DVD+RW. For photos which are printed, I have them on CD-R as well.
 

mpenza said:
I backup to an external harddisk and DVD+RW. For photos which are printed, I have them on CD-R as well.
I've read that RW disks, whether CD or DVD, are not a good medium for backups. Apparently they don't last as long as R disks.
 

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