New backup

Sebastian

Sebastian

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Sebastian
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Hi guys,

So far I've been backing up my photos on external drives, synchronising them in pairs after every update - so far it worked great for me.

I'm looking for another pair of HDD, this time 2 x 2TB
Any models/brands that you can recommend?
Or - is there any other technology I should be looking at (NAS, Drobo)?

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Seb
 
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neil_g said:
theres loooooads of threads on this, whats your budget first off and your total data size? the likes of drobo and alternative brand NAS arent cheap.
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So far my backup consists of 2 pairs of 1TB drives. Now I'm about to introduce 3rd pair 2 x 2TB.

Budget for these two drives? £150

Budget for other solution - depends... Drobo are pricey beasts, a bit like products with Apple logo... :)
 
So far I have 2TB storage, mirrored to another pair. Each file exists on two separate drives.
So with the new drives I would have 4TB mirrored
 
if you wanted to consolidate into 1 unit then for a 4 bay NAS youre easily looking at £270 (ebuyer - synology ds411j) plus youll need disks of the same size (it will take drives up to 3tb). but please remember that would count as a single copy of your data even when mirrored. so have a backup of that also elsewhere.

its up to you really, theres nothing wrong with what you are doing now. multiple copies over different mirrors is fine. if youre happy with all of those disks then id carry on with what youre doing unless you have the cash to drop :)
 
I'm quite happy with what I have now, but I can end up with 12 external drives and not enough sockets for all the plugs :)
I've heard that Drobo accepts drives of different sizes, do you know how it works? :/

I will have a look at this NAS from your post now!
 
Sebastian said:
I'm quite happy with what I have now, but I can end up with 12 external drives and not enough sockets for all the plugs :)
I've heard that Drobo accepts drives of different sizes, do you know how it works? :/

I will have a look at this NAS from your post now!
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drobo does let you use drives of a different size, it uses a type of raid substitute.

if you start looking at NAS id always overspec it. nothing worse than getting 6 months down the line and finding you need more space.

good thing about the synology is that it has USB ports for external drives which you can backup to.
 
RobertP said:
A bit out of date but this is a link to a data recovery firms view on drive brands - http://www.retrodata.co.uk/media/good-bad-downright-ugly/

It seems to be white text on a white background so select/highlight the page (ctrl A) to read it.
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interesting, i used to live about 30m down the road from where google maps puts the marker on that postcode and im not aware of any "international leaders of data recovery" around there.

i wonder how big they actually are and how reliable their figures are?
 
neil_g said:
i wonder how big they actually are and how reliable their figures are?
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And their writing style is "interesting". Take this:

Questionable: Samsung hard drives. Downgraded from Status Pending on 01 July 2010. We are now seeing quantities of failed Samsung hard drives. The majority of failures are the HD501LJ models manufactured in 2008 and 2009. Refurbished Samsung drives are especially flakey and now comprise most of the failures we are seeing from our own stocks of drives.
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That reads as "All Samsung drives are questionable quality. But we're only really seeing problems with the HD501LJ".

Which is what I said in my original post linked to above. There isn't a more reliable brand, just more or less reliable models of drives.
 
neil_g said:
interesting, i used to live about 30m down the road from where google maps puts the marker on that postcode and im not aware of any "international leaders of data recovery" around there.

i wonder how big they actually are and how reliable their figures are?
Click to expand...

Retrodata used to be run by a guy known as Odie that posted a lot on usenet many years ago. had a great reputation back then for getting data back - rebuilding drives completely using parts from others. It was before ebay and computer related newsgroups were a way of finding obscure spares. no idea how big his business did or didn't get.
 
Sebastian said:
What do you think guys, would it be fast enough for photographer's use?
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Fast enough?

A current gen internal disk will always be quicker than a networked disk. I'd have a local disk for PS/LR and a networked disk handling backup duties....
 
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