When you shoot 70 - 100 gigabytes of images per week this becomes a constant issue.Currently I run two separate 8 terabyte Buffalo Link Station NAS RAID 5 to which all new work is backed up to both every week. One at the studio one at a mirrored copy at [Read more...] posted in How do you backup? DVD's that won't last or expensive HDD's?

When you shoot 70 - 100 gigabytes of images per week this becomes a constant issue.Currently I run two separate 8 terabyte Buffalo Link Station NAS RAID 5 to which all new work is backed up to both every week. One at the studio one at a mirrored copy at remote location.I also have an additional 3 2 TB external USB drives that I work from on a day to day basis.Images go from Card to USB Drive B which is my working drive, USB Drive E and USB Drive F are local working archives mostly older work that I find I regularly refer back to that I do not want to be going to the NAS units to work with.As the NAS Units reach 3/4 capacity select active archive content is copied to working archives and then the NAS us relegated to Archive Status and a new pair of NAS Units are established and the process continues. One day I will have the ready cash to simply buy a rack server and connect it to the backbone run live tape backups and forget about it but for now the system remains modular.I edit to and from all 3 of the External USB drives with weekly backups to the NAS units (nothing but operating system and software on internal C Drive) In addition all finished retouched work also goes to the cloudI did not used to believe I had a need for a mirror at a remote location until one day someone (Me) tripped on a cord that pulled a NAS off a counter while the platters were spinning the result was a loss of the whole directory to which data was being written at the time of the fall, a directory which contained 6 months of high end glamour work. $2,700 in recovery efforts later I was still missing 3/4 of a terabyte out of 4 tb of valuable RAW Data. Now I simply am never 100% comfortable with any backup plan. In the end it is not a matter of IF you experience a Catastrophic Storage failure but WHEN! So for me it is a matter of Backing up the Backup just so I can sleep at night. posted in How do you backup? DVD's that won't last or expensive HDD's?