How do you store/back-up your family photos & other files?

[freshprince1]

Good Morning, I'm wanting to be more vigilant in having back-up copies of our family pictures/videos and other important documents.

I currently have a couple external hard drives that I keep everything on, and am considering just signing up for iCloud and carry a redundant back-up there.

I wanted to see what others do, and what has worked well for you?

Any opinions and insights are appreciated.

Merry Christmas!

[DeleriousZ]

Multiple HDD's and cloud storage has been more than adequate for me so far.

[spike98]

Raid NAS with cloud mirror.

[Tik-Tok]

Originally posted by DeleriousZ
Multiple HDD's and cloud storage has been more than adequate for me so far.

Yeah, I've got 2x HDD's as backup for photo's. Speaking of which, I haven't done that in probably a year, thanks for reminding me, lol.

[Mitsu3000gt]

Multiple HDD's + Online storage (Smugmug) + offsite Blu-Ray storage. That pretty much the maximum one can do within reason.

Some people go as far as using archival quality media and putting them in a safety deposit box, but I feel pretty safe with the 3 backup methods above.

It's one thing to have your photos in 10 different places, but if they're all in your house, and it burns down, it wouldn't matter if you had it in 100 places.

These days, cloud storage is probably as good as anything else, since most services store your data on multiple servers in multiple locations (different cities or states).

[Xtrema]

I have not look into cloud backup because I'm looking at just short of 2TB.

Since I have a VMWare farm at home, all my critical stuff is in the FreeNAS serving this farm. Everything is backed up to the Drobo where I have 16TB. On top of that, I get my 2TB USB drive out of my safe deposit box and sync my critical stuff every 3-4 months.

[revelations]

I just have a simple 2TB Ubuntu headless server sitting in a closet, 1TB is mirrored.

[wtf im nameless]

Western Digital Sentinel NAS running RAID with dual power supplies and ethernet connections with cloud backup of all my important files. It's plugged into a Panamax MB1500 battery backup system that checks for internet connectivity and re-boots the network if it goes down. All of this is tied into my Control4 automation system that monitors all the vitals in my home including temperature, power interruptions, security system, etc. If there are any issues with anything, (assuming my internet is working) the system immediately sends a message to my phone via push notification.

Yes - I do this sort of thing for a living

[dirtsniffer]

holy crap you guys are hardcore. I thought I was doing alright just by backing up onto an external. Fuck, time to look into making a dvd copy every six months and keeping it somewhere else,.

[sabad66]

Cloud backup ftw. Why waste your time/money with these crazy home setups?

Carbonite 2 yr subscription for $120. Set it and forget it.

The only way this would fail is if the cloud company fails at the exact same time your hard drive fails.

[taemo]

cheapest way to back-up your pictures now IMO is flickr.
free 1TB and just set your profile and pictures to private.

but me I just have a 2TB drive and I manually run a robocopy of the drive to an external 2TB drive

[GoChris]

^^ But isn't uploading to flickr a pain if you have 100+GB to upload. I thought it was all drag and drop or is there a tool that can upload my whole drive? Then it's disorganized on flickr no?


My file server has some parity protection against a single drive failure. That's basic. Beyond that I'm using Crashplan to backup important bits, docs and pics, to an external drive.

Soon I'm taking that external to a friends house and my Crashplan will backup to that external so it's offsite storage in case of a fire or disaster.

Crashplan is free for local and to a friend/family backup pc. The nice thing, is that it's encrypted. So you could have a friend to host your usb drive, or just space on their pc/server for your backup and vice versa.

[Mitsu3000gt]

^^^ I don't know how Flickr works but with Smugmug you can do a mass upload (unlimited lifetime storage for $40/year & no ads), and then move your photos in groups to the correct albums. So, as long as you uploaded them in a somewhat organized fashion, it would be fairly easy to split them into albums later. You could drag & drop your 100GB of photos into 1 album, and then split them up after, or you could upload them one album at a time if they were pre-organized. If you just wanted the storage and didn't care about organization, you could just dump them all on there and it would serve that purpose without any additional work.

[revelations]

Carbonite as mentioned is not a bad idea, 60$ a year is pretty good for unlimited storage. I imagine trying to initially upload 500GB will take a few weeks to finish though at 3mbs.

I use the Ubuntu server for many other things than just file hosting though.

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by revelations
Carbonite as mentioned is not a bad idea, 60$ a year is pretty good for unlimited storage. I imagine trying to initially upload 500GB will take a few weeks to finish though at 3mbs.

Carbonite could be a good replacement of my USB drive but with only 500GB/mth with Shaw @ 3Mbps, it's at least 61 days for the initial sync and blowing the 500GB limit 2 months in a row.

[Zero102]

I have 6TB of disks in a 3-way mirror in my fileserver, all of my family backs up to my machine using crashplan (totally free), then I use crashplan to back up all of my stuff to external drives which I rotate out so one is always outside of my house. I do monthly integrity checks on all drives.

This means important data for all of my family members exists both on my machine (3 copies on mine) and on theirs, and all of my important data is both on my machine (again, 3 copies), on an external drive inside my house and on an external drive outside of my house.

This leaves data restoration mostly in the hands of my family members - if they delete something they want back they can just open crashplan and pull it back from me, or if their machine goes away they can just set up a new one on the same account and do a full restore of the old machine's data onto the new one.

So far it has served me well and we have only been using the free level of crashplan - if you wanted extra security you could pay for them to store your data as well.

The other nice thing about this setup is for the initial seed you can give them an external drive, get them to add it to their crashplan and once it's done copying, unplug it, plug it into your machine and copy their backup archives into your collection, the crashplan daemon will notice this and you have a pre-seeded backup.

Oh, one other thing, all of their data is securely encrypted with a password that only they should know, same with yours, nobody can read anybody else's files.

[Alterac]

I will also vouch for crashplan.

I use their single user unlimited storage option for the last year or so, love it.

I have about 40gb of personal pictures/documents/files so it wasn't bad for the initial upload.

Don't cloud backup TV/Movies/Music lol.

They do offer a Seed Load service that can help you get to where you need to be. (but limited to a single 250gb drive)

The best point about Crashplan is the Headless Linux client. So it runs on anything. (They have a Mac and Windows client also)


We use Proactive Backups at work, and they offer a seed load service that you can ship all your data to them (but they are Calgary based, so its easy) and their software is also easy.

[taemo]

You can do a mass-upload on Flickr, basically all the pictures in a folder but I don't think it can do subfolders though.
If you have LR you can actually sync your LR catalog to Flickr and your folders in LR will be created as sets.

Originally posted by GoChris
^^ But isn't uploading to flickr a pain if you have 100+GB to upload. I thought it was all drag and drop or is there a tool that can upload my whole drive? Then it's disorganized on flickr no?


My file server has some parity protection against a single drive failure. That's basic. Beyond that I'm using Crashplan to backup important bits, docs and pics, to an external drive.

Soon I'm taking that external to a friends house and my Crashplan will backup to that external so it's offsite storage in case of a fire or disaster.

Crashplan is free for local and to a friend/family backup pc. The nice thing, is that it's encrypted. So you could have a friend to host your usb drive, or just space on their pc/server for your backup and vice versa.

[freshprince1]

Wow. great information, guys, Thanks. I need to learn more about this stuff and get set up better. At the very minimum, I think I need to get a second external HD for family photos and keep it elsewhere.

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by freshprince1
I think I need to get a second external HD for family photos and keep it elsewhere.

RAID guard against hardware failures

Offsite backup (cloud or physical) guard against fire or theft.

You should do at least offsite.

Crashplan looks very interesting tho, have to look into that.