Time to review my backup strategy

[Peter Rush]

Well my little Uspeed 2 bay drive dock has bitten the dust so I should really look to see if my backup procedure is as safe and efficient as it could be. Currently after a wedding I copy all my footage and audio onto one of two 4TB internal drives for editing and make copies onto two 4TB external drives, one of which is kept offsite.

During Editing I have all my Premiere project files in a folder which is synced to Google drive which backs up at the end of each day - I figure using this system I could only ever loose a day's work and my footage/audio is never at risk.

I now need to replace my drive doc but is a NAS/RAID system a bit overkill? It's only for storage after all.

Thoughts?

[Kyle Root]

I never thought about syncing PP projects to Google Drive... that's a great idea!

I copy all my video stuff to a 2TB internal drive, and then have nightly backups to a 4TB Seagate external drive.

I also keep all the original media cards and don't reformat them until well after the wedding is delivered.

In fact, I still have about 20 from last year just sitting in a drawer that I need to go through.

[Chris Harding]

Hey Pete

I just backup on external USB 2TB drives and haven't had an issue yet. I find that the WD Elements drives are simple and work well .... I just store them with a date-to-date sticker on a shelf and have often had to do extra DVD's from them and no problems and probably 15 -20 drives and counting ... Here it's cheap storage as a 2 TB is around $120!!

Chris

[Danny O'Neill]

We have a handy little article on just such a question. We cover backups, onsite, offsite, RAID, NAS, cloud backups and even hard drive selection (very important if you plan on using RAID, you ideally should avoid desktop class drives).

STORAGE AND BACKUPS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND FILMMAKERS | Minty Slippers

[Peter Rush]

Thanks guys - I think from your responses I'm not missing much - Danny some great info there and really helpful - I think for my purposes however a NAS/RAID solution is a little overkill but having said that I've seen this netgear NAS on amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...=AFBWJ3YA8L7MS

Because I rotate 4 disk drives for backup purposes (wedding footage and audio) this might do the job - also my Seagate 3TB drives are on the compatibility list.

Danny would I have to format my existing drives before using them with a NAS?

Pete

[Robert Benda]

For my Vegas files, I save them in Dropbox so that I don't have to worry about losing my progress.

For onsite backup, I have a single external drive, then the copy on my computer I'm actually working on.

For off site, I was keeping a drive, but switched to using Amazon's... nuts, I don't remember what it's called. It's cheap but slow to download your stuff again, but it's great for long term storage of large amounts of data.

[Nicholas de Kock]

I have two Drobo FS units for external back-up's then my PC runs RAID10 & my SSD drives are scheduled weekly for back-up to my Drobo's. One thing I don't have yet but want to get is two external 4Tb drives for offsite storage.

[Danny O'Neill]

Originally Posted by Peter Rush

Thanks guys - I think from your responses I'm not missing much - Danny some great info there and really helpful - I think for my purposes however a NAS/RAID solution is a little overkill but having said that I've seen this netgear NAS on amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...=AFBWJ3YA8L7MS

Because I rotate 4 disk drives for backup purposes (wedding footage and audio) this might do the job - also my Seagate 3TB drives are on the compatibility list.

Danny would I have to format my existing drives before using them with a NAS?

Pete

You would need to format them. Nas units will have a specific file structure and if it's raid then it needs to initialise them for the stripe.

A nas is a great way to automate a lot of tasks. You don't need to think about copying things from here to there or running backups. It does it all.

Ours is also set to upload videos to vimeo. So i dump any vids in a special folder and it gets uploaded to vimeo and set to private. I can turn my PC off and by morning it's all done.

[Dave Partington]

Right now we have RAID 0 in our workstations, so backups of on going work are absolutely required, since failure of any RAID 0 drive results in the loss of everything.

So, we have a Synology DS414 as our online RAID (4 drives) then we also 'backup' to external hard disks at specific points, including end of projects, then 'archive' to LTO4 tapes. We have about 60TB on LTO as of today.

I've lost far too many HDDs over the years to leave them sat on the shelf for very long. They are great for backups but terrible for archiving.

We used to have a Drobo, but like so many other people it had problems so that went a while ago and I agonised over the various options and eventually went for the Synology unit and don't regret it for one minute. It's something I'd recommend to anyone. Sure, they aren't cheap, but I consider them to be well worth the price. It's also fast enough to edit from over the network if needed!

[Danny O'Neill]

We have the ds413 and it's fast enough to have several people edit from it at once.

Saves copying things to our local machines. Plus they run raid 0 so wouldn't want to store anything on them anyway.