Back It Up!

I got my new Drobo!!! And of course I had to share my excitement. So Jayse and I made a quick video while opening it up that I’ll post at the end of this! Should be the first of many of my goofy video blogs.

This also inspired me to share my experience and thoughts on storage solutions. Jayse does video work and I photograph all in RAW so this is something that we are constantly battling and exploring to find the best options out there. SO if you’re looking for tips this should be a good help getting started!

When storing and backing up your files, images, and all that important stuff that you’d hate to loose there’s a couple different types that you should have in mind. First there’s your local storage. These are drives that you can access at anytime in your network. This way if one hard-drive crashes (which will inevitably happen at some point in time) you can quickly and easily access your backup. It always seems that drive failures happen at the worst possible timing (not like it would ever be convenient) so why not make it easy on yourself by making it painless to get your system back up and going as quick as possible.

• Mirrored-Raid System - There’s many positives to this type of system. In theory, every time you write a file, it’s actually being written twice - if one hard drive fails you have a duplicated on the ‘mirrored’ drive. I say in theory because - what they don’t tell you is that with most of the consumer raids that you get you can’t just switch out a new drive when one fails. Instead, you have to pay the manufacturer a recovery fee starting around $700. Also, there is a chance of them failing around the same time since most of the time the installed drives were manufactured at the same time - in the same batch.
• Time Machine - Anything Apple ROCKS! Need I say more? Definitely worth checking out if you aren’t using this already.
  
• Drobo - This is the ultimate. The Drobo is similar to a raid system, however your files are copied across 4 drives offering a higher level of protection. And if one (or two) drive fails the Drobo will inform you and all you will have to do is switch it out. It will then immediately back everything up again to the new drive. All this with no down time! Even with 2 hard drive crashes all your files are still safe and accessible.

In addition, the Drobo utilizes a special way of maximizing the drive space. For example, with a typical mirrored-raid you would loose half of the space (for a 2TB raid, you’d have 1TB of storage). With the drobo you would get up to 1.4TBs of storage out of that same 2TBs worth of drives.

Another bonus: Drobo is 100% compatible with Time Machine!

Next you’ll need an off site storage option. As much as I hope we never have to face the problem of a fire or burglary where all our equipment (and yes, backups too) somehow get destroyed, deleted or stolen… as they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry. These things happen. So it’s important to be ready and prepared for whatever life throws at us. And this is especially important as photographers since we’re dealing with precious irreplaceable memories. So here’s a few different off site storage solutions that I think are awesome investments - all of which can be accessed anywhere you happen to be:

• Mac Account - For a limited amount of storage
• Mozy Online Backup - I love Mozy! This offers unlimited online backup for only $4.95 a month
  

• Pictage - Every image uploaded to Pictage is stored on their server for the life of your membership. You may access your images from anywhere any time. And you can easily FTP images back to yourself from any of your live Pictage events. To learn more on retrieving images you can click here.
  

Other options:

• Backing up to CD/DVD - While this isn’t an option I’m particularity fond of since it doesn’t fit in with my work-flow quite as seamlessly, I know a lot of people that this solution works for. This is a relatively inexpensive option, however if this is your preferred method of backing up you should look into getting a data protected water & fire proof safe.

Hope that helps!!

And without furthur ado, meet Drobo… the world’s first data robot:
(once you press play - hit the little HQ button to see it in good quality)

**Update to the video: Now with the 2TB drives you can have up to 5.5TBs of storage space!! Pretty sweet!! Check out the spiffy “Drobolator Capacity Calculator” to see how to make the best use of your drives, or the product demo here.