Please explain RAID to me

My Backup System

I have 1 TB backup drives in 3 locations.

I've noticed that pro photogs take a small external drive with their camera gear. However, what I do is transfer photos to an iPad with a retina display using an EyeFi card and Shuttersnitch as I'm shooting both for backup, and to review photos on a better display than a camera LCD. What these reviews usually show is bad focus, ISO, or aperture. The Shuttersnitch app shows aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.

I take about 2000 photos at 10 MB jpeg each, plus about 2000 from wildlife cameras at about 1 MB each, all in about a month. I put these in "raw" files. Each day or so, I put worthwhile photos in "select" files. Each week or so, I copy edited photos in "edit" files. Each month or so I put the best ones in "slide show" files.

When these disks fill up, I'm planning on putting the older raw files, which take up the most space by far, in a new disk.

My scheme is surely less than perfect, but so far, works for me

Here is good write ups for you to review what others are doing.

by Trey Ratcliff about his Drobo.

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/drobo-review/

Synology

http://www.synology.com/products/profile_all_pop_art.php?lang=us

Just another friendly comment on this thread..

There is a famous saying in the IT support world - RAID is not a backup..

Example would be RAID 5, its dangerous. When one drive fails and you add another, it puts a ton of stress on the rest of the array and more often than you'd believe, you lose another drive before it rebuilds! Google RAID 5 rebuild failure and you'll be shocked..

RAID should be considered a good way of making large volumes with a faster way to rebuild arrays, but a backup it does not make. Always have your data in two places at all times, preferably away / online somewhere..

We run this for our clients, notice the dual locations? - because you cannot trust a single point backup system.. Just be careful with your data, the more copies you have, the better.

Good luck!

I'd recommend using an inexpensive enclosure (Vantec Dual USB, $75 from Amazon) that does Raid 1 mirroring. Then get a drive docking station (Thermaltake eSATA USB for $30 from Amazon) and use it with Carbon Copy Cloner to back up your main drive to a drive that will be kept offsite.

Thing with carbon copy cloner is it doesn't really keep versions, so you're only as safe as your last backup - unless it's changed? I haven't used it in a few months..

MacTribe said:

Thing with carbon copy cloner is it doesn't really keep versions, so you're only as safe as your last backup - unless it's changed? I haven't used it in a few months..

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While I do like clones... your post is exactly on target. I would not recommend any backup strategy that does not have deep versioning. Of my 3 prong backup strategy... two have deep versioning (TM and Crashplan). I use CCC to make clones of my personal media (photos and personal videos).

I personally do not need clones of my system drive... because I can easily move my media to a different computer while my main drive is replaced and rebuilt.

/Jim

flynz4 said:

While I do like clones... your post is exactly on target. I would not recommend any backup strategy that does not have deep versioning. Of my 3 prong backup strategy... two have deep versioning (TM and Crashplan). I use CCC to make clones of my personal media (photos and personal videos).

I personally do not need clones of my system drive... because I can easily move my media to a different computer while my main drive is replaced and rebuilt.

/Jim

Click to expand...

Thats a great strategy.It would be extremely hard for you to lose any files!

MacTribe said:

Thats a great strategy.It would be extremely hard for you to lose any files!

Click to expand...

I recently put a post on here someplace of a recovery that I had to do from Crashplan over the cloud. It wasn't for my personal machine... but rather it was for a small MBA that my daughter has. Evidently, while she was away at grad school, she shut off Time Machine because she wanted full performance for WoW. She never turned it on... a year later (last week) dropped it... and smashed it.

We bought her a new MBA, but the TM data was a year old, so we installed apps manually, and then downloaded all of her data from the cloud (Crashplan+). It worked perfectly.

/Jim

flynz4 said:

I recently put a post on here someplace of a recovery that I had to do from Crashplan over the cloud. It wasn't for my personal machine... but rather it was for a small MBA that my daughter has. Evidently, while she was away at grad school, she shut off Time Machine because she wanted full performance for WoW. She never turned it on... a year later (last week) dropped it... and smashed it.

We bought her a new MBA, but the TM data was a year old, so we installed apps manually, and then downloaded all of her data from the cloud (Crashplan+). It worked perfectly.

Click to expand...

No better backup software out there at the moment. We run the enterprise version on our servers for clients etc - we've only had great results.

MacTribe said:

No better backup software out there at the moment. We run the enterprise version on our servers for clients etc - we've only had great results.

Click to expand...

Agree.

I've been using Crashplan+/Crashplan-Central for about 4 years now and I have been delighted.

More recently (within the last year), my employer (very large corporation) has implemented Crashplan Pro for Macs.

/Jim

flynz4 said:

More recently (within the last year), my employer (very large corporation) has implemented Crashplan Pro for Macs.

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Wow, must be interesting to manage on a massive scale. We look after a few 100 people, even then its pretty stressful at times watching the data flowing in and out like crazy! I'd imagine on a large scale deployment they'd segment the backups onto several clusters managed by different teams. Uber geeky stuff.