Synology NAS DS220j is only about $200. 2 Bays. Set it up to clone. So both drives have the same data. Then connect an external drive into the NAS's USB. All completely automated with Grsync or equivalent . So now you have 3 copies of all your data with one of them being portable to store off-site. The whole setup under $600. Easy Peasy
@@Pikafys power consumption is high compared to nas. But i realised for backup best option are just two usb pockets with power button. And for sharing data low power consumption terminal with nvme disk.
I bought the exact Synology NAS. Now it sits collecting dust since I didn't know you must be a Network wizard to set it up, and that basic computer and tech orientation is NOT enough. (How the hell should I know how to set up a Reverse Proxy for example..?)
My backup strategy is to use one of those disk duplicator boxes to periodically make an image copy of my entire hard drive to an identical drive, and rotate among three drives.
Fun video. I would say my setup is very similar - except that I did go for those additional 300 bucks NAS cost. As you say the drives and backup drives themselves add up, so at the end those extra $300 aren't making much of a difference in my opinion. NAS: synology423+. 4 bay, + means expandable with another multi-bay box to 9 bay. Configured them a single volumes (no raid, no one volume). So there are 4 individual drives in there, G,H,J,K for example. These I back up directly to HDD's as you do. So if something dies I duplicate and replace that particular drive only. Setup of the NAS was simple, very doable for non-IT nerds. I've read that Synology is most user friendly here, that's why I chose it. Read into the most important steps how to secure the system, plus exact having duplicate HDD's has me not to worry about ransomware much to begin with. My PC (no Mac products in this house) sports a hot-swap bay and yes, if I rebuild my system it will have two of those, I found them very useful, for the same reasons. So basically it's going to be 4x10TB in the PC, 4x10TB in the NAS, plus extra copies on HDD's of each. That should do for a while, I'm certainly at less than 50% of that capacity (don't do much video). In the field I use a NEXTO drive, love these fast backup drives. I use an SSD in it, complemented by those little external WD passport USB HDD's for field backup, the same as you use. Yes, the NEXTO supports USB OTG, so after backing up the card to the NEXTO I plug in the HDD and do the backup. Love that setup, no need for ipads or laptops when on trips, and albeit not cheap at first still better than buying cards and more cards for the camera. In fact I still run my z7 on the first 64GB Sony card I got free with the cam. Never really needed to buy another card thanks to that portable backup system (albeit I likely will get a new one with my next cam). Wish had your prices on HDD's, we pay about $300 for the 10TB...😆
Excellent! Thanks for the detailed comment, Marcus. I looked into Synology and QNAP. Agree, Synology seems most user-friendly but they both have been hit with a lot of targeted attacks.
thank you for video. Overall good strategy. Since you are relatively put together and organized men it somewhat easy to keep everything sorted out. Im still under impression that even (some) your old gear is up and neat. However I would go with 2 nas-es, 4 or 6 bay each, possibly with 10Gbe nic, in raid10. One nas is a backup of another. It would have been paid for itself long time ago, and you could sell off and upgrade one along time.
I like the idea of using loose internal HDDs as non-cloud, on-premise backups (airgap). It's like a data toaster. The only potential downside is that SATA connectors are intended for internal use and weren't designed for constant unplugging / replugging. That said, I've been around IT my whole life and I don't think I've ever seen a SATA connector fail due to wear (only mishandling).
All photo data I generate is on only two drives: a 1 Gb Samsung T7 for my lightroom catalog (and auxiliary files), plus a 4 Gb LaCie rugged portable drive for all original image files. Both are backed by Backblaze. I swap these disks between a Mac Mini at home and a powerbook when I'm out of town. Everyhing I export gets deleted once uploaded to a printer or a website. There is a slight loss of performance with LR being on an external disk, but with the M1 chip, proper RAM and fast disks I find it very tolerable. My initial backup did take about 10 days, but now it's all incremental. If my disks get saturated I will simply buy a larger one (if it's for the catalog), or perhaps even store my original files on two drives rather than one if needed. This keeps me feeling safe :)
As soon as I saw you talk about CCC, I went to research it only to find it's only for Mac. I found an app called Backupper that seems to do the same for Windows. I'll have to experiment with it to see how easily it syncs. I have one of those Sabrent docks but switched to a bigger WD Elements drive. Really good ideas here, Ray.
I guess it all comes down to what level of safety you need and the costs you’re comfortable with. Personally I use cloud storage only, and don’t mind the costs for the security, accessibility and zero work involved. I don’t want to do backups, I want backups done - and the cloud does that pretty smoothly with a few clicks.
Have you checked how long it will take to get the data back from the cloud? I have heard any cloud provider offers the service of sending a hard drive by mail with the data. Cloud backup is fine if you work on the files from another cloud storage from the same provider though. Or as cold storage. Or if you only need to restore a few lost files. At least from what I understood. I still have to take that backblaze plan. This video saying that Backblaze is slow compared to Dropbox or iCloud had me wondering. Is Backblaze really any slower than Dropbox? I knew about upload and/or download plans... but is the upload and/or download speed limited? Or did he mean that upload is slow no matter which cloud provider so he only backup most critical files to Dropbox/iCloud? (ie no use to take a Terabyte cloud plan as it is impractical to use?)
Useful and still confusing. As a professional storing 50 plus years of work, I get it. However, for an amateur with just a smattering of excellent work, I use a less thorough method. :) I enjoyed your perspective and I will rethink. For now, I copy ALL my shots that come out of the camera to my local hard drive and to Samsung T7 drives. Great things I also put in the Cloud, Onedrive for now. I do try to erase everything in camera that is poor in one way or another, out of focus, not interesting, redundant. I miss the days when it cost money to take five exposures of the same thing "just to be sure".
Yup, Barry, we lived dangerously in the "old days" with everything in one place. And, of course, many photographers paid with the loss of their work, including Ansel Adams. Good to hear you're using the cloud for your Great things. My intention here is indeed to help photographers think about their strategy and how it might be improved.
Something i can recommend is a computer setup with a linux distro called unraid which allows for different size harddrives for whatever sizes you need plus up to 2 parity drives and a cache drive to make the first transfer fast with it moving onto the array overnight this also allows for more customization and also deviding up share with also autoshutoff is setup with a ups
A NAS is more about up time. If you have a lot of services that need access to that data. Having a NAS with RAID configuration means you wouldn't have any down time if a drive goes down. Especially if the drives are hot swappable. But as a backup solution, a NAS would only count as one device. (If you needed a NAS for your work, you would likely use a second one as a backup along with an off site solution. )
Hi Ray Late reply ( I was away in a gale at the time :)) Been using CCC for I don't how many years , never had a problem, Now, how safe, well, as safe as the loose nut behind this keyboard I guess I'm an old timer so a different perspective, my wife thinks all my images are rubbish so I don't think her concern is redundancy when I'm gone! FWIW, I have always had 2 drives, when I'm away, I put them in a fireproof safe ............ Gary .....................AU
You could make a dirt cheap basic NAS with an old PC running windows and sharing even just a single drive to the local network. In fact this is a backup to my primary 16TB Unraid NAS. You could even do 2 drives and mirror them. I use a simple robocopy script but use flags that skip any previously copied data and nothing is ever deleted from the backup drive in case I accidentally delete something from my primary drive. There are so many cheap options if you have even a small amount of skill.
ooof. Lot's of moving pieces there as well. I think I am going to go for pairs of RAID 0 drives backed up to IDRIVE. Once a year they will mail you a free drive to load your TBs onto, then transfer to the cloud. Of course that would not provide me an onsite backup if a RAID pair were to go down. But I am not a commercial videographer, so I don't need immediate access to backup files and could wait until they downloaded.
I still don't understand this backup system. So all portable drives are copied over to the 10TB Sandisk drive as a backup. But what happens if the Sandisk drive goes bad suddenly, or if heaven forbid it's burned down or lost?
nothing wrong with hard drive cloning it's simple it's effective and it works providing that we're talking about a few terabytes worth data but when you have dozens upon dozens of terabytes or even a couple of hundred it becomes impractical lto tape is a better overall solution
Here's my monkey-brain method: I use one drive for housing images and the catalogue. A second drive is a clone of the first and is manually cloned as needed. A third drive is also cloned as needed. Cloud storage is an option I've not needed - as yet. But, we'll see.
I'd suggest saving a bit of money and investing in a NAS. This is way too complicated and has way more ways of failing than a NAS. They are not all 800€ or more. You can get one for less than 100€, or even less than 50€. NAS systems are also not complicated to understand and run, at all. They are literally just plug and play, basically. You connect them to your router, encrypt the drives, plug them in and install software on your devices. That's it.
Synology NAS DS220j is only about $200. 2 Bays. Set it up to clone. So both drives have the same data. Then connect an external drive into the NAS's USB. All completely automated with Grsync or equivalent . So now you have 3 copies of all your data with one of them being portable to store off-site. The whole setup under $600. Easy Peasy
i had 2 bay nas. All was ok till mainboard of nas broke.
@@armatheos wouldnt it be better to build a cheap pc so that you can replace the motherboard or cpu when they die for 10-20$?
@@Pikafys power consumption is high compared to nas. But i realised for backup best option are just two usb pockets with power button. And for sharing data low power consumption terminal with nvme disk.
What’s the benefit to this vs just using a cloning software with multiple external drives?
I bought the exact Synology NAS. Now it sits collecting dust since I didn't know you must be a Network wizard to set it up, and that basic computer and tech orientation is NOT enough. (How the hell should I know how to set up a Reverse Proxy for example..?)
My backup strategy is to use one of those disk duplicator boxes to periodically make an image copy of my entire hard drive to an identical drive, and rotate among three drives.
Fun video. I would say my setup is very similar - except that I did go for those additional 300 bucks NAS cost. As you say the drives and backup drives themselves add up, so at the end those extra $300 aren't making much of a difference in my opinion.
NAS: synology423+. 4 bay, + means expandable with another multi-bay box to 9 bay. Configured them a single volumes (no raid, no one volume). So there are 4 individual drives in there, G,H,J,K for example. These I back up directly to HDD's as you do. So if something dies I duplicate and replace that particular drive only.
Setup of the NAS was simple, very doable for non-IT nerds. I've read that Synology is most user friendly here, that's why I chose it. Read into the most important steps how to secure the system, plus exact having duplicate HDD's has me not to worry about ransomware much to begin with.
My PC (no Mac products in this house) sports a hot-swap bay and yes, if I rebuild my system it will have two of those, I found them very useful, for the same reasons.
So basically it's going to be 4x10TB in the PC, 4x10TB in the NAS, plus extra copies on HDD's of each.
That should do for a while, I'm certainly at less than 50% of that capacity (don't do much video).
In the field I use a NEXTO drive, love these fast backup drives. I use an SSD in it, complemented by those little external WD passport USB HDD's for field backup, the same as you use. Yes, the NEXTO supports USB OTG, so after backing up the card to the NEXTO I plug in the HDD and do the backup. Love that setup, no need for ipads or laptops when on trips, and albeit not cheap at first still better than buying cards and more cards for the camera. In fact I still run my z7 on the first 64GB Sony card I got free with the cam. Never really needed to buy another card thanks to that portable backup system (albeit I likely will get a new one with my next cam).
Wish had your prices on HDD's, we pay about $300 for the 10TB...😆
Excellent! Thanks for the detailed comment, Marcus. I looked into Synology and QNAP. Agree, Synology seems most user-friendly but they both have been hit with a lot of targeted attacks.
thank you for video. Overall good strategy. Since you are relatively put together and organized men it somewhat easy to keep everything sorted out. Im still under impression that even (some) your old gear is up and neat. However I would go with 2 nas-es, 4 or 6 bay each, possibly with 10Gbe nic, in raid10. One nas is a backup of another. It would have been paid for itself long time ago, and you could sell off and upgrade one along time.
Glad it was helpful!
I like the idea of using loose internal HDDs as non-cloud, on-premise backups (airgap). It's like a data toaster. The only potential downside is that SATA connectors are intended for internal use and weren't designed for constant unplugging / replugging. That said, I've been around IT my whole life and I don't think I've ever seen a SATA connector fail due to wear (only mishandling).
Yes, definitely something to consider and be careful. So far so good. 🤞🏻
All photo data I generate is on only two drives: a 1 Gb Samsung T7 for my lightroom catalog (and auxiliary files), plus a 4 Gb LaCie rugged portable drive for all original image files. Both are backed by Backblaze. I swap these disks between a Mac Mini at home and a powerbook when I'm out of town. Everyhing I export gets deleted once uploaded to a printer or a website. There is a slight loss of performance with LR being on an external disk, but with the M1 chip, proper RAM and fast disks I find it very tolerable. My initial backup did take about 10 days, but now it's all incremental. If my disks get saturated I will simply buy a larger one (if it's for the catalog), or perhaps even store my original files on two drives rather than one if needed. This keeps me feeling safe :)
As soon as I saw you talk about CCC, I went to research it only to find it's only for Mac. I found an app called Backupper that seems to do the same for Windows. I'll have to experiment with it to see how easily it syncs. I have one of those Sabrent docks but switched to a bigger WD Elements drive. Really good ideas here, Ray.
Cheers, Christian!
If it helps, I used Borg backup em linux (actually the GUI Vorta Backup).
I guess it all comes down to what level of safety you need and the costs you’re comfortable with. Personally I use cloud storage only, and don’t mind the costs for the security, accessibility and zero work involved. I don’t want to do backups, I want backups done - and the cloud does that pretty smoothly with a few clicks.
Have you checked how long it will take to get the data back from the cloud? I have heard any cloud provider offers the service of sending a hard drive by mail with the data.
Cloud backup is fine if you work on the files from another cloud storage from the same provider though. Or as cold storage. Or if you only need to restore a few lost files. At least from what I understood. I still have to take that backblaze plan. This video saying that Backblaze is slow compared to Dropbox or iCloud had me wondering. Is Backblaze really any slower than Dropbox? I knew about upload and/or download plans... but is the upload and/or download speed limited? Or did he mean that upload is slow no matter which cloud provider so he only backup most critical files to Dropbox/iCloud? (ie no use to take a Terabyte cloud plan as it is impractical to use?)
Useful and still confusing. As a professional storing 50 plus years of work, I get it. However, for an amateur with just a smattering of excellent work, I use a less thorough method. :) I enjoyed your perspective and I will rethink. For now, I copy ALL my shots that come out of the camera to my local hard drive and to Samsung T7 drives. Great things I also put in the Cloud, Onedrive for now. I do try to erase everything in camera that is poor in one way or another, out of focus, not interesting, redundant. I miss the days when it cost money to take five exposures of the same thing "just to be sure".
Yup, Barry, we lived dangerously in the "old days" with everything in one place. And, of course, many photographers paid with the loss of their work, including Ansel Adams.
Good to hear you're using the cloud for your Great things.
My intention here is indeed to help photographers think about their strategy and how it might be improved.
Something i can recommend is a computer setup with a linux distro called unraid which allows for different size harddrives for whatever sizes you need plus up to 2 parity drives and a cache drive to make the first transfer fast with it moving onto the array overnight this also allows for more customization and also deviding up share with also autoshutoff is setup with a ups
A NAS is more about up time. If you have a lot of services that need access to that data. Having a NAS with RAID configuration means you wouldn't have any down time if a drive goes down. Especially if the drives are hot swappable.
But as a backup solution, a NAS would only count as one device. (If you needed a NAS for your work, you would likely use a second one as a backup along with an off site solution. )
CCC is a great software. Saved me a few times and it is very easy to use.
I’ve had good luck with it as well.
Hi Ray
Late reply ( I was away in a gale at the time :))
Been using CCC for I don't how many years , never had a problem,
Now, how safe, well, as safe as the loose nut behind this keyboard I guess
I'm an old timer so a different perspective, my wife thinks all my images are rubbish so I don't think her concern is redundancy when I'm gone!
FWIW, I have always had 2 drives, when I'm away, I put them in a fireproof safe
............ Gary
.....................AU
Cheers Gary! Yeah, CCC is excellent. Fireproof safe for on-site drives is a good plan.
Hi thanx for the video! Can you tell me where can I get the screensaver that you’re having on your desktops in the background?
C/W my Mac
You can buy very cheap plastic protection boxes to store and protect your internal HDD drives.
You could make a dirt cheap basic NAS with an old PC running windows and sharing even just a single drive to the local network. In fact this is a backup to my primary 16TB Unraid NAS. You could even do 2 drives and mirror them. I use a simple robocopy script but use flags that skip any previously copied data and nothing is ever deleted from the backup drive in case I accidentally delete something from my primary drive. There are so many cheap options if you have even a small amount of skill.
Too complicated for me. Not a Windows user.
ooof. Lot's of moving pieces there as well. I think I am going to go for pairs of RAID 0 drives backed up to IDRIVE. Once a year they will mail you a free drive to load your TBs onto, then transfer to the cloud. Of course that would not provide me an onsite backup if a RAID pair were to go down. But I am not a commercial videographer, so I don't need immediate access to backup files and could wait until they downloaded.
do u encrypt your drives?
some
I still don't understand this backup system. So all portable drives are copied over to the 10TB Sandisk drive as a backup. But what happens if the Sandisk drive goes bad suddenly, or if heaven forbid it's burned down or lost?
No. *As demonstrated in the video* the 10TB partition is backed up.
nothing wrong with hard drive cloning it's simple it's effective and it works providing that we're talking about a few terabytes worth data but when you have dozens upon dozens of terabytes or even a couple of hundred it becomes impractical lto tape is a better overall solution
Here's my monkey-brain method: I use one drive for housing images and the catalogue. A second drive is a clone of the first and is manually cloned as needed. A third drive is also cloned as needed. Cloud storage is an option I've not needed - as yet. But, we'll see.
Similar to mine, minus the cloud storage.
It is not PCLe, it’s PCIe 🙌🏼
Typos happen.
I'd suggest saving a bit of money and investing in a NAS. This is way too complicated and has way more ways of failing than a NAS.
They are not all 800€ or more. You can get one for less than 100€, or even less than 50€.
NAS systems are also not complicated to understand and run, at all. They are literally just plug and play, basically. You connect them to your router, encrypt the drives, plug them in and install software on your devices. That's it.
What are your thoughts on smugmug as an online storage?
Can't comment, sorry. I only know it by name.