Really helpful! One method I've used: As an Amazon Prime subscriber, Amazon provides unlimited photo storage (video IS limited) without shrinking the images. I run Amazon's photo uploader on my laptop. So after copying the raw image files from my camera's SD card to the laptop, the Uploader automatically uploads them to the Amazon cloud. It's easy and provides the off-site backup.
I took the plunge and bought a Synology NAS last year and it's been great. Their software is really useful once you get everything set up. I use an app on my phone to access my files remotely. I will say though that I have had problems with data transfer speeds and this was down to my old WiFi router which I had for 8 years. When my ISP sent me an updated version it really sped things up a lot. It was 10x faster so you can imagine how pleased I was to sort that out. In addition to my NAS I use an online backup services which updates every week. I don't produce any work during the week so weekend backup is fine.
I'm also using a NAS system (Synology). I was using one long before I became interested in photography. When my friend was setting his up and suggested it to me I thought it was overkill for my needs but it turns out it is one of those things that you find a million uses for after you get it up and running. I am in the process of installing security cameras around my house and I was able to get 2 cameras that are way better and cheaper than home security systems offered by Amazon, Google and the like. Plus, no subscriptions and no surprise change of terms and conditions at the whim of some foreign company.
Great overview of options! I just moved to adding a Synology NAS to my backup options for my iMac with photo and digital music files. I've got the iMac backed up to a LaCie drive locally and then to the NAS sitting offsite.
I’m at the drive bay stage and since I really don’t do full time photography anymore . For me I will never be at your level but have a dual drive bay works well for making copies then starring them. I like the pelican case option. I usually go to harbor freight and they carry a similar case that is water proof. Thanks Dave for going over all these options…very important stuff to keep in mind.
I store my old 3.5 inch drives in some bag, usually the bag which came with a recently purchased hard drive. Even though the drive is "sealed" never know if some dust "could" get in. Thinking especially inside a pelican box with foam. But David, I do like your idea of storing them in a pelican box - that is why I watch your videos every week!!!
After loosing years of photos due to two consecutive hard drive failures, I'm doing a 1-2-3, 1 is my laptop, then an external hard drive, so every time a import photos to lightroom, i make a copy of the raw and the lightroom back ups to that drive, and finally, i bought a cheap NAS from Buffalo, which comes with a back up software, so that thing automatically backs up my second drive and my laptop every week. you can set this up to be even every day.
Wow, this Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series sounds like a great backup power solution for outdoor enthusiasts like us! I love how it has a massive capacity, fast recharging, and versatile sockets. Plus, the waterproof technology is a definite bonus. Thanks for sharing this recommendation!
Holy cow, Bergman! What a performance on this question! In answer to your question, I use Macrium as 3x a week external drive bkup + continuous cloud bkup, so not quite 3-2-1. More like 2-2-1, I guess. Getting ready to go to external SSDs and remove the photos from my hard drive, so maybe I ought to look at NAS, which I knew nothing about until this video. Thanks for the timely rundown on all these options!
I'm with you, believing that RAID is the way to go. Currently using two 12TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives in RAID 1, along with two other 4TB external drives for miscellaneous backups, and an online backup. My last Western Digital RAID system went for a little over 3 years, before one drive failed, but I was able to recover all my data from the remaining drive, and keep going. With my Nikon Z9's arrival, I expect to need more... :)
Tried a Synology NAS System about 5 yrs ago and it was a nightmare trying to get it set up with our home network even with pro network tech support it never worked--finally ditched it and went to a Drobo for file storage which has functioned flawlessly so far.
Great topic. So easy to overlook until it's too late. I have the same elements as you except cloud storage. Too many bad experiences with cloud based systems to ever use one again. I would add developing a procedure ahead of time on how you would both identify a failure and recover from failure. Recently switched from Netgear NAS as their built in monitors didn't identify a drive failure. The bad disk was found during my bi-monthly review of the NAS log files. The recovery plan should include a failure, one at a time, of each storage. Mine includes how to identify what was lost, what hardware would be replaced, and what source would be used for the recovery. Going thru my plan in a mock recovery I found several holes. One was the need to have a spare drive on hand for a failed NAS disk. NAS drives often auto recover just by replacing the failed disk. But the process can take more than a 1/2 day. Adding 2-3 days to get a replacement drive was too long for my comfort. With today's supply chain issue might be weeks or months before NAS redundancy is restored while you wait for a compatible drive.
Great ideas. I also shoot many images. JPG + RAW takes up lots of space. Cloud storage is excellent, but you depend upon your internet connection when travelling. That connection could be slow and perhaps expensive. I have found the new SSD drives handy and compact for fast storage. Also, the newer USB 3.2 interface is much faster than the older USB standards - consider that when buying storage.
As a systems admin that works with backups frequently.... all you need is a synology running raid and a cloud backup. At that point you would not need a second physical backup. If you have a second location, you can avoid paying a cloud service by using a second synology and syncing the folders.
Hobbyist here, three places of storage. First, I have is a large internal ssd in my desktop. Second, NAS on RAID 1 (exact copies on each of the two large drives on NAS), Third, AWS glacier with automatic upload from NAS, which I will only touch if my home was destroyed which has copy 1 and 2.
Thank you for this video. I am currently looking to upgrade my storage solutions for photos. Have considered using cloud services but have been skeptical. You have cleared up some of those questions. I have also been eyeing an Synology disk station, but I may still wait on that and implement your 1,2,3 strategy with smaller drives for now.
I've recently decided that "if it's not worth delivering, it's not worth keeping". Basically when it's time (6 months after delivery) to archive my photos, I delete all the shots that I didn't deliver. You keep only your best images and it saves a ton of space!
This sounds good, but I am finding with all the new editing programs and their constant advances, I have gone back and edited photos from 2015 that were not so good, and are now worth printing. So I only delete those that are duplicates or really really throw aways. Shoots for customers, I may look at differently.
Watch out and protect against lightning in high prone locations… I basically use the 3/2/1 technique. Every 3 months I rotate one of the drives in a Safe Deposit Box ever three months. And yes, I do not have that much data… I had a NAS, but but at this time I’ll not use that method. Where I live in Florida (World Capital for lighting) you have to make sure that the NAS is backed up to a site outside your property (and/or Cloud). My property has been hit at least 5 times in the last 35 years by lightning. The last lightning instance damaged my NAS and an Ethernet Switch. Yes I have UPS with surge suppression but lighting does not care because if the hit is very close nothing can really stop it. And… damage seemed to enter via the Ethernet cabling… So, make sure also to surge protect the Ethernet cabling to the NAS and make sure is backed in a separate location outside your property because a RAID is a good technique, but is usually useless against lighting. In my case, the lightning rate causing damage has been much greater than hard disk failures.
This was great David! I shoot lots of music events and up to 1,000 photos in a day is a regular occurrence and I have been doing this for a long time and at last count I had over 40 hard drives ranging in size from LaCie to Western Digital and everything else and its a pain in the you know what to find files etc. etc. Your solution seems to more like what I need and the suitcases full of hard drives are a riot. It’s not New Year yet but I am working on a new resolution right now…..get my act together! Thanks, I’m a fan!
I uses a 8 terabyte external solid state drive for all the originals (raw files ) tagged as keepers . No moving parts , no constant overwriting , reliable. Another 8 terabyte external solid state drive for the edited and modified files for sharing and uploading .
I was doing multiple hard drive backups and supposed to keep one drive off site and update the drive every month. During that month I would continue to backup the photos on to 1 large drive along with 1 smaller drive for that months photos and then do the transfer to update the off site drive and start over again with the small drive the next month. BUT then I didn’t bring my second drive to the offsite location…..then we got hit by a tornado…..we are lucky that our house was damaged but survived. We are in an area that is or at least was considered to be stable environmentally and our biggest worries in the past were ice storms, power outages and maybe a house fire. We use to be more prepared but then get complacent and think that nothing ever happens so we slacked off and then it hit the fan! Gotta get back on track and work on a better system for everything but still in the process of house and car insurance stuff related to the tornado 6 months later. 😬
Synology DSM220+ in my home in RAID1. Pixieset for cloud and client access of my best edited images. Locally attached 8TB portable x2 - 1 locally attached and a 2 copy kept at my folk's house. I was was virtually all cloud backup but it was slow and expensive.
I have a 4 bay Synology in my home office and I have it running a backup to another Synology that I placed in my son's home. So I am running my own "cloud" so to speak.
I recently got a Synology 920+ NAS but am having difficulty in figuring out the best way to set it up (the options seem daunting). I have my Lightroom catalog and about a years worth of pictures on my laptop which is in a OneDrive folder, so they are available on my other computers and backed up to the cloud. Older pictures are stored on external ssds and hard drives. I tried backing up my OneDrive folder to the Synology, but it does not seem to be copying all the files and fodders. I also moved the pictures on my external drives to separate folders on the NAS. I am not sure of the best way to sync the pictures back to the hard rives when I go on a trip and want to have the images with me in case I do not have internet access. Any thoughts or advice?
Beware of static electricity with the foam padding in the pelican case. You should put the drives in an anti-static bag before putting them in your pelican case.
I am using a DYI server with an Areca high-end RAID controller with two 9-disk RAID6 arrays attached. 2 drives act as spares for a total of 20 drives in that system. The setup can withstand 1 disk failure per RAID6 and automatically rebuild the RAID, and a second failure on each RAID6 where I would have to intervene for recovery (replacing a broken drive with a spare drive). The server sits on the local network, and I am thinking of upgrading to a 10 gigabit/s LAN at least for it and my Photoshop computer. The 1 gigabit/s network certainly is a bottleneck at the moment. I too did backups to DVD at one point. My choice was DVD-RAM due to their longevity, but with such a small capacity, I soon switched to doing backups to HD - and did so for more than a decade now. The SATA interface made it easy to just plug them in and go. Eventually I had a single-drive docking station built into an computer case, but now I am using a generic USB 3 dual-HD docking station (rather much like the one in your video) that served me well for performing backups or data dumps. The HDs go back into their antistatic baggie and then into the box (of 10 or 20 ea) they were shipped in. I use battery backups for both all the computer gear, one for the router and switch, one for the server, and another one for the Photoshop computer. Label by date is reasonable, but how do you keep track of what subset of images is contained on each of your HDs? I keep finding myself not being able to do a full backup, so I have to split up into groups of files and backup to multiple devices.
I basically follow a routine similar to your system, except I use Drobo storage units - both Thunderbolt / USB units that are directly connected to my workstations and Ethernet-based 8-drive units. Unfortunately Drobo appears to be facing some problems, so I guess I must prepare to phase out to a different arrangement? I also rely on HD backups that I store offsite.
I store all my pictures on an old Drobo 5D attached to my computer. The Drobo has 5 2TB drives configured for dual drive failover. My computer is configured with BackBlaze which makes automatic backups of my computer and Drobo to the cloud. I just recently had 1 drive fail and all I had to was to replace it without loosing my data.
Thanks for sharing. My setup keeps no photos on my computer at all. I have been running a server out of my house for years (yes an actual server in a rack and everything) but at the end of the day it is just another computer. So my photos are stored on a Network Share from the Hardware raid 6 array (2 redundant drives), then backed up to a software raid setup once a week, and nightly to the external drive plugged into the back. The external drive gets rotated with one at my work once a week so simple enough to keep up and just far enough away to not worry about disasters at home. But I am started to hit that wall of the photos and documents don't fit on a standard external drive, so I will be looking into other setups shortly (hopefully I can start my own studio and run a mirrored drive setup over the internet like you want to do).
i primarily shoot on my iphone and have 4TB of images i want to backup including live photos. I use dropbox and google photos but im looking for something external. what NAS / external hard drive would you recommend? Looking for something that can hold 10TB and is easy to access the images from.
I'm just a hobbyist, but my photos are irreplaceable, so for me, it's 2 copies internal to my desktop, 2 copies on a NAS, 1 copy on each of 2 4-drive docks, 1 copy on each of 4 USB SSD drives at a separate location, and 3 cloud services.
the only hard drive failure i ever had was with an OWC external hard drive. It was such a nightmare but thankfully i took it somewhere and was able to recover the data but i would never recommend that hard drive because of my experience. i've had much better luck with LaCie and G-Drives. The company that I used to work for had 100s of LaCie drives that we used to back up every photoshoot and the retouchers used G-Drive raids to work off of. We had the LaCie backup, the raid backup, our Dam system, Jellyfish, and during COVID dropbox.
Hi Dave! I’ve owned my Synology for close to two years. It was a pain to setup, but it now works great except that I can’t access my files on my phone once I go outside the range of my router. I have 5G.
Hobbiest here. I thought I was doing well: three 2 TB SSD drives, one of which I keep at work. Unfortunately the file for the year 2022 became corrupted without me knowing, and when backed it up to the onsite and offsite backups it copied the corrupted file and I have lost the year 2022.
I almost always shoot tethered to a folder on a 2TB portable drive. One copy goes there and another is saved in camera on an SD card. If I'm not shooting tethered, I copy the RAW files to the portable drive as soon as I leave a job. Once I get home the portable drive gets copied to my NAS and, using Hyper backup, everything gets copied to a second remote NAS at my sisters house. After the final images are delivered, a copy of those are burned to an archive grade DVD. Only then are my SD cards wiped and files removed from the portable drive. Of course I'm only dealing with a few hundred files a week at the very most, not thousands per job. After one year, unless requested by a client, RAW files are removed from the NAS.
I have creative cloud and iCloud Dropbox also I Diskk great until I changed to new iPad and guess they have changed the fitting I have changed to the raid wow just got to the pelican must have
NAS is not for everyone and DAS might suit others as compaired to a NAS drive setup. Also, reliance on the internet is never a fail-safe system due to the various reasons of failure as well as a worldwide service downdrive or to even a war or sunspots wiping out such a service. The more backup you have the greater chance of reliance however, to much backup also creates its own nest of problems. Ask yourself what is it you are trying to do and provide, work.from that starting point but don't over complicate the process.
I bought an external hard drive and copied my pictures from my card. But I'm hesitant to delete them from the card so I'm thinking that will be my second back up. Just keep my cards. I need to organize the photos on the hard drive I guess, too. It's starting to get confusing, the hard drive, the cards, the computer, and then also all the photos in Lightroom and Lightroom CC. At least I'm an amateur but I do want to keep things organized and create some projects. Also, how to organize in Lightroom CC? Folders or collections? I can't seem to figure out how.
I don't use Lightroom, but I show how I organize the files on my hard drive in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uQfP1iLESMU.html
I use SSD drives 1TB can push it to 2TB and there would fail because of getting wear out no moving part plus I backup images on Blur ray discs 50 GB per disc 100 GB disc if can get them. The more places you can save them images the best chance to have them when evening mayhem strikes David has some good ideas which fit He's work flow and allows him to work in different levels with images. Thou he going to need a forklift with those drives in those cases or get a droid to help him Good way to cover all the bases for your images
I have heard that all the time: "It is not IF your hard drive dies, it is WHEN it will die" But I have a question: What about SSD drives, Do those die as well?
Great question. SSDs do "go bad" as well, but it really depends how you use them. They aren't susceptible to physical damage like HDDs are from drops and falls. However, they are usually only rated to work for a period of time, or for movement of a certain amount of data. So they do need to be replaced over time as well.
@@DavidBergmanPhoto Thank you, David! But that makes me feel insecure, even though it is true. How often do I need to replace an SSD that I use only for storage?
@@carlosread5887 Hard to say since there are many factors involved. I would check with the manufacturer to see what your drive is rated for. More importantly, just make sure you are (3-2-1) backed up and you'll be fine! :)
Excellent David! I also bought a Synology NAS last year (4 bay) with 48TB (pre-RAID) and love it! Have any of you figured out to make your Synology into an FTP server so you can send pics from your camera straight to the NAS?
Idea of 'auto sync' for backup (14:33 ) is concerning to me. A live-synced copy is not a backup. It can protect against some disasters, but the sync means that if something goes wrong with one copy (e.g. because of a mistake, a software bug, or malware) the second copy will just have a copy of the damage and not be usable for restoration. A real backup should allow you to restore things as they were at times in the past - e.g. a day ago, a week ago, a month ago and six months ago.
I have been looking at higher capacity hard drives, currently have a 3 TB external which I backup my Mac desk top. The original Mac hard drive failed last month but the technician was able to recover most everything. I guess you could say I'm semi pro with a small high school sport business doing banners, school team shoots etc. My BIG problem is arranging them, they are all over the place, some by year some by sport....my fault. One thing that has me a bit worried is occasionally tethering with light room. With Nikon, the images are sent directly to the computer, bypassing the memory card in camera...I think. Would appreciate any input about handling this issue. Thanks so much David for your videos. Ted in Sebastian Fl, home of the $9 haircut.
LOL re: haircut. I still pay way more in NYC. :) As for organization, I talk about it in my Photo Mechanic video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uQfP1iLESMU.html Hope that helps.
Hi David, do you have any videos that explain what to look for in an SSD or RAID Drive, for example speed for photographers, fastest connection cable type, security features etc.?😊
Great video!! I normally have my external hard drive bay unplugged. If I need a folder, I plug it in to power, turn on the drive, transfer the folder, and then unmount it and turn it off again. I feel it will stretch the life of the drives because they only come on once a week or so for a few minutes. What are your thoughts on this?
I use dropbox to back up 5 star shots + A Drobo 5D3 with 20Tb+ storage where the bulk files are placed so Lightroom can access all 450,000 ...AND a 6Tb where Lightroom backs up the CR2 files to As well I moved all the files that were on various 4tb drives I'd collected (so many!) into Lightroom and the Drobo - then I exported the DNG files as backups over 5 4tb drives that are kept off site ... Is an intervention required ? LOL
Hi David, maybe you mentioned it by accident, but you don’t have to sync the NAS devices (if you buy a second one) over the Internet. The better and much faster option is to sync them inside you LAN via switch or router where both NAS are connected.
When do you get rid of photos? I am a beginning photographer and, while there are some that I want to keep, most I want to look at, learn from for the next shoot. Is it typical to cull through your photos and say 'that was a good shot then but not now. Time to remove it'?
Commercially, I capture ~8,000 images per day, ~20,000 images per weekend. Any lesson learned during the evening slaughter (a.k.a. culling) is noted and the out of focus, poor composition images are moved to a trash drive along with their RAW files. They usually last about a month on the trash drive before their space is needed. feasible Last set of drives I bought for offline storage were 12TB WD Elements drives at $198 each. At $16.50 per TB, it's not worth my time to go back thru all my past events deleting a few images here and there just to save from having to buy one set of drives every couple of years. Once I'm done with the evening's cull, the images that remain will stay in my catalog until the whole library is deleted. Probably when my heirs see a stack of dusty drives and trash them.
Like GOA, I don't delete anything, unless it's just a blank frame or similar. I've made money going back through my archives and finding an image requested by a client that wasn't one of my initial "selects."