Backup Strategy for a Photographer - help please
I need some help and advice on my backup strategy. I work as a photographer and wish to set up an effective strategy that looks after my photography files, as well as my personal documents/music. I have outlined the details of my setup and how my backup is configured and would really appreciate any feedback!
Keeping it simple
I originally looked into all the options available for setting up my backup including using NAS or Drobos and setting up RAID etc. Ultimately it was all a bit much and too confusing and I needed to get something set up (because i had no backup at the time). I want to progress to a more advanced setup in the future - but right now I have opted for the simplest setup I could manage - which is backing up to a single external drive. I explain below about how I want to improve on this strategy in the details below.
CURRENT HARDWARE CONFIGURATION (desktop computer)
Computer OS: windows XP
Software: Acronis True Image Home 2010
HD#1: 350GB, internal drive which is split into 2 partitions:
– C:/ (50gb) for windows OS and program files/installs.
about 40gb of this partition are in use
– S:/ (300gb) mapped to be the My documents, which contains all music and personal documents etc.
about 200gb of this partition are in use.
HD#2: 1TB, internal drive which is used for all my Photography files
– P:/ (1tb) containing my photography files. Currently using 350GB of this drive.
HD#3: 1.5TB, external drive for backup
– R:/ (1.5tb) backup drive. not used for anything else. This is a western digital elements drive.
CURRENT BACKUP STRATEGY
I have configured ATI 2010 to do the following (all backup files are stored on the R:/ drive):
- Image Backup
C:/ is configured to have a monthly image backup taken. This takes an image snapshot of my C:/ on the 1st of every month. The New image is set to replace the previous one.
Question(1): Is this a sensible approach? I feel that this means if I had a computer failure I could restore the C:/ image onto a new disk, to get my computer setup restored quickly, and then use the files and folders backup from below to restore my files? - Files and Folder backup
A task is set to run every night to take a backup of all files and folders on the S:/ and P:/ drives. This is set to be an incremental backup. After each 10 incremental backups, a new full backup is created.
Question(2): I feel that my incremental files an folder strategy works ok - but I am not sure if recreating a full backup every 10 days is the right amount of time? Creating a full backup takes a loooong time to run, and having more incremental backups would mean that I have a little more coverage if I accidentally delete a file and only realize a few days later. Although, leaving the recreation of the full backup too long means that it will eat into disk space on my backup drive (R:/) especially when my P:/ gets larger. Currently I am not running the validation on the backup because this appears to be taking way too long to run (where the full backup seems to take something like 20 hours to be created?).
PLANNED UPDATES/PROBLEMS WITH BACKUP STRATEGY
- Non Stop Backup (unable to get working)
I attempted to set this up, but kept getting an error message during the configuration. From memory I was unable to select the R:/ as the location to store the backup to - it did not appear in the list to select from. I wanted to set this up to assit with recovery for accidental deletion or overwriting an important file by accident. Question(3): Do you have any advice on my problem, and if I can get around this, what settings would you recommend I use? - Backup redundancy / Offsite backup (currently not set up)
My backup strategy currently stops at my backup drive (R:/). I need to setup something that enables me to swap out my backup drive and take the copy off site. How do I go about setting this up? If I got a second 1.5TB drive (lets call it HD#4), and mapped this drive to also be R:/ could I just swap this with the #3 hard drive, and take #3 off site, and then alternate the drives every week, or every month? Can ATI handle this, or would it get all confused? When I swap the drives the files on drive swapped in will be old - would ATI recognize this and kick off a full backup and a new image?
Question(4): do you have any advice on setting up my off site backup/ HD swap out? Do I need to get some sort of NAS setup with RAID1 and hot swappable drives to achieve this?
OTHER QUESTIONS
Question(5): Do you have any comments/suggestions on my backup strategy? Am I overlooking any obvious factors?
Question(6): Error reporting from ATI. I push all my emails through gmail - can anyone tell me how I can set up error reporting to email my gmail address when a backup fails?
Thanks for your comments
Brence,
Generally speaking I think your strategy is on the right track, however I think I'd recommend the following.
1. As your photographs are I imagine more important than a hosed OS, I would reconsider whether imaging them at all is neccessary, rather than just copying them to two alternative drives. Why? Whilst the risk is very low,encapsulating the photos in a a proprietary format does open up the possibility of file corruptio. If the tib file is corrupted in any way even by one bit, then your access to retrieve your photos is stymied.
My photos are in raw and jpg format - I have copies of the main directory of all the photos on three different drives. The main drive used mainly for photos (note this is a separate internal drive0 and then plain copying to two external drives. I have one complete tib image of this drive for redundancy purposes.
If all your photos are in jpg format, you will of course get very little further compression from TI. If you do decide to keep the photos as an image, then I suggest changing the mode from incremental to differential - the reason being, with a chain of incrementals, only one needs to ahve a problem to render the complete chain unrecoverable. If this is the last in the chain, maybe not so bad, if the full or early inc's then the archive is useless. Differential on the other hand only has one or two in the chain. Depending on how frequently the photos get updated would depend on how often you run the task and at what point you remake a full image. I'd want to make a full image at least weekly, and have a schedule that keeps at least a 2 weeks worth of fulls on disk at a time - even better if those two weeks were on separate drives.
As for your 'c' image, I would again keep at least one previous full, just in case.
I'll jot down a task/schedule later when I get home from work.
@Colin
Thanks for the advice.
Image vs file copy - I certainly see your point about just copying the files rather than making an image. I would actually prefer to do this - but am not sure of the best way to set this up. Can I set this up in ATI?
The image files that I am backing up are predominantly RAW, .PSD and .JPEG files. RAW and .PSD files take up the most space due to their larger size. The 5dMKII spits out RAW files that are 25-30mb each and some .psd files can run into the 150-500mb size depending on what I am doing and how many layers etc I wish to keep in the file.
Backup drive disk space - is there a recommended ratio of backup drive size vs the amount of data you want to save? To be able to store multiple backups on the drive, I imagine that I would really need a backup drive that is 2 or 3 times larger than the storage capacity on my computer?
I would be very interested to see your suggested task/schedule.
There are pure scheduled back up programs out there, that is they just copy files.
However with TI you could use the cloning feature, however this can't be scheduled using the TI scheduler. For a cloning operation you would need drives that are the same or greater in capacity. If cloning make sure the drive that has the original photos on, isn't marked as a system or bootable drive (it probably isn't).
For your purposes with whatever method you choose, I would suggest installing a removable hard drive rack for your backup drives this will enable you to 'hot swap' drives which has the benefit of not having to have your backups exposed to noise on the PC power lines or fatal problems if lightning takes your PC out. Internal because with the size of your files it will be much quicker using IDE or Sata interfaces then using USB even USB3.0.
If you wish to avoid the possibility of corruption caused by compression, but happy to have the photos within a TI container file, then you can opt for no compression, however I would strongly suggest you include a validation task whether with or without compression. Problem here is that validation will take much longer than it took to make the image and depending on your system may or may not slow the PC down.
Decisions:
Do I want a plug in replica of my main photo drive, and be able to check immediately if there is a problem and one that can be resolved by just 'going again' ? If yes then cloning is the way to go.
Do I want the option to selectively decide which images I'm going to make copies of? If yes, then a files and folders backup is the choice to make.
Do I really want to just set everything and let it run automatically? In that case it'll be a disk based image with or without compression.
Tasks.
I would image the C:\ partition at least once a week, the S:\ partition daily.
P:\ partition, however often you add or delete photos, so if the contents are reaosnably static, you might only want to copy/image this drive once a week, fortnight or month.
Task 1:
C: partition.
One Full per week with an incremental on a daily basis, consolidated over 4 weeks.
Task 2:
S: partition.
One Full per week and either an incremental or differential on a daily basis - incremental if you need to go back to any day in time, differential if you just need the alterations - the latter will take up less disk space.
Setup a task 3 and 4 which is a copy of tasks 1 and 2 but have them run every fortnight - let me make that clearer! Although all the tasks will cover a one week period have them start on alternate weeks, so Week 1 has tasks 1 and 2, Week 2 has tasks 3 and 4. Idealy have them on two different drives, but as I don't practice what I preach, I have them on the same external drive.
As far as space required for images of your C and S partitions, if using compression (recommended), normal equates to about a 30% reduction of USED space. If you consolidate these, then with current versions you will need at least the same amount of spare disk space as that archive uses - so if C: with 1 full and 6 incrementals consumes 30GB - to consolidate you will need at least 30GB spare capacity to store the interim files that TI will create.
P: partition.
The type of task will of course depend greatly on your choice of backup method as described in the post above.
Whatever frequency is decided upon, they should be copied/imaged to two different drives on an alternate basis - this though also depends on how 'crucial' these photos are for you - if they are for business, or pleasure, and, if for pleasure if they are major tearing of cloth if anything happened to them type photos.
If you are cloning then just sling each drive in as required and clone the P: drive to drive ext_1 or _2 - then using Windows Explorer or similar you can check the photos to see if everything was OK, then remove the drive and store it somewhere safe.
If you are making either an image or a files backup, and using two different drives make sure you either make two different tasks one for each drive or ensure that you do not tick the Run task only if the current device is attached.
For your photos just as much space as you think you are going to need.