johnwartjr
Senior Member
Backups.. the 'dirty word'
I'm an IT guy, and have been for going on 15 years now.
I realize the importance of a good backup strategy, as I've had to recover my fair share of failed systems.
Up until recently, backups hadn't been a huge concern for me - but my recently purchased D700 has 25 MB RAW files, and that takes a LOT of disk space.
My present workflow for importing images:
-Insert card in PC, it opens LR3 import dialog
-Tell LR3 to make a 2nd copy to a mapped network drive. Network is gigabit switched, so that doesn't take as long as it sounds
This works pretty well, but lacks the 'offsite copy'. I do have a safety deposit box, so the offsite copy has somewhere to go.
I started running out of disk space, so I ordered 2 external USB/eSATA drives, 2 TB capacity each. I added one to the 2nd machine and set LR3 to copy the files to it instead of the internal drive.
The 2nd one will go on/with my laptop, and I'll 'archive' older stuff off the laptop to it, and keep the files I'm presently working with on the drive.
The challenge, though, is the 'offsite copy'. I tried carbonite.com, and while the concept is pretty sweet, it's incredibly time-intensive. I went out and did a small shoot, and came home and downloaded 10 GB of content to my PC. It took several days to upload 10 GB to carbonite's servers.
I could get more external drives, if that's the answer. But, I'm not convinced it *is* the answer. I'm also waiting on Comcast to raise hell for transferring gigs of data all the time.
My needs for a backup are going to increase, as I'm shooting more and more every month.
How do you handle your backups?
I'm an IT guy, and have been for going on 15 years now.
I realize the importance of a good backup strategy, as I've had to recover my fair share of failed systems.
Up until recently, backups hadn't been a huge concern for me - but my recently purchased D700 has 25 MB RAW files, and that takes a LOT of disk space.
My present workflow for importing images:
-Insert card in PC, it opens LR3 import dialog
-Tell LR3 to make a 2nd copy to a mapped network drive. Network is gigabit switched, so that doesn't take as long as it sounds
This works pretty well, but lacks the 'offsite copy'. I do have a safety deposit box, so the offsite copy has somewhere to go.
I started running out of disk space, so I ordered 2 external USB/eSATA drives, 2 TB capacity each. I added one to the 2nd machine and set LR3 to copy the files to it instead of the internal drive.
The 2nd one will go on/with my laptop, and I'll 'archive' older stuff off the laptop to it, and keep the files I'm presently working with on the drive.
The challenge, though, is the 'offsite copy'. I tried carbonite.com, and while the concept is pretty sweet, it's incredibly time-intensive. I went out and did a small shoot, and came home and downloaded 10 GB of content to my PC. It took several days to upload 10 GB to carbonite's servers.
I could get more external drives, if that's the answer. But, I'm not convinced it *is* the answer. I'm also waiting on Comcast to raise hell for transferring gigs of data all the time.
My needs for a backup are going to increase, as I'm shooting more and more every month.
How do you handle your backups?