I am so paranoid about loss of data. And when you have more than 700GB of images in 1 Lightroom catalogue then it becomes obvious that you must keep things running.
Not to set my requirments bar too high, I set to find what was avalaible to me. So I put my IT thinking cap on and thought about several possibilities that could work for me. This is what I prioritised my requirements;
Speed - I have to be able to get access to my images in a flash
Localised restores – something that is close by so I can get to it quickly
Off-site – this is paramount to a full disaster recovery solution
Up-to-date - keep my portable laptop sync’ed with all the business and ensure all documents and contracts are updated
Affordable – of course it has to be in the reach of our business.
I never wanted to rely on one set of systems, drives or process to get my images back. I’m in the business of images. My business works with some of the top athletes and identities in their chosen field. I could never rely on one single hard drive for this. Something I have heard some many professional photographers say to me before.
I have detailed in a diagram below (click to enlarge) how this looks.
1. 24″ iMac
2. Lexar UDMA CF Card Reader
3. External case with 2 x 1TB / FW 800 running RAID0
4. Drobo connected to a DroboShare
Other items include; Backblaze, ChronoSync, Dropbox
Click to enlarge
STAGE 1
The first part of my storage is using a large external Firewire 800 connected RAID0 drive set (3). This offers me the best performance when dealing with large files and indexes. It’s lightning quick to read and write from. Some may say this is overkill, but I don’t think you could ever have enough speed when it comes to this.
STAGE 2
The next part is to have my Firewire connected drives backed up to somewhere locally. This is where the Drobo (4) comes in handy. The sole purpose of my Drobo is for local backups. It is a massive pool of redundant disk. Given the landscape of storage these days and the available sizes are ever increasing I just went for the “in-the-middle” size, a 1TB drive. So the Drobo is populated with 4x 1TB. I also added on the DroboShare which gives it the Gigabit interface, therefore it sits on the network and it can provide local storage for all the other machines in the office. I was originally using it for the first stage, however I found it to be fairly slow in its read and write performance. Its job now of backup is perfect.
The missing link for actualIy controlling the scheduling of the backups is ChronoSync (marked with the clock in the above picture). It runs my backup schedule every few days. Here are my settings that I use for ChronoSync.
STAGE 3
The final step is to have all the important data off-site. This is where we use Backblaze. Some people have freaked out when I tell them that I use an in-the-cloud service for my backup. But really, this is a fantastic service that would save me huge amounts of cost. Think about it. The old way was to use tapes or CD/DVDs and then send them away. Have you ever tried and checked to see if you can restore? Most people don’t and by the time you are trying to restore you critical information it’s probably not going to work.
Final thoughts…
As you can see, we have many steps that we have automated to make things really simple and easy. And to make it time efficient, we’ve scheduled all these jobs to happen overnight – starting at 1am usually.
Many years ago I moved away from proprietary archiving solutions as you would always find yourself not being able to find the correct version of the software to read the archived files.
I’ve always said that you can never have enough backups. But really, if none of them work then what was the point in the first place. Think wisely about the solutions you use and always ask, what if.