[popo]

I use the free version, but if you get a paid version you can have extra features.

[borisbg]

Popo, SynkBack rocks! Thank you again.

[Mahadragon]

Don't understand why the cloud isn't a viable alternative. Exactly how slow are your upload speeds? I don't see why you can't just sync your photos with Dropbox, Onedrive or any other cloud solution overnight, wake up and it's done. Also don't understand the volume of photos. If you take so many pictures there's no way all those photos are keepers. With programs like Lightroom and Aperture, it's not hard to export a lot of compressed photos and storing those (as smaller files) into the cloud. If you want, you can export those photos in higher resolution and then zip them up later on to compress the file size so it doesn't take so long to upload.

 

For me, I just have my favorite pictures scanned and burned to DVD. Easy.

[popo]

My current connection is 10M upload. So for a small data set, say, 10GB, that'll be about 3 hours. I guess incremental backups could be manageable. Once you look at the monthly costs at TB level, that'll really start to add up too. Still nothing close to just buying more hard disks. In my scenario, I never need remote access so there is no value add from going cloud, apart from the off-site backup.

 

I am quite prolific in quantity, and for sure I don't get near 100% keepers. But even after reduction, the quantity is still high. To me, the original source files are most important to be backed up, so there isn't a space saving possible there.

 

Of course, if your style is different, it might work. Just still not a practical option for me.

[stoppingdown]

WIth Amazon Glacier costs are in the magnitude of $0.01 per gigabyte per month. You don't have a real-time access to data and thus the backup process must be managed with some more care, but being a long-term backup this is hardly a problem.

 

The only reason for which I'm not using it yet is about privacy - I don't sell my photos, there are no photos which hold secrets or privacy stuff, still I don't like to accept the fact that I put my stuff on the web and some people have more or less unauthorised access to it (this particular scenario, anyway, should be manageable with an encryption software run locally, before putting the stuff on the cloud).

 

I recommend using multiple approaches. The backup process for my photos is the same I use for all my data: everything is on my laptop (with two disks), it's cloned bit-per-bit to another laptop (the older one), I have an USB external drive that gets incremental backups several times per day; then everything is cloned to a RAID 6 storage (5 disks, 2 can fail with no loss of data); after some time, when the decimation of photos has been completed, they are archived to both a set of DVD (4GB per disk), DVD hi density (8GB per disk), twice. The two sets are kept in two different places of the house. I used to keep one set in another house in a different town where I frequently worked, but things have changed in the past two years. Still, I feel decently covered by this strategy. My house burning, or an earthquake, would destroy everything, but I have a practice to keep always at hand a small bag with all the extremely important stuff (such as the wallet, with documents inside): it also contains the USB backup unit. 

 

ZFS has been mentioned, and it's a good point. Some years ago it seemed that Apple was going to include it in Mac OS X, but they didn't. Unfortunately HFS+ is very unreliable, in the past I've seen at least twice silent data corruption happening. People should be aware of this in case of incremental backup to a rewritable media: the risk is to have one file corrupted to be inadvertently backed up and overwriting the good backup file. That's why I have both, backups on rewritable and non rewritable media. Furthermore, I take advantage of the fact that RAW files never change, so I always compute their fingerprint (e.g. MD5) and periodically compare them. When a MD5 changes, something is wrong - stop, think, find the good file and restore. This practice should be also periodically used to check the integrity of optical media, because they last long but aren't eternal.

 

PS Yes, a RAID controller can fail, but I don't see the problem: we're talking about stuff which is off-the-shelf, so buying a replacement is not a problem. Just keep an eye on the market to check whether the product goes end-of-life and spare parts are no more sold. Also, if you use RAID units with a documented protocol, ever in the worst case you'll find a professional service capable to recover the data - it would cost you a few bucks, but this is an extreme case.

[popo]

WIth Amazon Glacier costs are in the magnitude of $0.01 per gigabyte per month. You don't have a real-time access to data and thus the backup process must be managed with some more care, but being a long-term backup this is hardly a problem.

To me that's not cost effective and needs to go down another order of magnitude to be interesting for me. Let's say my total data set is 3TB. That'll be $30/month or $360 a year. I can easily buy 3 consumer grade 3TB hard disks for that much with change left over (keeping two local at all times, cycling the 3rd one offsite), and that will last multiple years. Personally I don't use 3 copies, only two, so the cost is even lower.

[thxbb12]

Don't understand why the cloud isn't a viable alternative. Exactly how slow are your upload speeds? I don't see why you can't just sync your photos with Dropbox, Onedrive or any other cloud solution overnight, wake up and it's done. Also don't understand the volume of photos. If you take so many pictures there's no way all those photos are keepers. With programs like Lightroom and Aperture, it's not hard to export a lot of compressed photos and storing those (as smaller files) into the cloud. If you want, you can export those photos in higher resolution and then zip them up later on to compress the file size so it doesn't take so long to upload.

 

For me, I just have my favorite pictures scanned and burned to DVD. Easy.

 

There is no point in trying to zip an image file (unless one uses an uncompressed format which I think would be pretty insane). You won't gain anything by trying to zip jpegs or raw files. Even tiff supports lzw compression...

[youpii]

I don't have raid, just a backup to external drive.

But I also change HD (main and backup) frequently, basically every two years.

[stoppingdown]

To me that's not cost effective and needs to go down another order of magnitude to be interesting for me. Let's say my total data set is 3TB. That'll be $30/month or $360 a year. I can easily buy 3 consumer grade 3TB hard disks for that much with change left over (keeping two local at all times, cycling the 3rd one offsite), and that will last multiple years. Personally I don't use 3 copies, only two, so the cost is even lower.

 

I understand your point, but you should put some other stuff into the equation. If you buy your disks, you're also taking also all the risks of failure. On the average, even customer grade disks are reliable, but there's the chance of taking a lemon. With the cloud, you're guaranteed of quality. With your own disks, you're also taking the risk of having them stolen, or - please touch iron - having them damaged together house damages, or a trivial voltage spike, etc. I mean: pricing is not only related to the direct facility/service we buy, but also to the associated risks; let's talk of "ownership costs".

 

Anyway I won't insist since I've just written that I'm not using the cloud, but going your same way of local hardware. Let's say that cloud pricing are going to drop and this should make this solution more palatable - sure, even disks will be cheaper in future, but under a certain price threshold I wouldn't worry about using a cheaper solution, rather than having less things to take care of.  

[popo]

For the moment, my worse case scenario is if my house gets toasted, I will have near 100% data loss as I don't use off-site at the moment. While disks don't last forever, I'm suggesting you could keep up to 3 copies at very low cost. Apart from the live copy, I don't run the backups 24/7 so they're not at risk from transient conditions.

 

While I'm not a data centre user in quantity of disks, I'd say there is a better than 95% chance of a disk lasting 3 years at 24/7 running, without noticeable error. With two copies, that's well over 99%, and considering I don't run them 24/7, the operating life may well be longer. If I were paranoid, a 3rd copy off site would pretty much cover reasonable scenarios outside the collapse of civilisation.