Back up storage

[TimWalter]

Hello everyone. I haven't been on here much the past few months, but hoping to be on here regularly from now.

Been thinking about back up. I remember when I went to Ronan's Recording Boot Camp a few years ago, John Rodd gave a talk about back ups. He said "if it isnt in 3 places, it doesnt exist". Of course he was dealing with projects like recording a symphony orchestra at Abbey Road with 42 mics, etc. If HE lost a project, it would be much more significant than anything I have on my computer (lol). Still, the concept remains.

I currently have a number of external hard drives hooked up to my imac, and carbon cloner works in the background updating all my files every hour. I also have a bootable hard drive same size as my main drive on my imac, and that gets backed up every hour. What I am NOT prepared for is physical loss at my facility (fire, tornado, flood, or even theft..) regarding theft, it actually happened to me. I had a break in at my company that I owned and ran, and it just so happened I had been working my lap top (which was my main computer at the time) that day and I had the hard drive out of the lap top and the backup also laying on my desk. The thieves took the hard drives (but not the computer!) and a power tool or two, and kind of ransacked the office. I later heard through the grapevine it was couple of upset former employees, but I actually lost 6 months of all emails and other data, gone, poof. They took my main drive and my backup. They most likely didn't even open up the files (not that savvy) but instead used them for beer coasters, etc. but still the data was lost. ha ha.


Hard drive storage has gotten cheaper and cheaper.

Anyway, I am thinking about getting a huge (maybe 4tb) dual raid hard drive, and keeping it in a remote location, and bringing it back to update every quarter or something. Seems like a lot of work. But at least It would be a a "belay line" so to speak. The other option is cloud backup. I did sign up for one of the cloud companies that was supposed to upload all my files behind the scenes years ago, but the upload speed so so slow that after 6 months it still had only about 10% of my file size (and my main hard drive was like 500gig or 750 gig, not that big). Maybe now it would work better. It certainly would be easier than getting a safety deposit box at the bank or wherever and changing hard drives out every quarter.

What do you guys do?

Thanks and best regards.
Tim

[orest]

I had a safety deposit box at my bank, but, it was very time consuming going to the bank all the time to pick up the hard drive, make the backup and return it to the bank.

I bought a fire proof safe instead. Now I can just open it with my key and make the backup easy!
We also have a home alarm and an extra lock on my studio door.

That's my recommendation!

[mojobone]

My friend runs this: https://iosafe.com/

Tell 'em I sent you, it won't score you a discount but they'll be tremendously impressed that you know me. [winks]

[Paulie]

How much total storage are you talking about? There are a variety of cloud-based solutions that are affordable, the initial upload takes a while, but after that it's easy to keep things updated. And, most of those services by default put their storage in three locations (because most of them are actually using Amazon AWS which does this automagically for storage).

There are several NAS (network attached storage devices) out there as well, some more advanced than others. Any good NAS should have multiple hard drives and use RAID to protect you in the event of a disk failure.

In a perfect world, I would buy a NAS storage solution for home, get all of my content onto it, then use SuperDuper to copy all important files to two separate hard drives and store those drives off-site. Two drives because drives fail, so you need to have backups of your backups.

Probably the most popular NAS for Mac users right now is the well-respected Drobo. It has a really simple interface that integrates with your mac desktop. I've also heard good things about the Synology NAS. It has the more common browser-based interface.

For your use performance will not be a major concern, so don't worry about the difference between RAID1 or RAID5, etc. There is a difference when it comes to how many drives you need. If you go with RAID1 you will need to buy drives in pairs because RAID1 mirrors content, meaning that it copies it to two drives at the same time. If a drive fails you have a good copy on the other drive. If you go with RAID5 you will only need one extra drive in addition to your storage needs because it uses a parity bit to determine how to rebuild files in the event of a failure.

Have you summed up all of your content to see how many TV you need?

Paul