What is your long term archive solution?

[Joel Eade]

I am not a great or famous photographer and my work has no significance to most of the world but I thought my kids/grandkids etc might someday like to look back at my images. I have been shooting digital since 2009. Every year I have kept my images on my laptop as I go and I back that up to an external drive about every 2-4 weeks. At the end of the year I copy all my keeper images (usually 10-15 gB total annually) to a separate flash drive and some years I have burned to DVD's as well. Also most of my keepers are uploaded to my Zenfolio account.

Recently I was doing my 2015 back up routine and became curious as to the longevity and stability of this type of media and was surprised to find that many sources do not consider any of these very secure beyond 5 to 10 years and recommend re-archiving periodically.

So my questions for the forum are these...are most folks concerned about long term preservation of their images? If so, what are you doing to store and protect your images for the long haul?

I started reading about M-disc....is anyone using this or know much about it? Seems like the best currently available long term option to me.

[Kayaker72]

If I get to vote you'll publish a couple of books. Say start with a coffee table book. Then say a "Birds of the Southeastern US."

I rearchive about every three years. Typically by buying a newer larger external HD. Right now I have my long term archive in about 4 spots, including a 2TB hard drive located with family in Idaho. All my external hard drives are still working, but I've heard the same thing, that digital media is temporary.

Next, we do "best of" photo albums for each year. Yep, I am the one guy still buying 4x6 photo albums. I need to catch up on a few years, but we have most of them and getting caught up on the photo albums is one of this years planned winter projects.

[DavidEccleston]

Yes Joel... do a book. I bought two lay-flat photobook coupons (buy now, make book later) for Christmas. A 14"x11" and a 11"x8.5". I'm guessing you can do better. You've got so many high-quality shots of birds I'm sure you can get a bird book published.

Someone at work just bought an M-disc drive last week. He said it was surprisingly inexpensive. He got the one for 25GB disks, blu-ray BD-R compatible. Not sure what makes it special over other BD-Rs. A quick look at the MDisk site, and I see there are also 4.7GB (DVD size), 50GB (dual layer BluRay), and 100GB (quad layer bluRay). They're all rated for 1000 (roman numeral M) years, but I doubt you'll still find a compatible reader in 1000 years.

I see they're just over $100 on Amazon for one that's external, supporting USB3, and does BD-25, and DVD. The advantage of the external over SATA is that you can attach to PC, Mac, Laptop, whatever. The advantage of BD + DVD is you can give DVD discs to friends/family/clients who may not have a bluray drive.

That does seem like a decent option... but make yourself a book too.

[Lumens]

I am very heavy on good backups, but have not thought about "Preservation" so to speak. Yes electronic media is good and I have all my computers backed up on external hard drives and then the cloud for extra protection. But something for "Preservation" should not include media formats that likely won't be around 20 years from now. Something hard that can be held in the hand and requires nothing (like electricity) but looking at it is the way to go.

I am going to have to think about putting a book together. That is a marvelous idea.

[jamsus]

My suggestion.

Survive for 2-3 years with HDD \ External HDD Backups or more powerful solution (RAID architecture for backup) then CLOUD everything in 2-3 years the space will be enough

[peety3]

Survive for 2-3 years with HDD \ External HDD Backups or more powerful solution (RAID architecture for backup) then CLOUD everything in 2-3 years the space will be enough

Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

[Jonathan Huyer]

Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

I've been doing quite okay with cloud backup... I have about 1.4 TB on CrashPlan right now. The upload speed is about 1.5 GB/hour, so when I come home from a major trip and have 500 GB to deal with, yes it could take a while. But who needs to back everything up? At least 95% of the photos I take are junk, so once I do a purge, the cloud backup works just fine. For example on my last bear trip to British Columbia I took 20,000 images. I've pared them down to just over 800, and I could slash even further if I wanted to.

[jrw]

Sorry, but RAID is absolutely, positively NOT a backup solution. It is simply a way to have one particular storage set survive a drive failure. If a natural event strikes the RAID set, it's just as dead as the next drive. And cloud will struggle to keep up with the needs of photographers, particularly with respect to upload bandwidth.

Perhaps you wouldn't mind sharing what you do consider to be an effective backup strategy? I ask as RAID storage is part of my redundant drives in multiple locations plan for backup.

[Raid]

Well my first backup solution was to use archive grade DVDs.

I would use the backup catalog feature in Photoshop and burn a new set of DVDs once a year. I would also do a quarterly incremental backup.

Unfortunately some years back it stopped working, never did workout why.

Have had a NAS for many years so what I would do is backup my PC (this contains all of my images) to the NAS. Since this NAS was also mirrored to a second NAS everything was safe (that's 3 copies).

The ideal system would be to use the cloud. The only problem in Australia is that we not only have bandwidth caps, but we also have usage caps. This means that you need to be rich to be able to afford Cloud backup.

Upload bandwidth and rates are the worst part which means that this would never be a viable option for me

[peety3]

Perhaps you wouldn't mind sharing what you do consider to be an effective backup strategy? I ask as RAID storage is part of my redundant drives in multiple locations plan for backup.

Multiple geographically-dispersed copies, period. One copy at my parents' house, 4 miles by helicopter, 5 miles by car, accessible even when our little town becomes an island during flooding. One copy at my office, 8 miles by helicopter, 14 miles by car, brick building. One copy at my in-laws, 1700 miles by helicopter, 2100 miles by car, concrete exterior walls. 4TB drive handles our archives from 1999 to mid-2010. They don't change, so the backup volumes will remain at their offsite locations undisturbed. 4TB drive handles our archives from mid-2010 to now. At the moment, I'm using a fleet of 7 2TB drives for backups. Three of those handle mid-2010 to mid-2014; those also don't change (except for rare re-edits), so the backup drives remain in place. Four of those handle mid-2014 to present. One sits at home, gets updated every two weeks, and is shuttled to alternating sites as the opportunity presents.

As much as Lloyd Chambers of DigLloyd/Mac Performance Guide annoys me, he's got a lot of great ideas to share. One of these is to always partition your RAID arrays into 4TB volumes, so the backup process is more manageable. He's definitely onto something.

Personally, I'd be scared of using a RAID array as any one (or more) of my offsite backups. That array, in almost all cases, needs to be kept as a concise, undisturbed unit, potentially mated to either a hardware RAID card, hardware RAID chassis, or OS/RAID driver/toolset.

For at least the past 3 years, whenever I've come upon a need to grow my home storage solution, I've contemplated a RAID array, and I just can't swallow the cost. I can use a simple, single SSD for scratch work, with simple 'rsync' to two adjacent HDDs for short-term local triplication, and get great performance from Lightroom etc. Once the job is finished, I sync it to my home archive, and delete from the SSD. I sync to one of the offsite drives, and delete from the first HDD. I swap the offsite drive with one at the office/parents, sync to the returned drive, and delete from the other HDD. Tedious, yes a bit, but the only place that RAID would make a difference (to me) would be at home, to avoid the local HDD sync/deletions.