Aren't you glad you used film?!

[Steve Smith]

It's just that, when you use a RAID mirrored drive box to ensure that when one drive goes down, the other keeps going, you don't expect the operating system (or something) to carefully delete everything except one file, then copy that deleted state back to the second drive, all without somuch as a by your leave.

This is something I often wonder about when I hear of people's multi back up regimes. How do they know that the files they are backing up are still o.k. and not corrupt.

And yes, I am glad I use film (only) so this wouldn't bother me at all.


Steve.

[Patrick Dixon]

A proper backup regime might consist of a daily incremental backup and a full backup once a week - with one of those full backups retained off-site for each month of the year. That way even if you are backing up corrupt data or your backup is bad, you limit your losses - and if you have a fire or disaster, you have something away from the building to fall back to.

That might be OTT for your photos, but it's a question of balancing cost and time against the importance of your data. As Joanna says, the films are a backup of sorts, although not necessarily a very conveniently recoverable one.

Redundancy in a RAID is good for individual disk hardware failures and for speedy recovery (you can usually continue working whilst the RAID rebuilds itself on new hardware), but often no good for operator error, software bugs, or malicious attacks.

[timparkin]

A proper backup regime might consist of a daily incremental backup and a full backup once a week - with one of those full backups retained off-site for each month of the year. That way even if you are backing up corrupt data or your backup is bad, you limit your losses - and if you have a fire or disaster, you have something away from the building to fall back to.

That might be OTT for your photos, but it's a question of balancing cost and time against the importance of your data. As Joanna says, the films are a backup of sorts, although not necessarily a very conveniently recoverable one.

Redundancy in a RAID is good for individual disk hardware failures and for speedy recovery (you can usually continue working whilst the RAID rebuilds itself on new hardware), but often no good for operator error, software bugs, or malicious attacks.

The one thing everyone forgets which is essential in every good backup strategy is a regular integrity check. The very minimum that this means is going in and opening a few files at random from various years. At best it using a tool like tripwire (command line only I'm afraid) to compare the contents of a drive with a previous version. In order for this to work, it's best to keep core backups read only (that way you can easily compare old directories with new directories to check things haven't changed).

Unfortunately all of the tools I can find are command line ones...

http://www.l0t3k.org/security/tools/integrity/

Alternatively, you could create dmg's of your backup folders and then checksum (a unique signature for the contents of a file) manually.

http://c-command.com/dropdmg/

I'm happy to expand on this. It's only worth noting because I know *lot* of people that have come to use their backups only to find that all or part of them are corrupted or the backup has not been working recently..

Tim

[lostlandsuk]

Reading all this makes me realise how glad I am that all I have to worry about with my negs and non-digital stuff, is fire, flood, mice and moths
Phil

[Paul Mitchell]

I must do something about clearing out my back up files... some go back 20 years! I still have some of my earliest work on 44mb SyQuest disks (remember them!). Recently I took to the tip my last Power Mac (7500/100) and for pure nostalgia I hooked up a very aged SyQuest drive via a SCSI cable and it still worked!

Sorry this reminiscing doesn't help Joanna with her immediate dilemma. Anyway look on the bright side Joanna you have a few days off over the Christmas period to start your re-scanning ... he now runs off and hides!

[lostlandsuk]

I've got a Quadra in the loft - was a graphics server . . . 800MB HDD!

[uniB]

I must do something about clearing out my back up files... some go back 20 years! I still have some of my earliest work on 44mb SyQuest disks (remember them!). Recently I took to the tip my last Power Mac (7500/100) and for pure nostalgia I hooked up a very aged SyQuest drive via a SCSI cable and it still worked!

Awww, SyQuest drives, still remember the sound of those mounging up... chucka chucka chuck chucka churrrrr chup chup chup! Although they more commmonly didn't mount and you had to do it 40 times 'til it finally mounted. And when I finally gor a 200mb one.... wow!

[Paul Mitchell]

Awww, SyQuest drives, still remember the sound of those mounging up... chucka chucka chuck chucka churrrrr chup chup chup! Although they more commmonly didn't mount and you had to do it 40 times 'til it finally mounted. And when I finally gor a 200mb one.... wow!

I also remember the speed that they were ejected! if you weren't careful they'd fly out and skitter across the studio floor

[SteveH]

Comiserations and good luck Joanna. During the Millenium changeover in BT I once had my entire filing system (3 years work) trashed by the engineer doing the upgrade. Being a sceptical s*d, I had already backed up most data but still lost all my emails. Painful. And embarrasing - it was my team running the upgrade programme.

I don't know Time Machine, but assuming that this is a Mac only product, for those of us who use Messysoft, ViceVersa http://www.tgrmn.com/is cheap and effective. I looked carfully at my workflow (as I shoot a lot of di****l for my business), and decided that RAID was fine so long as the problem was with a failing disk, but no use if it was finger trouble, so I back up my raw files to DVD at the same time as importing to Lightroom and then synchronise the LR library using ViceVersa with an external HDD when the import is complete.

Happy New Year All.

Steve

[Joanna Carter]

I don't know Time Machine, but assuming that this is a Mac only product

Hi Steve. Time Machine is not just a Mac product, it actually gets installed as part of the operating system.

I looked carfully at my workflow (as I shoot a lot of di****l for my business), and decided that RAID was fine so long as the problem was with a failing disk, but no use if it was finger trouble

I finally managed to recover quite a lot of my files; most of the missing ones seem to be some of the thousands of digisnaps that I was going to get around to sorting "one day". My greatest relief was to find, what I think is, the majority of my LF images that I have spent a lot of time preparing.

For those of you who use Macs, can I recommend Data Rescue 3 for retrieving accidentally deleted files that are on external drives that have not been backed up with Time Machine.

I believe my problem may well have been that I upgraded OS X from Leopard to Snow Leopard without upgrading the driver for the e-Sata card, to which I had connected the RAID box; but, who knows?

I back up my raw files to DVD at the same as importing to Lightroom and then synchronise the LR library using ViceVersa with an external HDD when the import is complete.

Whatever you do, don't rely on CD or DVD media as a secure backup. Unless you have extremely good quality (gold) disks, they can lose data as soon as 5 years after being written. You should really re-copy all such media, at least, every five years, even with good quality media.

Better still, use multiple external hard disks, cloning one to the other to keep them up to date. If I had done this rather than rely solely on a RAID box, I would have only lost work from the latest cloning. Oh, and once you have cloned a drive, disconnect the clone and keep it somewhere safe.

[SteveH]

Hi Joanna,

Glad you got most of your files back and thanks for the tips.

I don't rely on DVDs for the active files, and my main files are backed up on an off-line drive, so effectively I have 3 copies - 1 fallback set (the DVDs), a main drive (on the PC) and an off-line drive (the backup). I will also recopy the DVD's every 5 years (not had to do this yet), so I feel reasonably secure! I won't use blue-ray as there is too much to loose on 1 disk, and for the same reason I prefer DVDs to another HDD as my final line of defence. I even considered tape but decided that it was too expensive per Gbyte.

All the best

Steve