Backing up your photos?

[Sonny]

I know this topic has been discussed many times and the quick answer usually turns out to be "back up the pics to DVD" or "back them up to an external drive". I need a larger solution and something that is also safer, quicker and more efficient.

So far I have 125GB of photos. The majority of the photos belong to my business and the rest are my personal photos. I usually keep two copies of each event. The originals and then the cropped/edited copies. Along with the photos I'll also keep the PSD files too.

I would like to have a dedicated "Photo Server" with a RAID setup and mirror backup. Cost will be an issue, but my main concern is to keep my photos safe, backed up and secure!!! I will ONLY use this PC/ Server to store and back up my photos. I've been out of the custom PC loop for so long..I have no idea what vendors are reliable anymore. So what would you guys recommend?

• Intel or AMD? Xeon, Dual Core, or 64bit?
• Mobos?
• 1, 2, or 3GBs of RAM?
• SATA, PATA, or SCSI RAID?
• To start...what size hard drives?
• Maxtor, Western Digital, or Seagate?
• OS: Win 2K, Win2K Server, or Win XP Pro (No Vista..too new and too many potential bugs)?

Any help will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Sonny

[bbailey]

I'm no expert, but if the computer isn't going to be used for processing the photos, just storing them, I would think any modern processor with decent amount of RAM will do you fine. I would think over 1GB would be overkill, but then again I could be wrong. I would think the primary concerns would be network transfer speed (if that is how you plan to transfer from your editing machine) and hard drive speed and capacity. I would think SATA would give you the best bang for the buck since it is fast and nowhere near as expensive (or loud) as a SCSI for the amount of storage you get.

As far as hard drive size, that really depends on how much you have to store. Also don't forget to account for the amount of space the the RAID array type you want to use requires. For example, if you want a mirror setup, and have 4x 250GB drives, only 500GB will be used since the other 500GB is used for the mirror.

It is also a good idea to occasionally backup to a removable media and take offsite in case of some sort of catastrophe.

[Davidtxs]

our server at work has 6 drives two mirrored boot drives and 4 120 gig seagate ata with a Promise Raid controller raid 5 it gives you about 320 gig of storage its been running abotu two years without a problem, i lean towards AMD nowadays I used to be strictly intel but built this one a year or so ago its the socket 754 so its behind but it still does the job great. two gigs of ram at least
Asus mb are hard to beat in my opinion
good luck

[Bill]

I would also back up any software needed to read your photos, if they are in a proprietary format, such as PSD or Nikon's NEF.

Something a Houstonian would appreciate is geographical separation(think 400+ miles away, not all on the Gulf Coast) for a backup, in addition to backups kept in the same region. The city could flood or be hurricane-zapped. Look at online storage or one of the companies that does off-site data storage for corporations. They may send copies to a half dozen facilities(temperature and humidity controlled, of course) around the country. I know it is expensive but you asked. Motivator=Katrina. Bonus Motivator=Fire, Theft, Tree Fall, and Lightning(sorry, surge suppressors do not necessarily prevent damage as their capacity may be exceeded).

You may be able to find a security partner and reciprocate services. Houston backs up Des Moines and Des Moines backs up Houston. I know a charity that did that with an affiliated organization. The cities were Dallas and Phoenix.

At least storage costs may be dropping faster than your storage needs are increasing.

[Trey Neal]

Do yourself a favor and go buy this book. I've read through a good bit of it and it answers most if not all of the questions.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Why not buy some off site storage space by the year? They should mirror their servers to a second location that way you are protected from "disasters" taking your data away.

Otherwise I would go with a RAID set up in a unit that is reasonabley transportable and have your system able to be torn down in a matter of minutes and loaded into a car/truck in a few more. There were many photographers who had their lifes work destroyed by Katrina because they had assumed that since they were out of normal flood areas their negatives were safe.

[sbp]

Originally Posted by Sonny

I

• Intel or AMD? Xeon, Dual Core, or 64bit?
• Mobos?
• 1, 2, or 3GBs of RAM?
• SATA, PATA, or SCSI RAID?
• To start...what size hard drives?
• Maxtor, Western Digital, or Seagate?
• OS: Win 2K, Win2K Server, or Win XP Pro (No Vista..too new and too many potential bugs)?

Any help will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Sonny

If this is only for storage (backup) why buy costly dule core etc.. Here is my take

Get simple PC buy SATA card and hook up 400Gig four or more drive. Install Linux (free and easy belive me). Then do software raid 5 (if you loose one disk your data is still ok. that will give you 1.2TB cheaper. You don't need high memory or cpy power for this.

or hell you can even buy 4 IDE drive and do software raid using linux on simple pc.

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by sbp

If this is only for storage (backup) why buy costly dule core etc.. Here is my take

Get simple PC buy SATA card and hook up 400Gig four or more drive. Install Linux (free and easy belive me). Then do software raid 5 (if you loose one disk your data is still ok. that will give you 1.2TB cheaper. You don't need high memory or cpy power for this.

or hell you can even buy 4 IDE drive and do software raid using linux on simple pc.

We run over 40 raided servers here at the University and we don't and I don't trust any software raid. If you are going to do raid go with hardware raid at the controller level and be sure and test it before you put any important data on it. Also and people want want to here this but the best long term back is to tape and be sure you can read the tape and rotate the tape media every few months.

There are no cheap and easy solutions to long term data storage and recovery.

If you want to understand disaster recovery at every level read this. What works for the enterprise also works for the home and small business.

[LoungeLizard]

I just bought a couple of these (their in UPS's hands right now), but it strikes me as the right thing for me at this time. Once I test out the first one, I may order a few more. http://cooldrives.com/usb-raid-enclo...drive-ide.html

PATA drives are very cheap and I figure that for $460, I get about two 600GB solutions - one "master" the other the backup.

Of course, this is just backing up the files.

[bbailey]

Originally Posted by johnastovall

We run over 40 raided servers here at the University and we don't and I don't trust any software raid. If you are going to do raid go with hardware raid at the controller level and be sure and test it before you put any important data on it. Also and people want want to here this but the best long term back is to tape and be sure you can read the tape and rotate the tape media every few months.

There are no cheap and easy solutions to long term data storage and recovery.

If you want to understand disaster recovery at every level read this. What works for the enterprise also works for the home and small business.

Agreed, I've never been a fan of software RAID. Hardware is the way to go.

[sbp]

Originally Posted by johnastovall

We run over 40 raided servers here at the University and we don't and I don't trust any software raid.

Well I disagree as we run hundreds of server on commericial production on software raid (linux). They are very very reliable. Some are raid1 and some are raid0. Though we don't have software raid-5.

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by sbp

Well I disagree as we run hundreds of server on commericial production on software raid (linux). They are very very reliable. Some are raid1 and some are raid0. Though we don't have software raid-5.

Well my experince has been only raid-5 is worth doing.

Raid 0 is useless as all it does in increase throught put and provides no fault tolence.

Raid 1 is the most over head (100%) of any fault toleran solution and doesn't provide fast on the fly hot swap. So why bother?

[zeroendless]

I been researched and have couple Raid data storage for personal use. Hope I can provide you the answers here, ........ I don't go for dirt-cheap solution, I go for speed with durability and let not says cheap ...it’s affordable. :) The reason I have huge storage is not only for photo but my non-compression DVD movie. I think I have about 350-400 DVD movies in storage. But My photo is somewhere 350-400GB, Before you start, I say the 'cheaper' solution for photo storage is to get 3x750GB, one on board for data editing, one sync to backup on 2nd station then one store remotely. Believe me, this is much much cheaper approach to do.

If you have to do Raid 5, you still need backup for the data then another remote backup. It cost money for ya small storage.

Anyway.....My workings station is Raid 0 for OS (no data), single large disk for data(used as temp location for fast editing). Then a separate server storage in Raid 5 for all my media and images. That server again has separate Raid 0 OS for speed, sounds risky? Don’t be, all my os drives are well imaged and hard copied, in case of failure, I will just slide the mirror drive in and up and running in 5 minutes, if not, I have the image rewrite and back to work in less than15 minutes. Then I will sync my photo images to 2nd raid server as well as to hdd and store in remote location, aka my work place.

Anyway, let looks at your questions... you miss the hdd controller.
True, most recent mobo come equipped with 4,6 even 8 onboard sata drives Capability and allow Raid 0,1,5,10 but i prefer separate raid controller card for durability and speed!!. You would appreciate how fast the pure hw raid compre to sw for browsing, reading and writing. They also give you more options for common Raid features like online capacity expansion(OCE), online raid level migration (ORLM).

What is OCE? OCE gives you option to add new disks to existing raid with system online. Said you have 4x500GB raid 5 now, effective 1.5TB in use in 8x raid cards.
It's near its end and you have 2 options, built another raid on the available 4 slots and lose one disks for Raid 5 parity property. Or... add new disks and expand he existing raid, you don't get to lose the storage efficiency here.

ORLM allows you to change existing type of Raid to new type on the fly. Those you can modify the storage system without interrupting the operations. Say for instance you have more than u need for raid 5 8x500GB, 4TB and you decided it's too much for you, you change your mind for safer bet, Raid 6. The ORLM gives you option for that flexibility

A stand-alone Raid controller can be software or hardware X-OR. For instance, full line of highpoint card is software, notice they said optimize XOR. Then there's dedicate hardware XOR controller card like Areca with onboard processor. These onboard card will use it own processor for XOR calculation those reduce the cpu Utilization; therefore, it's a lot faster when it comes to rebuild, initialization and normal usage such as read and writes. They usually come with pci-x 64 bits or pic-e. I use both hw-sw before and decided to keep the my last highpoint sw cards for reasons below.

I have powerful server board, Xeon emt64. Highpoint support have been very good, they even respond to me during weekend. They went all the way tested the card by building one similar to my system. I still using the first ever FX series from AMD. :) and my last card with highpoint has been flawless. It's 'cheap' and effective. Their card also offers single raid cross adapter meaning you can cross join single raid more than 2 cards. I'll be expanding my 8x250Gb with another card and add disk to expand the raid this weekend. If it's good, i am going for max 16hdd single Raid 5. Wish me luck...

You don't need a server (OS) for your application; XP pro would do just fine. To use those dedicated raid card, you do need a moboboard offering pci-x or pci-e. Some card is backward compatible with legacy pic-32 but doing so you reduce the bus bandwidth, so I would look for a good server board that offers pci-x or pci-e. May be desktop with pci-e x4 and more.

If I can start all over again with nowadays has to offer, I would go for Areca PCI-Express ARC-1220 sata II x8. It's hw XOR and they are the best raid card you can find. Newegg has them. Keep in mind, it's pic-e x8, you only can used it on x8 or x16 slots. Normal desktop mostly offers x16 for video cards, x1 for useless slots. Highpoint just came out with x1 raid card but it's only good for 4 drives. You can use the dual x16 slots and split into x8, but then you video card only use the x8 bandwidth. Anyway, The server board I want to upgrade is Intel SE7520BD2SATAD2 but it doesn’t support the latest Woodcrest xeon dualcore. Unless you looking to turn this into giant workstation say quad core Xeon 5000 series else, go for cheaper solution.

How about areca pairs with those?

1) Intel mobo SE7520BD2SATAD2, onboard video, pci-e x8,x4,x1, 1 pci-x 133 and 2 pci-x 100. You'll have plenty option for both pci-x and pci-e.

2) Go for pci-x, Tyan S2676 without scsi but with pic-e x16, pci-x 133 and 2x pci-x 100. That's one i have and they have one cheap now at newegg open box for $180. you can use x16 for video card.

Enclosure... the box, you gonna need a big case with good airflow. I use this http://www.bigplasticfork.org/chaotic42/case2.html. Cheap and BIG. one side for mobo and one side for pure hdd. Then get use hdd rack for 3 hdd in 2x5.25" bay. Each bay has it own 12mm fan, enough and plenty for airflow. No bling bling, pure case with good air circulation. I can stick in 16 hdd in this case, what i make me think twice is the power. I don't like the built but like the separate compartments.

Next, hdd selection. The 750Gb is expensive, 500Gb is ok but best bang for the buck has to be the latest perpendicular recording 320GB 7200.10 from Seagate, $100 a piece, 8x320Gb give effective 2.240TB less redundant disk and effective 2.086 TB after formatted. Rumors has it it's only using 2 platters, less is better, meaning chances of platter failure is less. Hdd failure is all about luck.... as long you are well prepared for backup and recovery. Any brand of selection will do.

Hitachi 500 is 5 platters, Seagate 500 is 4, WD is 4, Maxtor 500 is 4, Seagate 750 is 188gb per platter, so it's 4 but I heard darn thing is heat generator but I won't mind 750Gb x 8 for raid 5 if I have the money...LOL

Have funs and good luck, hope that helps

[sbp]

how about 1000gig a disk. it is soon to be release end of this year.

[agillette]

Originally Posted by Sonny

I

• Intel or AMD? Xeon, Dual Core, or 64bit?
• Mobos?
• 1, 2, or 3GBs of RAM?
• SATA, PATA, or SCSI RAID?
• To start...what size hard drives?
• Maxtor, Western Digital, or Seagate?
• OS: Win 2K, Win2K Server, or Win XP Pro (No Vista..too new and too many potential bugs)?

Any help will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Sonny

I use the following config in my machine.

Intel Dual Core
4.0GB Memory
Dual 1GB GeForce Video Cards
4x350GB Maxtor SATA Hard Drives
2x IDE133 Pioneer DVD+ - RW
No Floppy Drive
TerraPod with 8.5 TerraBytes of Storage
Building up a new Storage unit wicth will be a mirror of the current 8.5TB
Windows XP Pro / Vista
************************************************** ********

Phew, i know i am forgetting some stuff. But at least you have the core system.
Waiting for the 64 bit version of vista so i can upgrade the memory to 8GB, and run Dual Dual Core Intel Procs..

Regards,

AG