Toronto Photography Meetup Group

At Future Shop, I saw some "archival grade" CD-R's, but nothing similar in terms of DVD-R's.

(Best Buy had nothing but standard CD-R's and DVD-R's.)

Any suggestions re: what type of disks to buy -- and who sells them?

(I know that no disk will last forever; I'm just looking for the best endurance of the available options.)

Google is your friend:

http://www.pricebat.ca/Kodak-Gold-Preservation-Archival-Grade-DVD-R-8X-25-Pack-Spindle-Branded.p_10056868/

http://jvc-media.com/dvd/dvd_plus_r/archival/vp-r47hms25/

http://vistek.ca/results/ProPhotoBlankMedia/stor%20media-rem%20stor-dvd%20record/DVD-Recordable.aspx?order=Price&so=desc

Redundancy would be your best friend. A back up of your back up will give you peace of mind.

And even a different type of backup in addition, like a hard drive considering you can get multi-terabyte drives.

Setup a raid. Two disks are better than one. And you wont have to worry about burning dvd's. I got very lazy when i did dvd/cd backups

Even better to do a backup of a backup of a backup.

Raid 1?

I need to build a nice NAS.

the slippery slope begins with the digital switch... my rule of thumb is to make the highest quality prints I can for those images that are important... the rest I backup on to a WD mirrored 1 TB drive and DVDs... I expect that at sometime in the future, I will have a data failure so that is why I make prints...

Raid isn't a solution for backups.

I just had a raid 1 mirror suffer a double disk failure... oops. Where I used to have 4 raid 1 mirrors I now have 3 raid 1 mirrors (failed disks pending RMA with seagate) and 3 single drives getting nightly copies via rsync/robocopy. The likelyhood of a triple disk failure is a lot lower.

That said... you'd be a millionaire if you could solve the backup issue. The problem is only getting worse. Yes, there are online backup solutions but where can I store terabytes of my data? Doing so presents a couple of challenges:

1) Cost
2) Uploading that much data isn't practical in the world of Canadian broadband.

Then you have the buddy system... you have to transport a physical disk with all your data, sounds problematic. You store it at a friends house, do you trust them with your entire dataset?

I spend a lot of time thinking about solving this issue, I hate this problem because there are no good answers. Something is better than nothing... although DVDs aren't even practical with the growing datasets we all own.

Holy Expensive batman!

how did the two raid 1 drives fail simultaneously? i'm curious since i don't want it to happen to me!

even the most archival dvd will burn or crack, even the most redundant hard disk raid setup can potentially fail. the only way is to be as redundant as possible and hope for best.

i personally use a single 500GB hard drive on my laptop as my main source for pictures, which is also backed up to a raid 1 NAS. i think if all 3 hard drives fail at the same time, it was destined for me to lose those data. by my estimate, my hard drives will be full within two years, at which point higher capacity hard drives will be cheaper than now, allowing me to buy better NAS with higher capacity and continue on with this trend.

My solution is: PC HD + D-Link DNS-323 Raid 1 NAS + Flickr

If you plan on getting archival DVD's don't buy them at a camera store. You're paying a premium on DVD's that are most likely manufactured by the same company. Theres a hundred brands of DVD's but only a handful of manufacturers and those manufacturers use the same processes/materials to create their archival DVD's. I would recommend DVD+R as opposed to -R as well.

I would suggest this place:
https://www.blankmedia.ca/prodsubcats.asp?id=176

Here is a good article explaining all the details of archival media and what to get:
http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media

I backup on a 2 separate 1TB external HDs. One at the office and one at home. Once in a while I take the HD from work home and to back up new files on to it. Then I take the HD that was at home to work, in case my home pc is hit by a tsunami, volcano lava, meteorite or dog urine.

Just need to remember to grab my HD at work when I am given the 30 minutes to clear my desk when they find out how much time I spend on this site during working hours. OK - I better get back to work in order to keep my backup plan in place.

If you are a tech head: www.freenas.org

turn an old pc into a NAS that boots of of a CD rom.

What's a Raid? (I suppose I could google it... In my day it was a thing you sprayed on bugs.)

@Ken: I knew you'd say that! Of course, I agree: Making prints is a good solution. Hopefully I'll find the energy to print out my best photos. (Mind you, that gets you into a different kind of storage dilemma.) Anyway, it's true there's a slippery slope... but it's still a less-evil devil than the devil that represents endless Grand & Toy file boxes filled with 35 mm slides... (I think...)

Anyway, thanks for the tips!

It happens if you use two identical drives from the same batch. Pros buy Hard disks from different stores to reduce the chance of this happening.

Oh, of course I do have an external HD. But it's right next to the computer, so if burglars come in one day, they get both.

(I don't have an office where I can keep a 2nd HD.)

hmm never considered that scenario, guess the next batch of HDDs will be purchased from different places, perhaps different brands as well.

raid refers to different ways in which you can combine multiple hard drives. raid 1 is the typical backup method since it mirrors data on one drive to another. there are bunch of other combination which are designed for either performance, redundancy, or both.

if you are worried about physical theft as well, online backup would be the best solution. while there are bandwidth problems as mentioned previously, if you backup only the very important pictures instead of everything, it shouldn't be too difficult.

Dan, why don't you get a second portable external drive and just back up periodically (and don't leave it by your computer).... even if it is not always current, you won't lose everything that way.

I have three externals- each with a copy of my files - and I am printing my favourites as well.

I try to take Ken's approach. Out of the thousands of photos I take each year I probably have only a few hundred that are meaningful and I print those "just in case". If you ever lose all your digital data at least you can scan these prints so all is not lost.

You print several hundred images a year?!

Has anyone ever seen DVD+R archival disks

Exactly... 2 drives from the same store likely off the line next to each other. The likelihood of it happening even with that mistake is still very low as disks have varying lifetimes, but it does increase the odds.

Easily. Most of them are 4x6 and stored in photo boxes. And the more special ones I'll print large (8x10, 8x12 or larger) and stored in binders.

Outside of DVD archival disks (which I may start doing for non-personal shoots), all my working photos are on an internal drive, which are backed up to a Raid 1 external set-up. Then that is backed up to another external drive. I'm going through the practice of killing RAW files that fall below a 3 in my rating system, as I'll never look at them again ... not to mention 5D MKII files are huge.

If you're looking for outside storage that you either update once a month or rotate with, you could get a safety deposit box at your bank.

parents' house, sibling, boy/girlfriend's house? maybe a friend from this site?

RAID-1 is little better than a single drive. You give yourself multiple points of failure for a slight gain. If you go RAID, then level 4+ is where you want to be. Also don't cheap out; buy the replacement disk when you build the array.

As the price of Blue Ray drives and Disc come downs we can soon use these for disc back up as 5 DVD disc = 1 Blue Ray disc (25GB). Or 10 DVD disc = 1 dual layer Blue Ray disc(50GB).

I'm not sure cost is as much an issue in this area as is confidence in storage reliability. There are two file types we are aiming to keep safe, the RAW file (the original negative) and the processed image. I think this where a live archive comes into play, and being organized well with either labeling and/or have a system where the photos are located. Is it Aperture that allows you to retain the thumbnails even the files don't exist in a current drive? Or does Lightroom do that too?