On line backups

[opalmox]

I'll have to check the manufacturer on the thumb drive when I get home... I have it stashed at the moment to keep my young modelers from getting ahold of it.

[Maltedfalcon]

Don't confuse online storage with online backups, they are two different things.
Remember your backups are for Disaster recovery, not data storage. Should the online backup company disappear, you would still have your original data go and sign up with a different company and re-create your backup. So if your backup company goes away it is not a big deal as long as you deal with it immediately.

Thumb Drive, DVDs SD cards, are barely OK for backups, Only if you create them regularly and then MOVE THEM OFFSITE. Anybody who does backups to a device or media and then leaves them next to the machine or in the same building, is asking to loose all their data.

Unfortunately just making copies of your data and putting it onto a usb device or DVD, is the absolute worst method of making backups. It requires so much user input (select copy paste burn, etc...) that most people who use this method do not really do it often enough. and then data restores are a nightmare.

If your backups are not automated and the media you backup to is not offsite or taken offsite. - you aren't really backing up your data.

Don't get me started on backing up to USB devices. They are not a good place to backup your data to. There are any number of scenarios that would destroy your original hard disk that will also destroy your usb device.

[Maltedfalcon]

oh and backing up to SD cards is ok but you need to remember the larger the GB of the card the more susceptible the card is to static electricity. The more expensive cards usually are a little more hardened than the cheaper ones. only carry them in the case they came in and for extra safety keep those cases in a anti-static bag. and then store them offsite.

[richkat]

I use Carbonite back-up, we had a computer die about 6 months ago and we got ALL our stuff back, even stuff my wife was working on THAT DAY! I think it cost $55 a year. The thing about Carbonite (and others) is it runs in the background, you don't have to do anything, most people forget or get to busy to back-up as they should. i never thought MY computer would die, but it did! glad the wife(Kathy) signed us up!.......Rich

[whulsey]

The external hard drive right now since like the best physical backup, but still think one of the onlines ones will work. I'm not worried about data hijacking, etc since its primarily photos and reference material. But right now I have around a 100G of photos so cd or dvds are a hassle.

When I go to a car show or museum I may easily shoot as many as 400 images so takes a lot of room. It was really a storage problem when I was shooting film since I have shot as many as 30 rolls over a race weekend. Have around 20-25 feet of shelf space with binders of prints and negatives plus another 4 or 5 copypaper size boxes of uncataloged stuff still to get to.

[codex34]

There's actually no solution yet to long term storage of data, cd's go brittle, tapes and magnetic disks have dropouts, and solid state media suffers from epitaxial seepage.
You can only really store data for a few years and guarantee its state, so cloud storage on raid machines is a useful alternative, if not a better solution for the non technically minded and businesses.