I have a bunch of random folders within one big folder of RAW files which is ultimately sorted in Lightroom. This is because I never took the time to organize my photos, and Lightroom does it better than I could ever do (even if I muster the motivation to sort it). Now I have about 45 GB of photos. Is there an easy way of backing it all up on DVDs? Is there a way to automate it, or do I have to do this one disc at a time. I'm using Vista.
It's possibly not the easiest way, but if you just want a safe backup and not usable copies, you could use winRAR make RAR's of the whole lot that are 4.5GB in size, and then just burn one after the other. It's gonna take 11 discs though probably. Were I you I'd just buy an 80GB HDD and keep it in a drawer. Much better backup.
I find that keeping the end jpgs on the hard drive is the most useful, and backing the raws up to dvd. Once you work the images you like, and have a finished product, how often do you find yourself in need of the raw images? And if you do need them, then it's a snap to find them. Of course you do have to label them.
Screw DVDs, tbh. They're not reliable enough, especially if you've got cheap media. Pick up an external USB/FW hard drive, and use any of the free utilities to keep the folders in sync with each other (MS Synctoy powertool should do it, and I've found others that work well too)
Firehed is on to something. Personally, I do backups with a USB external, but that's just because it's small and random-access. If you want to do backups to DVD, get good media. Take a look here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm and don't try to save money if you care at all about what's being backed up.
I'd vote DVD too for very important stuff, but the likely hood is an external hd (unplugged!) should provide ample redundancy
DVD for important stuff? Personally I think that's nuts. DVD for stuff you don't mind losing. For proper backup, I wouldn't trust anything but HDD's or tapes.
I never understood the whole tapes thing. Unlike a hard drive, tapes actually are susceptible to magnetic damage (well technically a HD is too, but you'd need an electromagnet plugged straight into your nearest nuclear power plant to do it) and more so to environmental conditions too. But whatever. Anyways, I'd also consider Mozy if you've got a half-decent upload speed on your internet connection. $5 a month for unlimited storage on one computer. But of course it's all web-based, so the first sync could literally take days of saturating your connection.
For $5 a month, save yourself the hassle and buy 2 external HDD's. The only thing good about web-based storage is protection against physical storage devices being destroyed in a flood, tornado, housefire or what ever mother nature has to throw at you. Of course there is the occasional nephew or younger sibling to count on for destroying priceless info. Other than that for the price of online storage for a year you could easily afford a second decently sized HDD. What are the chances of your main storage device (computer w/ raid config), external HDD and secondary ext. HDD being destroyed at once?
Personally, I want to use quality DVDs. I have an EXTREME skepticism about HDDs, which is part reason why I want to move my files off my data drive in the first place.
Do what you prefer, but there are a whole lot more points of failure on optical media (expensive high-quality stuff or not) than a HDD - and they're much more likely. You can get a damaged surface, damaged label side (it's the backside of the label that has the data, so this is completely irreversible), "DVD rot", various environmental stuff, physically breaking the thing, etc. Let's just say that there are reasons computers have used magnetic storage for so long.
There's a huge advantage to using hard drives rather than optical drives. The only points of failure in a hard drive are mechanical - the data is almost permanently written, and the only issues are whether you'll be able to access it. To solve this problem, you turn off and remove your backup drives whenever you're not actively making or updating a backup. Sitting in your closet, the hard drive will never, ever fail as long as you plug it in once a year or so to prevent the bearings seizing. A DVD, on the other hand, will lose data if you just leave it alone for a while.
Repeat after me: RAID is not backup RAID is not backup RAID IS NOT BACKUP A plugged in HDD? Sure. But easily the safest on-site means of backup is an HDD that gets plugged in to back up your data and otherwise is kept in a drawer. DVD's are not reliable, and while higher quality DVD's are more reliable, you still can't be sure that you're not going to lose your disks, go to your backup, and find that 2 or 3 out of 20-40 discs don't work or are partially corrupted. The chances of that happening on an HDD are minute.
Exactly, the chances of an HDD going bad while sitting in a drawer are very very low, so chances are that either your backup dies while being used and is replaced, or your main disk dies and your backup works. With optical storage, there is a far higher risk that your main disk dies and some of your backup discs do not function, or have problems. It may be cheap, but a highly reliable backup medium it ain't.
RAID for your system/boot drive is not backup. RAID as a secondary logical drive that files are copied to is backup. Redundancy is a form of backup, though as far as computes go, it's not a good one. It's better than nothing, as it at least protects against mechanical failure. If you accidentally delete a file or the writes are corrupt, then it's useless. Using something to the effect of Time Machine stored to a distributed RAID1 array would be ideal (which is to say, your revision history is synced between local and offsite storage). There's no perfect backup solution, but it really comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. Use JungleDisk and a folder sync tool to save files on Amazon S3. You pay 10c/GB to upload the files, then 15c/GB-month to keep them there (a bit more in Europe, I guess). $15/mo for a hundred gigs of offsite backup that's as reliable as you can hope for. Or $4.95/mo for Mozy and similar services that have their own limitations and benefits. Or a one-off cost of an external drive, external RAID, pair of external drives that you'll somehow have one offsite and synchronize, etc. What's your budget, how valuable is your data, and how long can you be without it if there's a local failure? Answer those questions to find the right solution.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but NOPE! RAID is just a more secure way to store data, it is by no means backup. Like you say, RAID is a matter of protection against drive failure, but FS corruption, data loss,... is unrecoverable by a RAID array. Backup (at least last time I looked) is to recover corrupted or deleted files. So RAID does absolutely nothing... In your Time Machine example, if the FS got corrupt, all data is lost (both drives get the same corrupt data) and you lose everything...
I have to agree with spec and glider here. Repeat after spec, those playing at home: RAID IS NOT A BACKUP. Raid 1 and 5 are simply more secure PRIMARY storage.
