Railfan Technology > Keeping up with storage

The last few months I have been attempting to organize my digital life by finding a reliable way to archive all my digital droppings I have collected over the past 20 years. This is turning out to be quite a big project.

I am sure a lot of you are like me. You have printed photos, slides, video tapes, and a ton of digital image imagery. For my situation add in a boxes of Betacam SP, SVHS, Hi8, and MiniDV tapes. Years ago I started putting data onto external hard drives, then to be safe I started copying them to newer drives as they aged. About seven years ago I made the effort to convert over all my tapes to digital files and placed them on a network Raid 5 array I kept under my desk to archive stuff.

Last month I began collecting all the drives together and figuring out all that I had. Out of eight drives, two of them were dead. Luckily most of the files are cross saved to more that one drive, but I think I lost some.

The first phase was to collect all of my "keepable" digital photos. These include both railroad and family images. I went through all the photos and dumped the crap. Rather than placing these on a on a hard drive I configured Google Drive on all my computers to sync the files. Google drive is a really neat cloud service where your files are sync'd from your computer to the cloud. If something happens to your computer your files are still safe. You can also sync the files to multiple computers and even access them from your tablet or smart phone. All my image files came out to 90 gigabytes and for that Google charges me $2 a month.

For my video files I moved them onto two solid state drives that are smoking fast. I feel pretty safe with the solid state drives as they have proven to be more reliable than conventional magnetic drives. However, just to be on the safe side I will probably mirror it to one large conventional hard drive that hopefully will last a few years. They have gotten so cheap, but I still don't trust them especially after losing two of them.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Does it take a long time to move RAW and Jpegs from an external hard drive to Google? I only have about 400MB on an external hard drive.

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

bobwilcox Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Does it take a long time to move RAW and Jpegs
> from an external hard drive to Google? I only have
> about 400MB on an external hard drive.


It shouldn't take that long. It depends on the speed of your Internet connection. The way it works is you install Google Drive on your computer and whatever you place in the directory will be mirrored to Google in the background. It looks and feels like any other directory on your computer. You won't even notice it happening. If you turn your computer off, it will restart and pick up where it left off next time your computer is on.

As for RAW, they do take longer than jpegs because they have larger file sizes. If you have a gmail account Google gives you 10 gb of storage free.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

OK, question.

If it is on your computer and deleted or somehow lost on that system is it synched away???
or does everything on the cloud stay there forever even if you delete it from your own computer.


Bob

robj Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> OK, question.
>
> If it is on your computer and deleted or somehow
> lost on that system is it synched away???
> or does everything on the cloud stay there forever
> even if you delete it from your own computer.
>

If you delete the file from your computer it will delete it from the cloud. If you lose your computer or hard drive, you can rebuild the local files on your new drive by just installing Google Drive. I have a business Google account and I have thirty days to reclaim accidently deleted files. I am not sure how long you have to reclaim for non business accounts. Also, you can sync the files between multiple computers as well. In my case my drive is syncd to my notebook, my desktop, and I have an app on my phone to grab stuff too. Some of my directories are shared so others can sync them too. For example, we have a huge collection of handcar documents and photos that I share with Mason and another hobbyist.

One nice aspect is they give you 15 gb for free to try it out. You only have to pay once you go over that and it isn't that much.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

For individual (non-business) accounts, Backblaze has a pretty good deal with unlimited storage space, it will back up external drives at no extra charge, and it will maintain older versions of files for 30 days. The service runs $50/year.

https://www.backblaze.com/

Google Drive, Dropbox,,,, choices, questions.....

Google Drive, from what I see and understand, it mirrors
a folder/folders onto Google's cloud. Can I use an external
harddrive for this, or does everything have to be on my PC's
harddrive. Same question for Dropbox.
$100.00 a year for 1TB of storage isn't a bad deal.
Bottom line question for either GD or Dropbox, can I use an
external drive for files to be backed up, and will them remain
even if I've deleted them?

JWR

Thanks for all the info. The 30 day reclaim time sounds reasonable and that was my concern.

Bob

I'm a proponent of CrashPlan. I think it works well for people that have multiple terabytes (TB) of data. I'm up to 2.9TB so using my internet connection to upload all that data just isn't feasible. Download connections are faster but I don't want to wait for 2-3 months to restore my data if needed. Most users don't have that much data but I would bet some of you are in the same position. Todd, what's your backup size?

So I have two computers in two locations. I have CrashPlan running on both. I bought two hard drives (4TB each) and hooked both up to my primary PC and ran Crashplan to create a backup of the primary drive to the backup drive. After a few hours it was complete. I then removed the second drive and installed it into the backup PC at the secondary location. They are connected via the internet and when I add new photos, video, etc on my primary PC, they are uploaded to the secondary PC. It isn't fast but works well (upload overnight). If I have a drive failure, I can drive to the other location and get that PC and restore in a few hours.

By the way, it costs $0 for the software that does this.

For a price, CrashPlan has a data center that will store your data, or even a dedicated hard drive for you. They can send you a drive, you "seed" the data (same process as I described above) and then send it back to them where they hook it up in their datacenter. If you have a crash, they will mail you the disk. Much faster than downloading multi-TB of data over the internet.

If you don't have two locations, you can actually do this with friends or family. Just point at each other and know that your data is encrypted (not accessible by them) and in a second location.

Just wanted to give some other ideas...I know it's more difficult but I'm thrifty and worried about losing 10+ years of photos/video/files!

Ryan Wilkerson
Fair Oaks, CA

RyanWilkerson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm a proponent of CrashPlan. I think it works
> well for people that have multiple terabytes (TB)
> of data. I'm up to 2.9TB so using my internet
> connection to upload all that data just isn't
> feasible. Download connections are faster but I
> don't want to wait for 2-3 months to restore my
> data if needed. Most users don't have that much
> data but I would bet some of you are in the same
> position. Todd, what's your backup size?
>

I am keeping about 100 gigs on Google. I spent a month going through all of my photos and I dumped probably 90% of my train stuff. With digital cameras we all tend to take many more photos than we would have with film. Train comes around the corner and I would snap pictures until it arrived. I went through and saved maybe one or two and dumped the rest.

My video is another story. I have transferred all of my analog video and it took up about a terabyte. I transferred some of my HD from various cards and I ran out of space on my SSD drives. I need more drives. For backup I am probably going to buy a 4 tb drive and just make a backup and leave it in a drawer at my day job. I feel pretty confident with the SSD drives, but just in case. External drives are so cheap these days, but I would not trust them as I have found they do fail. For those who think CDR's or DVD's are the way to archive, I got news for you. Many of my CD-R's from 11 and 12 years ago are unaccessible.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Does anyone have experience with ICloud or Adobe's cloud storage?

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

Just as an FYI, 90% of the time that an external hard drive fails, the actual physical hard drive can be removed from the casing and either mounted directly or the data easily recovered using recovery software.

jst3751 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Just as an FYI, 90% of the time that an external
> hard drive fails, the actual physical hard drive
> can be removed from the casing and either mounted
> directly or the data easily recovered using
> recovery software.

I was able to do that with one drive that I did not include in my list. The others made some nasty clicking noises.

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Flickr has announced they will give you 1000GB of storage for "free".

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

What I did to solve my backup issue was to create what is know as a mirror drive or a RAID array. If your system supports RAID and you don't need data on more than one computer this is a very efficient backup. Know as a mirror drive because that is exactly what it does. What you do on one drive is duplicated on the other. Also once you create the 2nd drive it becomes invisible . They both have the same drive letter. If one would crash you just replace it with another and it will repopulate the replacement with all the data from the other drive. You don't have to deal with uploads and downloading or paying to store on someone else's storage.
I have two 3TB storage drives that are exact duplicates of each other. Upsizing to larger drives should work the same, replace one let it repopulate, then replace the second.
I once read about a company that was storing photographers photos on their servers and they went bankrupt and the photographers had a few days to download their images. Plus with all of the hacking and things going on I don't trust outside storage, someone could corrupt the data and render it useless.
If you want to know more read about RAID or mirror drives.