Does anyone do it? Obviously physical drive backups are no use in cases of burglary or fire, but are the file sizes for video not too big?

My weddings are about 80-100GB. Surely uploading these amounts makes it unrealistic?

I'm hoping to be told I'm wrong here!

Who do people use, and what does it cost??

Cloud backups are a no go for us. It takes around a week to upload 80GB on a 6mbps virgin line as they also cap your uploads after the first couple of gig.

We have a little blog article about our storage and backups strategy STORAGE AND BACKUPS FOR SMALL BUSINESSES, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND FILMMAKERS | Minty Slippers (http://www.mintyslippers.com/storage-and-backups-for-small-businesses-photographers-filmmakers/)

In short, we have 2 NAS units, one at home and one in the office. They replicate everything (although the big uploads like the video media we handle manually). So that gives us an offsite backup. A USB hard drive is permanently connected to each unit and it does a backup at night to give us a point in time backup should we accidentally delete something or do something stupid.

This approach protects us against fire, theft, deletions, mistakes, corruption and failed drives.

Hi Clive,
I think most areas around the UK have too slow an Internet connection for the large scale uploads that you are talking about unless you have an expensive high speed commercial connection. Hard drives are by far the quickest and safest backup and if you are worried about fire or burglary, arrange for a friend or family member to store them. It will be quicker to go to their house than wait for 100Gb to upload.

I am not convinced on cloud storage for major files, as I have internet problems from time to time due to server maintenance, cable faults etc. You just know it will happen at that one time when you need urgent access to your backup files.

Roger

Another thing about cloud backups are the restore times are slow.

We use iDrive for things like personal photos, music etc and downloading can be as slow, if not slower than uploading.

Amazon offer storage charged per GB and they have different speeds depending on your needs and what your willing to pay.

Not a problem 99.9% of the time but trust me, when you end up needing it and the restore is taking forever it can be a problem.

Hi Danny,

I will look into the NAS option. My office is in an outbuilding. Knowing I could have it stored in the house over a network would be more secure!

Since it is you background - I wonder if I could pick your brain.

WHen it comes to a RAID1 setup, or simply sync backup software... does it delete in the backup what you delete in the primary drive?

I'd be worried I'd accidentally delete or save over something, and that the other drive would back up the error...

Cronosync can be set to archive deletions on the backup drive so you can go into the archive and retrieve something if needs be. Obviously eventually you will have to delete some or all of the archive because it will fill up quicker than your working drive but hopefully after six months or so you will have realised and corrected your mistake and can delete the oldest stuff!
Cronosync is a very cheap very good piece of software that can make your backups safely completely in the background if you wish

I too use a NAS to store everything. The NAS is 16TB, setup in RAID 1 for redundancy and is automatically backed up to Crashplan in the cloud in case of catastrophic failure. Crashplan is many multiples cheaper than a second NAS somewhere else but the second NAS would be many multiples faster to restore from than the cloud. Hopefully I will never need it!!

I'm on a 125Mbps line so it takes about 12 hours to backup 60 GB to the cloud.

Thanks guys, I'm not great at this technical side of things (not worst either though!)

Can you work with the footage on the NAS? Is it fast enough? Or do you still have to have a local copy of your files to do your work with?

WHen it comes to a RAID1 setup, or simply sync backup software... does it delete in the backup what you delete in the primary drive?Yes it does. RAID simply protects against disk failure it doesn't protect against file corruption or accidental deletion.

Never forget 'RAID is not Backup'

Thanks guys, I'm not great at this technical side of things (not worst either though!)

Can you work with the footage on the NAS? Is it fast enough? Or do you still have to have a local copy of your files to do your work with?
NAS performance can be very good provided the network is fast enough e.g. use Gigabit ethernet not WiFi. However it's never going to be as fast as a locally attached disk particularly if that is an SSD or RAID0 array.

You can never have too many of backups of your data. Store the raw files on a NAS with a backup elsewhere to the cloud or whatever. Then copy the files to a working disc on your edit system & backup these files.

I have Gigabit Ethernet at the router end and the PC end, but what if it's travelling via Powerline? I've never looked at whether powerline is much slower than ethernet.

First, I'd love to know how your weddings are under 100GB.... I'd love that.

Mostly, if you're internet isn't fast enough, carry an external HD to someone else's house every so often. For the files that change, like my NLE save file, I have those on a cloud backup (Dropbox for me), so that I only have to get the 2nd external drive when I have shot a new event, and don't have to worry about losing my editing progress.

Otherwise, if you really do want to back it all up, there are plenty of services. Heck, for a little while, I had Amazon's service for long term storage... blanking on the name. Cost pennies per gigabyte. Was relatively slow since its for long term storage, but, if its for a backup copy, I like something like that.

Same here Robert - sub 100GB! most of my weddings are 150 - 200GB, especially now I'm using XAVC instead of AVCHD from my main camera

I use it. I use CrashPlan Pro. Yes, it's slow to upload, but having another backup to my hard drives is great to have. :)

I use it. I use CrashPlan Pro. Yes, it's slow to upload, but having another backup to my hard drives is great to have. :)

There is a small, but important difference between a Backup solution and an Archive solution.
Whatever one chooses, make sure it is the correct one for your circumstances