If you don’t know, I’m a bit of a technology geek…I like gadgets and love to tinker around.  Having this technology background has helped me move into the world of photography more easily and has especially helped me be prepared to build a backup solution for our (my wife Tracie and myself) photos.

I’ve been struggling for months for a good photography backup solution that gets our photos stored on a RAID system as well as stored somewhere off-site (in the cloud).  There are a lot of options for local backup – external hard drive, network attached storage, DVD’s, etc…but a full-fledged backup solution requires some type of off-site backup to account for disaster recovery.

What do I mean by disaster recovery?  Simple – if your house or business burns down….what happens to your data?  What happens if your external hard drive crashes?  You lose your data.

To ensure  your photographs are backed up properly, you need to perform timely backups locally but also incorporate an off-site solution. Before I tell you some of the backup solutions that are out there, let me take a few minutes to discuss a pieces of technology and terminology.

Technology & Terminology

RAID

RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks” and provides redundancy by storing data across multiple disks. I won’t go into details of the different types of RAID setups, but you should know that RAID is a good thing   When looking for a system that has RAID, I recommend at least RAID 1 as this setup will mirror two hard drives and gives you very good protection from hard drive failure. For more information on RAID, check out this Wikipedia article.

External Drives vs Networked Drives (NAS)

External Hard Drives connect directly to your computer using USB, Firewire or eSATA connections. Network Hard Drives, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS), are actually small format file servers that can be attached to your home computer network and accessed across your ethernet connection.  NAS devices give much more flexibility to home users but they also require some knowledge in networking and a router or Ethernet switch to plug the NAS into.  Chance are, if you have broadband internet, you have some type of router that can act as a host for your NAS device.

Local Backup vs Backup in the Cloud

Using an External Hard Drive or a Network Hard Drive is an absolute necessity for backing up your photographs.  That said, just backing up to one of these devices doesn’t ensure your photographs are backed up….it just means you have a local copy.  To truly backup your photographs (and any other files), you should use some type of off-site backup solution.

What do I mean by off-site backup?  Off-site is any type of backup not on the premises.  You can use cloud services (discussed below), DVD’s that you take to your bank safety deposit box or some other option…but you’ve got to have something that is located at a different location than your home or office.

Backup Solutions

Simple Setup – Off-site backup only

You can opt to not do any local backup at all…but I recommend against this.   That said, there are some options for you if you don’t want to mess with buying an External Hard Drive or Network Hard Drive.

• Carbonite – For $55 per year, you can get automatic backup for your Mac or PC.  In addition, Carbonite provides unlimited storage and no-hassle backups.
• Mozy – Similar to Carbonite with a similar price point (if purchased with a 1 year contract). You get automatic backups of your Mac or PC and receive unlimited storage.  Mozy offers a Business class backup solution too that costs more but provides much more control of your backup solution.  See the next section.
• Dropbox – If you need a small amount of data backed up (less than 100GB), Dropbox might be an option. I actually use Dropbox for syncing up my documents from my different computers.  Options are provided for 50GB for $99 per year and 100GB for $199 per year.
• Amazon S3 – Using a service like S3 can be frustrating if you don’t have a good software package to connect to the S3 cloud.  I recommend JungleDisk as it provides connectivity and automatic backup of your files.

For those of you who are looking for more technical approach, you can try the following:

• rsync.net – Provides off-site backup via rsync. Prices start at $1.20/GB for data storage in one off-site location and decrease based on volume.  They also offer geo-redunant storage (data stored in two locations) for $2.10/GB.
• Exavault – Provides off-site backup via FTP.  Plan pricing is dependant on sizing but they can get expensive.  200GB of storage is $100 per month.
• Amazon S3 – Even though there are a lot of software products to help get connected to S3 (JungleDisk, etc) you can also setup scripts to do automatic backups for you.

Good Setup – External Hard Drive plus Off-Site Backup

Run out and buy an External Hard Drive for your computer.  You can purchase an external drive, plug it in and use backup software (TimeMachine for MAC, GoodSync for PC)  to backup your photographs (and any other files) to your external drive.  One you’ve got your hard drive running and computer backed up, go take a look at an off-site service such as Carbonite, JungleDisk or Mozy…the external drive is good but with the addition of an off-site solution, you can be sure that your photographs are safely backed up.

Better Setup – External RAID Drive plus Off-Site Backup

Buy an External Hard Drive with RAID.  A few examples of these are products like Western Digital’s My Book Pro Edition II 1 TB External Hard Drive or SimpleTech’s 1TB SimpleDrive Pro Duo External Drive.  Drive’s like these will provide RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays and are good for home users. Use backup software (TimeMachine for MAC, GoodSync for PC) to backup your photographs (and any other files) to your external drive.  Once you have your RAID hard drive running, go take a look at an off-site service such as JungleDisk, Carbonite or Mozy…the RAID hard drive is good but with the addition of an off-site solution, you are golden.

Best Setup – NAS with RAID plus Off-Site Backup

Buy a NAS system with RAID.  A few examples of these are products like Netgear’s ReadyNAS Duo 2-Bay 500 GB (1 x 500 GB) Desktop Network Attached Storage or the Qnap TS-509 Pro 5-bay iSCSI NAS Network Attached Storage Tower are excellent SOHO NAS devices with RAID and additional features that are well worth the price. Many of the NAS devices come with backup software or you can use backup software like TimeMachine for Mac or GoodSync for PC to backup your photographs (and any other files) to the NAS device.

Other than a product by Datto (discussed below) there isn’t really a good solution to take files from the NAS and upload to the cloud for off-site backup.  Well…there are solutions but they are very technical.  I’d recommend using a NAS with RAID in conjunction with Carbonite, Mozy or JungleDisk for the off-site backup.  In fact, my current solution involves using Carbonite and a RAID NAS.

Is there an All-in-One solution?

Not really but there is a product from a company called Datto that comes close.

Datto offers a product that is a combination of a Network Attached Storage Device plus off-site backup.  Their mid-range G-Series product offers local RAID plus off-site backup starting at $499 for a 250GB non-redundant NAS and $20 per month.  1TB of redundant local backup and off-site backup is $1,149 for the NAS and $100 per month for the off-site backup service.

What’s the right setup for you?

I can’t tell you that…but I can say that regardless of which approach you take, you must look at off-site backup.  If you do nothing else, go buy an external hard drive for local storage and use Carbonite, Mozy or JungleDisk to send all your files off-site.

If you aren’t very computer savvy, I’d recommend going with an External Hard Drive with RAID and and off-site backup product like Carbonite, Mozy or JungleDisk.

If you have a local network at home or your office, pick up one of the NAS systems with RAID and sign up for Carbonite, Mozy or JungleDisk to provide the off-site backup solution.

I bet you’re wondering what my photography backup solution is huh?

Well…here it is:

I use a Qnap TS-509 Pro 5-bay iSCSI NAS Network Attached Storage Tower with 5 1TB drives running RAID 5.  I’ve got about 4TB of storage space (one of the drives is used for parity). I’ve taken the 4TB of space and split it up into 4 iSCSI targets (iSCSI provides easier access from across networks by providing SCSI connectivity across TCP/IP…read more about it here).

The 4 iSCSI targets are:

1. 2 targets @ 1TB each used for our TimeMachine backups (we both have our own Mac’s)
2. 2 targets @ 350GB each used for a clone of my machine (I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an image of both our Mac’s)

After setting these 4 targets, I still have almost 1TB left for additional NAS storage. Great stuff!

On each Mac, I have an external 500GB hard drive. These external drives contain older photographs while the newer pictures are stored on our local machines.  TimeMachine is configured to backup the local hard drive plus the external hard drive to the 1TB iSCSI target.  I run Carbon Copy Cloner weekly to clone our machines for disaster recovery purposes.

To get my off-site backup, I use Carbonite.  Each machine has an account and is automatically backed up.

What’s the price of this backup solution?  Good question…let’s take a look.

• Qnap TS-509 – ~$899.
• Five Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drives – $99/hard drive for a total of $495.
• Two Western Digital 500 GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drives – $90/drive for a total of $180.
• Two Carbonite accounts – $55 per year per account for a total of $110 per year.

My total upfront cost was $1574 for this setup plus $110 per year to continue my Carbonite service.  I’m planning on looking at Amazon S3 cloud storage more closely in the future to see if there’s a way to connect my Qnap TS-509 to Amazon S3. This will allow me to backup to the cloud from the NAS rather than from each machine.  Until I figure that out, my current setup works just fine well.

Have any questions or comments about my setup or what you need to set up to backup your photographs?  Drop me an email (eric AT ericbrown DOT com) or leave a comment here.

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