Photographer in need of storage advice/suggestion

I don't have the expertise to directly assist but my first thought is that if what you described is all that you are doing and there is either a fire or theft at your home, everything -- both your originals and your backups -- will be gone. Having a copy offsite is an important consideration.

I use Mozy for online backup but the amount of data that I need to back up is tiny. One frequent recommendation that I see here is to have an extra external drive that is rotated to another location on a periodic basis.

Also, if I read your original post correctly your plan is to backup a Time Machine backup. I've seen frequent recommendations not to do that. I believe that the logic is that if there is any error that makes the Time Machine backup unusable then that would also be propagated to the backup of the backup. I've seen a number of recommendations to use Time Machine and also to use 3rd party software that backs up from the original data.

Hopefully you will get more input here from others.

For the obvious reason (it's slow and unreliable) backing-up over the internet is pretty hopeless when you are talking about TB of files.

If you are doing photography for a living you should probably think quite carefully about your backup and archiving strategies. Not all data is equally valuable. There is stuff that you need to survive a house fire and there is stuff that you were never going to look at again anyway. There is stuff that you need to earn your living with and stuff you don't.

Draw up a table with a row for each of few scenarios (disk fails, power glitch causes corruption, burglary, lightning strike, house burns to ground) and columns for each backup strategy indicating what you are going to do when it happens. Look at the cost of the strategy and the likelihood of your scenario.

The scenarios everybody seems to overlook when they do this are 'I have a stroke and can't remember my passwords any more' and 'I drop dead suddenly', which are both much more likely than 'house burns down' for many people. 🙂

C.

For starters, I have never been a big fan of Time Machine. Have been burned a few

times by it not working properly and not being able to recover backups.

Personally, my system backup is using clones with Carbon Copy Cloner as my app of choice.

The biggest advantage of clones is the ability to immediately get backup and running if something

goes wrong by simply rebooting to the clone and deal with the main drive issue later. System cloning

is done weekly or prior to any system update or app update.

I back up data separately on a daily basis. In my case, I have local storage connected directly to my

iMac and I have a Server (a repurposed MacMini) that I backup daily to. These are also primary archival

storage. In addition to daily backups to these, I backup work in progress to 2 cloud based services.

Also, depending on how critical a project may be, I may do interim backups during the day (coffee breaks,

lunch, "honey do's", etc.) if the work is of a nature that it would be very difficult to manually reproduce

what was done.

When it comes to digital data and business, I believe there is no such thing as too many backups.

System clones also minimize downtime should something go wrong.

If it was my choice I would make a trip to Costco and purchase 5 Terabyte Backup that is Mac compatible. I would probably buy 2 and use one for my Photo Business and the other for Time Capsule. They were on sale for $120.00ea This the is the cheapest I have ever seen them. Of course this is up to you but it is what I would do.

Good Luck

DON

I suggest you visit the The DAM (digital asset management) Forum and read the Backup Strategies and Tools section. It's a forum for professional photographer.

The DAM book has an excellent section on workflows which I believe includes backup strategies.