Backups for Photographers

08/20/2020

Backblaze released their Q2 Hard Drive stats this week. Interesting look at hard drive stats, including a decrease in their annualized failure rate for Q2.

Hard drive failure rates on an annualized and quarterly basis for 139,867 hard drives by make and manufacturer.

08/04/2020

Time is running out to help me out! I'm looking to learn more about your photo backups (or lack of photo backups!)! It only takes a couple of minutes to complete the survey.

Follow this link to help!
https://forms.gle/wa1sR2Wr2px73oW2A

And feel free to share with your photographer friends!

I plan on closing the survey at the end of this week and would like to have a slightly larger sample size before I tabulate and share a summary of the results!

08/04/2020

Ultrastar 18TB hard drives are now an option in three of G-Technology's products - including the G-Drive, G-RAID, and G_Speed lines! That's some storage space!

This week Western Digital has announced it is extending the industry's highest capacity Ultrastar HDDs to a selection of its G-Technology products. Now WD

07/29/2020

Backblaze is making moves on Amazon S3 storage. They've moved their S3 API's out of beta to fully compatible *and* if you are a large customer (i.e. 50TB of data or more), they'll pay your data transfer fees to get your data to them.

Granted - probably not many photographers have 50TB of data in the cloud, but big moves from Backblaze to drive up the competition with other cloud storage providers.

Backblaze S3 Compatible APIs are in general availability. Migrate your data from S3 to Backblaze and we'll pay for the transfer.

07/28/2020

Continuing on 'The Basics' category of articles I take a look at RAID levels for photographers. As you work on designing and implementing your backup workflow, understanding RAID is a component of that process.

Today I am going to talk about commonly used RAID levels for photographers. First – what are RAID levels? And why should you care? RAID stands for ‘Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks’ (okay, some folks now call them ‘Redundant Array of Independent Disks’, but when I learned all of this i...

07/27/2020

If you are a QNAP user for your storage solution, be aware the Department of Homeland Security released a security bulletin today that advises a strain of malware called QSnatch targets all models of QNAP hardware.

Time to update your firmware to protect your photos if you have one in use.

This is a joint alert from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). CISA and NCSC are investigating a strain of malware known as QSnatch, which attackers used in late 2019 to target Network Attached St...

07/26/2020

A good summary article of basic backups over on a Wired article published yesterday. Worth a read on a Sunday afternoon.

Backups for Photographers will be exploring these concepts and tailored to photographers (with a large amount of files) in future articles.

Backups are boring, but they'll save your digital bacon. Here's how to make sure your data lives on even when your PC doesn't.

07/24/2020

Have you completed my survey yet?

Whether you have no backup plan or already have the greatest backup workflow in place, I'd love to hear more about why you do or do not backup your photos. It should only take 2-3 minutes to complete the survey.

Here's the link: https://forms.gle/wa1sR2Wr2px73oW2A

07/21/2020

I'm looking to learn more about your photo backups (or lack of photo backups!)!

Follow this link to help me out! https://forms.gle/wa1sR2Wr2px73oW2A

And feel free to share with your photographer friends!

07/18/2020

I’m updating my whole backup process for my photography business. While I have backups in place today for client photos - the whole process is cumbersome.

The key upgrade came together this afternoon. Synology 920+ and RAID 1 across two 12TB drives.

Full articles coming to the website in the near future. So stay tuned!!

07/17/2020

Welcome to Backups for Photographers! What is Backups for Photographers? It is part of a project to help demystify backups for photographers and help them be sure they are protecting their client photos (and even your own family photos!) the best they can.

You never want to have that call with a client on how you lost all of their files! To do that, Backups for Photographers aims to provide useful information on the basics of backups and how to follow the 3-2-1 method of backups to ensure the safety of your most precious digital assets.

Most of the information will be shared at the Backup for Photographers website (https://backupsforphotographers.com) under the Articles section. As new articles are posted, they will be shared here on this page - and news from the backup hardware, cloud storage, and other relevant information for a professional photographer looking to protect their client photos.

Do you have feedback? Feel free to hit that Message button and send it my way!

Demystify photo backups with Backups for Photographers. We'll bring information to the pro photographer regarding backup systems, hardware, and workflow.

07/14/2020

Selecting hard drives for your NAS for your photography backup workflow can be difficult enough. Add in that Western Digital silently shipped their Red drives (meant for NAS's) using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) instead of conventional magnetic recording (CMR) makes it even more difficult.

I won't dive too deeply into the specifics and simply leave it at SMR type drives in NAS situations often lead to a performance hit for the NAS. If not in general operation, it certainly will should the disk array need rebuilt due to a failed disk.

This is why (well, one reason why) Western Digital and Seagate have NAS lines of drives to help make sure you don't run into oddities like this with your NAS.

It looks like Western Digital has made some adjustments and now have a Western Digital Plus drive that is certain to use CMR and not SMR. Just something to be aware of when shopping for or upgrading your NAS.

Western Digital originally launched their Red lineup of hard disk drives for network-attached storage devices back in 2012. The product stack later expanded to service professional NAS units with the Red Pro. These drives have traditionally offered very predictable performance characteristics, thank...