Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Storing and backing up efficiently and securely more than ten years of photography is a complicate technical task.
At the center of my setup I use a Synology DS1515+ NAS, with 8 disks configured in Raid 6 for a total of 14.54TB of available storage.
I wrote about this set up a year ago, but I recently updated it to be more streamlined and secure.
If you need to get an 8TB disk and fancy a Seagate, we have a way for you to save $50 per drive, while getting a free enclosure and a 100% void warranty. The disk in question is the Seagate Barracuda Internal Hard Drive 8TB SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch. Long name, I know. The 8TB flavor sells (new) for $180 on Amazon, or you can get the faster spinning 005 flavor for $319.95 over at B&H. Either way, there is a way to get this drive for $139.99 and still have some spare parts.
Hard drives are something that all of us have. Some of us just have the one our computer came with, while others will have a whole mountain of them. I’m in the latter camp, although I do try to keep things to a minimum. Every few years I replace all my storage drives as faster, cheaper, larger capacity drives are released.
So, every few years I’m in the market for new drives. So, I look at large consumers of hard drives. Consumers like Backblaze, who just released their Q3 2018 report, showing their hard drive failure rates and they’re quite surprising. At least, they surprised me. It seems that those huge 8TB, 10TB and 12TB drives are actually far more reliable than smaller drives.
There’s one simple fact about hard drives. They’re going to die. It’s not a question of if, but when. And when it does happen, because it will, there’s two things you can do. The first is that you could panic, research data recovery services and spend a small fortune trying to get the data back. Or, you can simply replace the dead drive and restore from backup.
Personally I prefer the latter option, which means having a good backup workflow in place. Photographers and filmmakers create a lot of data. So, you really do need a good backup solution in place if you don’t want to lose weeks, months or even years worth of work. In this video, Caleb Pike from DSLR Video Shooter talks us through his backup workflow.
After first trying out the WD My Passport Wireless Pro as a solution to backup photos and video while traveling (click here for the full review of the My Passport), I thought I would try the competition – the Seagate Wireless Plus.
The main issue that I had with the WD My Passport is that it could not effectively synchronize files with cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive) without the need for a laptop computer.
The Seagate Wireless Plus seems to have this issue solved with built-in synchronization apps for both Dropbox and Google Drive, but as you will see, it has its own issues…
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