Bulletproof Backup Plan
Continuing from 3-2-1 Backup for Photographers, we are going to design a “set it and forget it” backup plan consisting of:
- our computer
- an external hard drive
- a backup drive
- offsite backup
The workflow is simple. We use our computer to store and run programs that saves data to an external hard drive which is mirrored to a local external hard drive. The mirrored drive then gets backup and transported offsite either physically or by using an online backup service to complete the final fail-safe plan.
Disaster Scenario
Scenario 1: The external hard drive fails, we use the local mirrored drive as the new working drive and the replacement drive gets rebuilt as the new mirrored drive. Zero downtime.
Scenario 2: The drives are stolen or destroyed in a catastrophes. We restore from the offsite service using a seed drive.
Scenario 3: We delete an important file. Restore just that file from our offsite backup using their online tools.
Following a 3-2-1 backup plan and building our system around it will prevent these disaster scenario from happening.
Organizing where to store your files
Computer: Store any file that can be re-installed
- Operating System
- Program files
- scratch disk, paging files or virtual memory
Your computer’s hard drive doesn’t have to be large but it does have to be fast. A smaller 250 GB solid state drive will yield a better performance than a 4TB 5400 rpm drive. You only need space for the operating system, program files and virtual memory used by your operating system and programs such as Photoshop. In the event of a hard drive failure and you DON’T have a backup system, you only lose time by having to re-install programs. With this in mind, files that don’t have to be re-installed to work such as program preferences, plugins, actions and presets should be stored on an external drive.
External Hard drive: Store any file that was created or can’t be replaced
- Photos
- Videos
- Music
- Documents
- Presets or actions
- Downloads
- Cloud Storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, Adobe Cloud)
The computer’s hard drive is the brain, an external hard drive is the heart. The external hard drive should store any file that was created or can’t be replaced. For such an important role, we need to choose reliable hardware that will grow with us. Starting with a small 1TB drive can fill up fast and a 4TB drive sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t allow us room to grow.
Network Backup drive: Mirrored copy of your external drive
A network backup drive is ideal but an identical external drive will work. Remember, this is going to be the drive you will use in case your main external drive fails. We need to mirror or synchronize this drive not perform a backup. Most backup programs compress files and keep deleted files separate. That’s great for the next step but not for the local backup. SyncBack is great for mirroring and keeping both drives synchronized.
Offsite backup: Compressed version of your backup stored offsite with online access.
- CrashPlan
- Carbonite
- Backblaze
- Acronis TrueImage
- Memeo AutoBackup
- SpiderOak
There are many choices for online backups. Compare which company has the best features you’re looking for. If the price is right and they have great customer care, use them. Alan Henry from lifehacker wrote a great article on the Five Best Online Backup Services.
Depending on the amount of data you have, it may take months to back up. An alternative is seeding. Seeding is when the company sends you a hard drive and you copy your data sending it back to them. It’s faster but it may cost extra.
Simple solution: $136.00
Ideal for: Typical users, College Kids, my Dad. 1TB drives are plenty for word documents, music and cell phone photos. If using this setup with a Laptop, save $68.00 by using your internal drive as your main working drive. You have to be discipline and sync your drives plus backup to Dropbox or Google Drive. This setup isn’t Bulletproof but is better than nothing.
- $ 0.00 Computer: work with the drive you have
- $68.00 Main working drive: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
- $68.00 Local mirrored drive: WD My Passport Ultra 1TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
- $ 0.00 Offsite: Built in software with WD Passport to Dropbox or Google Drive
Affordable solution on a budget: $423.00
Ideal for: Running a very small Home based business, Weekend photographers, Photographers getting started in the business. Photographers add $120.00 for the solid state drive. You’ll thank me later when editing in Photoshop or Lightroom. Adding a Network Attached Storage (NAS) such as Drobo 5N or Synology for about $499.00 to $599.00 allows your storage to grow as you grow.
- $120.00 Computer: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB solid state drive
- $109.00 Main working drive: WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
- $109.00 Local mirrored drive: WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
- $150.00 Offsite: CrashPlan with online access
- $ 55.00 SyncBack
My personal bulletproof backup solution: $1363.00 base price
Ideal for: Professional photographers, Mission critical business where downtime is not an option, Users that want a storage solution to grow as they grow. I grew my 10TB system over the years.Currently I have four Seagate Desktop 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 7200 RPM in each Drobo. Each drive cost $102.00 bringing the total cost to $408.00 per unit adding $816.00 to the overall storage solution. The best part of this solution, Drobo takes the up front guess work out of determining the amount of capacity I require. I buy the capacity I need today, and when I need more storage, I simply replace my smallest drive with a larger one and immediately use that capacity in seconds.
- $ 60.00 Computer: 120GB Samsung solid state drive
- $599.00 Main work drive : 10TB Drobo 5D connected via usb 3
- $499.00 Local mirrored drive : 10TB Drobo 5N connected to the network via ethernet
- $150.00 Offsite: Crashplan with online access
- $ 55.00 SyncBack
My reasoning
I purchased the Samsung solid state drive because of their reputation and at the time, the price was right. I use Seagate 7200 RPM hard drives for the same reason. 7200 RPM drives are recommended for faster performance. Drobo has been my choice for data storage for years. Several years ago I received a Drobo FS to evaluate. I fell in love with it and kept it. Since then, I have grown my storage needs around Drobo, upgrading from the FS to the 5D and 5N units. Drobos are self-healing, self-managing and even self-optimizing. Exactly what I need. I’ve had offers from other NAS companies to “try it, like it, keep it” over the years; a nice perk as a professional photographer and educator, but I choose to stay with Drobo.
I’m interested in sharing your thoughts on your current Bulletproof Backup Plan. If you have a unique storage question or problems, feel free to leave a comment below. By the same time next year, loss data should be a thing of the past.
Extra Resource & Links Mentioned
- Backup Your Operating System – Create a USB Recovery Drive
- Building an OS Recovery Plan for Photographers
- 3-2-1 Backup Concept for Photographers
- Building a Bulletproof Backup System
- Solid State Drives: Samsung 250GB, Samsung 500GB
- Mirror Software: SyncBack Pro , SyncBack Standard (affiliate links)
- Drobo Website
- Drobo 5N & Drobo 5D (small discount)
- Hard Drives: WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive, Seagate Desktop 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 7200 RPM
- Alan Henry’s Five Best Online Backup Services.
Nice article. Here’s a variation on it though. I have a desktop computer which has plenty of space for drives, so there is an SSD for the OS, and then mirrored disks for pictures. Backup is to a Drobo 5N, I’m still working on getting the backup to the cloud and I may use the Drobo to do that. My non photo files are also stored on OneDrive, you could use Drop Box or something else too. Point is those are available to me in the cloud and I can roll back to older versions if I need it automatically.… Read more »
Bob.. I haven’t heard of encryption attacks. I would assume a really good firewall and virus program would help. I use Kaspersky. Have you dealt with encryption attacks before?
I am in the midst of major disaster recovery rebuild right now, caused by the failure of one drive in my PC Tower’s RAID array (similar architecture to Drobo but a 4 drive RAID as the main PC hard drive). What should have been a simple swap got nasty when the RAID array got corrupted and I lost the whole computer’s hard drive – almost 2 TB of programs and data. My “mea culpa” is having a stale backup of the system – but since I manually backup data I am losing only four days of work. I use a… Read more »
I feel your pain in losing data. The external drives are fast for my Photoshop files, but video could be an issue. I haven”t heard of Retrospect, but I’m looking into it. Thanks for the input!
I like your approach. You might consider encrypting your external drive with BitLocker or other software to protect yourself in case your drive is stolen or lost.
That’s a good idea!
Here is my approach:
PC)
Holds all files that I need regularly or work on at the moment (incl. raw files).
Backup via Backblaze / Timemachine / Dropbox.
NAS with RAID1) Holds my Timemachine backup and finished projects. Connected to amazon glacier / dropbox for automatic backup.
External HD) Bootable mirror of PC-HD and mirror of NAS, updated 1-2 per month. Kept offsite.
This way, everything is always available and automatically backuped and up to date.
Be aware that disks, like camera and lenses, are not all created equal. There are ‘consumer’ level disks, and ‘professional’ level disks (the latter often with a SAS interface, not the more common SATA). ‘Pro’ disks are built with stricter specifications and better quality materials, exactly like a pro camera or lens, and designed to last longer under heavier workloads. Choose your disks wisely. If your computer allows for it, installing a RAID using two or more disks may be a better solution than a single external disk. It is usually faster, cable connections are more reliable, power is supplied… Read more »
I’ve been meaning to write an article about my backup and storage strategy. This is what I would have written. Matches my strategy.
Nice article. Always love seeing people’s setup and thoughts around it. One thing I do have to comment on the article is your use of Seagate 3TB drives.
At $102 I’m assuming you’re using non server grade drives and it may be worth having a look at what Backblaze has found with the 3TB drives:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
I hope I’m wrong but better to point this out rather than finding out after multiple drive failures.
If you’re using a Mac (or Linux) for the OS on your computer, there’s no need to pay for software to sync the two local drives, because they come with the tools you need built-in to the OS. If you’re not afraid of a little command-line usage, rsync is the perfect tool for keeping two directories synchronized, whether they’re on the same drive, two different drives, or even two machines that can connect to each other over a network. Add to that using the cron task scheduler built into those two operating systems, and you can have the command run… Read more »
I am a Mac user and would welcome learning more about how to make this happen. I have a Drobo 5D3 I want to mirror/sync to a Drobo 5D. Syncback is only available for PC. (Found that out the hard way after foolishly making the purchase). Any suggestions would be aprreciated.
rsync is good! I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to do incremental backups (mirroring changes) from my 5D to my network Drobo B810n. It works, slightly slower, but there’s some good options to work with and CCC isn’t super expensive. You can schedule things out, run it right away, clone drives, backup drives to disk images that are compressed. Check it out :D
Thanks. I went with a Synology backup NAS, first set up price can be huge. I spent over $1400 to get the right backup system. Least now its maybe only replacing drives if they fail and the odd subscription plan for online storage.
Cant wait for SSD to get cheap and high capacity. One day bring it on.
How did you manage to automatically backup your Drobo 5N to Crashplan? I am looking for an easy solution at the moment, because up to now I didn’t get it working…
Check out the DroboApps section of their website for details on how to install apps directly.
Well, I did, and there is no DroboApp which supports CrashPlan e.g. Of course I know how to use DroboApps, but e.g. rsync needs to be modified and installed outside of the DroboApps…
I thought the author found an easier way to use Crashplan :)
Nice article. Here’s a variation on it though. I have a desktop computer which has plenty of space for drives, so there is an SSD for the OS, and then mirrored disks for pictures. Backup is to a Drobo 5N, I’m still working on getting the backup to the cloud and I may use the Drobo to do that. My non photo files are also stored on OneDrive, you could use Drop Box or something else too. Point is those are available to me in the cloud and I can roll back to older versions if I need it automatically.… Read more »
Bob.. I haven’t heard of encryption attacks. I would assume a really good firewall and virus program would help. I use Kaspersky. Have you dealt with encryption attacks before?
I like your approach. You might consider encrypting your external drive with BitLocker or other software to protect yourself in case your drive is stolen or lost.
That’s a good idea!
Here is my approach:
PC)
Holds all files that I need regularly or work on at the moment (incl. raw files).
Backup via Backblaze / Timemachine / Dropbox.
NAS with RAID1) Holds my Timemachine backup and finished projects. Connected to amazon glacier / dropbox for automatic backup.
External HD) Bootable mirror of PC-HD and mirror of NAS, updated 1-2 per month. Kept offsite.
This way, everything is always available and automatically backuped and up to date.
I am in the midst of major disaster recovery rebuild right now, caused by the failure of one drive in my PC Tower’s RAID array (similar architecture to Drobo but a 4 drive RAID as the main PC hard drive). What should have been a simple swap got nasty when the RAID array got corrupted and I lost the whole computer’s hard drive – almost 2 TB of programs and data. My “mea culpa” is having a stale backup of the system – but since I manually backup data I am losing only four days of work. I use a… Read more »
I feel your pain in losing data. The external drives are fast for my Photoshop files, but video could be an issue. I haven”t heard of Retrospect, but I’m looking into it. Thanks for the input!
Thanks. I went with a Synology backup NAS, first set up price can be huge. I spent over $1400 to get the right backup system. Least now its maybe only replacing drives if they fail and the odd subscription plan for online storage.
Cant wait for SSD to get cheap and high capacity. One day bring it on.
Be aware that disks, like camera and lenses, are not all created equal. There are ‘consumer’ level disks, and ‘professional’ level disks (the latter often with a SAS interface, not the more common SATA). ‘Pro’ disks are built with stricter specifications and better quality materials, exactly like a pro camera or lens, and designed to last longer under heavier workloads. Choose your disks wisely. If your computer allows for it, installing a RAID using two or more disks may be a better solution than a single external disk. It is usually faster, cable connections are more reliable, power is supplied… Read more »
How did you manage to automatically backup your Drobo 5N to Crashplan? I am looking for an easy solution at the moment, because up to now I didn’t get it working…
Check out the DroboApps section of their website for details on how to install apps directly.
Well, I did, and there is no DroboApp which supports CrashPlan e.g. Of course I know how to use DroboApps, but e.g. rsync needs to be modified and installed outside of the DroboApps…
I thought the author found an easier way to use Crashplan :)
Nice article. Always love seeing people’s setup and thoughts around it. One thing I do have to comment on the article is your use of Seagate 3TB drives.
At $102 I’m assuming you’re using non server grade drives and it may be worth having a look at what Backblaze has found with the 3TB drives:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/
I hope I’m wrong but better to point this out rather than finding out after multiple drive failures.
If you’re using a Mac (or Linux) for the OS on your computer, there’s no need to pay for software to sync the two local drives, because they come with the tools you need built-in to the OS. If you’re not afraid of a little command-line usage, rsync is the perfect tool for keeping two directories synchronized, whether they’re on the same drive, two different drives, or even two machines that can connect to each other over a network. Add to that using the cron task scheduler built into those two operating systems, and you can have the command run… Read more »
I am a Mac user and would welcome learning more about how to make this happen. I have a Drobo 5D3 I want to mirror/sync to a Drobo 5D. Syncback is only available for PC. (Found that out the hard way after foolishly making the purchase). Any suggestions would be aprreciated.
rsync is good! I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to do incremental backups (mirroring changes) from my 5D to my network Drobo B810n. It works, slightly slower, but there’s some good options to work with and CCC isn’t super expensive. You can schedule things out, run it right away, clone drives, backup drives to disk images that are compressed. Check it out :D
I’ve been meaning to write an article about my backup and storage strategy. This is what I would have written. Matches my strategy.