Err from what you've said about how much data you have to backup (2x750GB + 500GB) you'll be paying amazon ~£200 a month for storage. You could mirror all those disks for that.

I'm pretty sure a figure of 200GB was mentioned - not 2TBs.

Local storage is fine as long as you don't get a local disaster.

Remote access could be provided to the local storage but an external provider could be better as then they have to deal with security.

However, don't have any experience of using them as I don't store anything that is more signfiicant than a major disaster that would cause my 3 local copies of everything to be destroyed.

EDIT: Additional comment. I am assuming that this is the US service? That might affect speeds of data access but also the US don't recognise the data protection of other countries for data stored over there. So, if you have data (photos) which you would consider sensitive then be careful about the terms of how that is handled under US law.

ANOTHER EDIT: Forget the comments about US hosting as I see they do EU as well.

Edited by ian72 (Fri 06-Mar-09 16:21:55)

In reply to a post by ian72:

I'm pretty sure a figure of 200GB was mentioned - not 2TBs.

Which would be £20, which would get you a sata raid controller for the 2x750GB disks already owned. Still cheaper.

Local storage is fine as long as you don't get a local disaster.

True I suppose. Somewhere like rapidshare would be cheaper for less than 500GB, although perhaps not as secure.

You dont even need to buy a raid controller. You could just do a software raid. The £20 raid cards dont offer anymore performance over a standard software raid anyways.

They dont have the hardware to perform the mirroring on them, its only when you start getting to the £80+ cards you start to see a proper controller card where it is the hardware on the card doing the mirroring.

Personally I wouldnt trust a company with 200GB of my data if it was important also the problem of accessing the data download/upload would be quite time consuming.

I would go for the raid option and keep my data at home. If remote access was needed then I would setup either a vpn or an ssh tunnel with a share running inside it.

In reply to a post by jonathanHodd:

I'm looking at signing up for Amazon's S3 service for remote storage of my photos. I have a few hundred gig to put up but was wondering If anyone had any alternative suggestions that are worth considering.

My main concern is that with the current economic climate, I don't want to just choose the cheapest solution; I want to make sure that my photos are still where they are supposed to be in 2 years time!

I don't plan to use any remote service in a customer-facing context - it is for me to store my photos and maybe get to them if I need one when I'm not at home and that's it. I'll still be keeping them locally as well, but decided a remote storage solution was cheaper than building a full-on RAID in the pc (I just have a couple of 750gb disks and a 500gb usb drive for photo storage atm)

I have been using Flickr for several years with no problem.
http://www.flickr.com/
There are two types of account available, a free account in which there is a maximum display of the last 200 photos uploaded, but, no access to the original high resolution photos and the Pro account which costs $24.95 a year, has unlimited storage and display and you can access your full resolution photos. You have options to categories of people who can see your photos from everyone to making them completely private so that only you can access them. Codes are available through every photo page to enable you to embed the photos at any size and link back to the photo page.

Flickr is primarily a photo sharing site, but, it can and is used for archiving as well. As with all on-line sites you are not advised to rely on it as your sole archive, anything can happen in the Internet so you should keep a physical back-up at home either on HD or CD/DVD or any other reliable media.

Edited by deleted (Sun 08-Mar-09 12:04:06)

I am a great believer in a good quality (Expensive) raid systems, they can be great. I have been using RAID in various shapes and sizes since the late 80's.

I have however had a couple of very bad experiences with a cheap raid controller, and would not go there again.

However RAID only covers you for a hardware disk failure it is not a complete solution, it does not cover you for "finger trouble or O/S hickups" deleting data, or local disaster (fire or theft). You are thinking along the correct line in having an offsite copy of your data.

My current solution is to have the primary local storage on a 3ware raid controller and use Jungledisk with Amazon S3 as offsite backup for our critical data. We have about 60GB there. It just seems to do what it says on the tin, and I hope that Amazon will be around for a while.

With a standard MAX ADSL line we can upload just over 2Gbytes per day, but our daily upload is usually a few hundred MBytes. One criticism would be that the download speed appears to be far less than our ADSL line speed.

Tim.

Just my take on things.

Two backups. One internal on a dedicated hard drive (you can even disconnect it if it's very rarely used). The other backup on an external USB drive.

Personally I'm not a fan of remote storage, but that's because I've never used it. I'm also less keen on RAID 1 or 5, since it involves familiarity of RAID systems, trials of backup and restore, and regualr refreshers or you forget how to do it when the time comes.

With my preferred system, you have easy to access data, with little or no experience required.

Thanks very much for all of your replies, you've given me lots to think about, but I'll just clarify a couple of things:

The images are currently stored on a couple of 750gb internal disks, nowhere near full and this will continue to be my primary store going forward.
My 500gb MyBook is considered a secondary backup, and once that's full, I'll buy another. It's not on very often, but on often enough to make sure nothing sticks solid

What I am missing at this point in time is a way to get to my images whilst away from home, and also some form of off-site storage. Although a home RAID is an option for some protection against hardware failure, it has no protection against burglary or other home-based catastrophe, although I guess a pc laden with disks would be pretty heavy I'm no stranger to mucking around with hardware, and my unix box used to be water-cooled for a long time, back in the days when I had 5 external ips and a whole suite of computers at home (I've somewhat rationalised and simplified my collection now, 'just' 2 pcs + laptop)

I might be a little paranoid, considering just one of my images has been syndicated to HBO and ESPN for a significant amount of money, I'm keen to make sure I have a sensible level of protection from disaster, at a sensible cost

I'm quite tempted to try using my flickr account as a store - it's actually something I feel daft for not thinking about myself, it'll cost me no more money and it doesn't have to be 100% reliable - I will just use it as a 3rd-string backup strategy

Once again, thanks for alll taking the time to consider and reply to my query

In reply to a post by jonathanHodd:

Thanks very much for all of your replies, you've given me lots to think about, but I'll just clarify a couple of things:

The images are currently stored on a couple of 750gb internal disks, nowhere near full and this will continue to be my primary store going forward.
My 500gb MyBook is considered a secondary backup, and once that's full, I'll buy another. It's not on very often, but on often enough to make sure nothing sticks solid

What I am missing at this point in time is a way to get to my images whilst away from home, and also some form of off-site storage. Although a home RAID is an option for some protection against hardware failure, it has no protection against burglary or other home-based catastrophe, although I guess a pc laden with disks would be pretty heavy I'm no stranger to mucking around with hardware, and my unix box used to be water-cooled for a long time, back in the days when I had 5 external ips and a whole suite of computers at home (I've somewhat rationalised and simplified my collection now, 'just' 2 pcs + laptop)

I might be a little paranoid, considering just one of my images has been syndicated to HBO and ESPN for a significant amount of money, I'm keen to make sure I have a sensible level of protection from disaster, at a sensible cost

I'm quite tempted to try using my flickr account as a store - it's actually something I feel daft for not thinking about myself, it'll cost me no more money and it doesn't have to be 100% reliable - I will just use it as a 3rd-string backup strategy

Once again, thanks for alll taking the time to consider and reply to my query

What might be worth doing is creating two online accounts. One with low res photos (with perhaps watermaking) and use that for a web portfolio for your clients. and one private one which has the hires back ups ....

Mick,

I know this thread is a bit old but I'm just interested as to why you don't trust online data storage / backup providers?

I personally use humyo for live online data storage, I also use our own offsite data backup service.

For business, all business critical data is stored on redundant arrays, then backed up offsite.