Backing up your work

[Sketchrender]

This has been covered, but a lot a posts are old.

Tech changes a lot, so with an average folder after a project being 500mb+, what would people suggest.

 

The old rule of Backup, Backup,Backup still holds.

 

So hard drive. -> external hard drives......

 

So what are people using these days.

 

Phil

[heni30]

First backup goes to a 2nd internal hard drive. Then at the end the folder goes to external HDs. Luckily most of my folders are smallish - airport/mall retail.

 

One thing I've been trying to do is really trim down the fat on the final folders. Old file versions, redundant material; etc.

Most of my old folders could be trimmed down at least 30% or more. Also makes things easier to find.

[Sketchrender]

Thank you for the reply.

And have you thought about the "cloud"

For backing up.

[heni30]

Yeah, but in the back of mind I'm always apprehensive about the internet going down like

due to a storm or something. We have a lot of trees falling over in this region. So yeah, for

long term storage but not for current projects.

[CliveG]

First line of defence.... Mirror Disks! .... god I love those, they've saved my bacon so many times now. All my machines for the last 10 years or more have had a raid array mirror and in that time I've had I'd say something like a hard disk failure on average every 2 years. No loss of data no loss of time no loss of sleep.

 

Second line of defence external hard drives are so cheap load up on those, store some off site. I've no time for trimming and editing, just buy another external hard drive, they're only a few bucks!

 

I'll burn stuff occasionally but probably haven't done that for a year or more.

 

Can't be arsed with anything more than that.... if anything's happened beyond that sort of cover then my data is the least of my worry's!

[heni30]

Does the mirror setup take longer to save?

 

Another problem I see is that sometimes I'll save a file before I wanted to and that blunder would carry over to the mirror drive whereas a separate drive will still have the last saved good version of the file.

 

That's save my butt big time a couple of times.

Edited January 24, 2016 by heni30

[CliveG]

Does the mirror setup take longer to save?

 

If it does it's only nanoseconds, which is much less than my "duh.... what do I do now..." so my workflow would never notice it.

 

These days I run an SSD as my C drive, which speeds things up and if anything this is now my weak link - but my Autosaves etc all write to the Mirror disks, so I'd still only stand to lose 15 minutes work from an SSD failure.

 

I'm no tech head, but the Mirroring has genuinely saved my bacon so many times.

 

I'm not sure if it's just me, but having had 7 or 8 hard disk failures over such a short time is sobering stuff! So to me it's not a question of IF but WHEN?

[Devin Johnston]

I've tried online backups before but unless your willing to pay for business class speeds the regular personal plans just won't backup your stuff quick enough. At the time I had over a TB of data and it took about 4 months to finish the first backup, after that it was just backing up files that changed but that first backup took forever. Now I backup to external drives and I see no reason to change this, it's fast, cheap, reliable and if I do need something I don't have to spend hours downloading it. If your worried about fire or theft buy a couple of drives and swap them out every week, or daily if your really paranoid.

[Scott Schroeder]

I use online back ups for my current jobs only and I only back up ultra critical items such as Max and Photoshop source files.

 

I use external hard drives for my main backups. I run a master backup every 3 months on everything. I keep one hard drive in my home and one in a safety deposit box at my bank. It's nice to have that outside place just in case something were to happen such as fire, flood, tornado, etc.

 

I used to keep an extra HD in my computer and use that as my weekly backup source. Since I don't work as much as I used to at home, I don't do that anymore.

[Fooch]

Having your backup script / program to exclude certain folders does help ease the file sizes.

 

Example : _superseeded or _archive (in any folder)

So anything in folders wouldn't be backed up. It does shave a lot of file management etc.. and gives the onus on artists to put older files in there.

[Sketchrender]

Thank you all for the replies.

 

I thought things might have changed with Amazon storage or other companies offering large volumes, a little cheaper.

But no the old fashioned way still seems to be the way to go.

Now again it's good to chime in and check what everybody else in the business is doing.

 

Thank you

 

philip

[SkylineArch]

For current projects, I work out of a Google Drive folder on my desktop (just the main files), so it's backed up all the time in case of a failure, or if I need to access the files for some reason. Then, when the project is complete, it's backed up to an external drive, my main desktop with a RAID backup and occasionally I back that up to another external... Can you tell I've lost work in the past?

[TomasEsperanza]

I find this set-up is working fine for my small office:

 

1. Everything is on a fast network.

 

NETGEAR GS116E-200UKS ProSAFE Plus Gigabit Switch

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00I46IIFQ?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00

 

2. A NAS repository is accessed by all, to read and write, to and from.

 

Synology DS214+ DiskStation 2 Bay Desktop NAS

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00G6AX604?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00

 

3. The NAS has mirrored drives, but is also automatically backed up nightly to an external harddrive.

 

Samsung 3TB D3 Station External Desktop Hard Drive - Black

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00C9TEOCA?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o09_s00

 

4. Local drives are practically redundant but have copies of the asset libraries, (so machines can access these if the network was ever down).

 

5. FreeFileSync is used to copy project folders (and other such working files) back and forth to Dropbox, when sending WIP to and from other offices, clients etc. This way it's a couple of clicks to sync the latest iterations for sharing, and the recipients get a Dropbox notification that files have been updated.

 

http://www.freefilesync.org/

https://www.dropbox.com/

 

*If I had the need, and the money, I'd consider building a windows server with Intel PCI-e SSDs, and back up to an offsite service.

[elipan]

I have a NAS with all my data.

Every six hours it makes a differential backup to an external drive.

Every one hour my projects folder makes a differential backup.

 

Once a day the NAS in the office syncs itself with another NAS I have at home thru a VPN.

The sync is done by the morning.

Even if my office catches on fire I still have a backup...

 

In case anything happens, all I need to do is buy a new computer, pickup my home NAS and violla i'm ready to go.

Installing Windows and software is not a problem, because I always have a system image backup on the NAS.

Edited January 30, 2016 by elipan

[joadhughes]

My current set up is like this:

 

1TB storage drive, gets copied to another 1TB drive which is an exact replica of it, then backed up to an external 1TB drive over USB 3.0.

 

Also I sometimes will drop things on dropbox, but I don't have any room on theres I only do it if I have something really important.

[Jeff Mottle]

Excluding the 5 web/database servers running CGarchitect, my office backup uses Synology NAS across the board. Main network drive is a RAID 5, secondary is RAID 10. Both backup to secondary onsite NAS mirrors every 6 hours. Then each secondary NAS is swapped and taken offsite to a bank safety deposit box weekly. In the event of a total loss fire or theft, the most that would be lost is 1 week. All workstations are also mirrored every hour as differential backups on the network NAS.

 

For all of my important cloud files (mostly stuff on Google Drive and associated apps) I use http://spanning.com/ to backup the cloud to another cloud.

[numerobis]

I'm using a self-build server with RAID1 (2xSSD+2xHDD) + 2 removable backup HDDs to have one copy at another location. File syncing without compression or any special archive format.

 

But i have to say that in maybe 25 years (~50-60 HDDs?) i never had a HDD crash, only two external 2.5" HDDs got lost, one failure was based on a user error and the other problem was the stupid USB-controller that was directly soldered to the logic board of the HDD (this was my last WD HDD!!!).

Edited February 3, 2016 by numerobis

[Amen]

I will soon buy myself a small nas:

 

0 x Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD 512e 5TB (6 Platter), SATA 6Gb/s (ST5000NM0084)

2 x Seagate NAS HDD 6TB, SATA 6Gb/s (ST6000VN0021)

1 x Samsung SSD 850 Pro 512GB, SATA (MZ-7KE512BW)

0 x Qnap Turbo Station TVS-871T-i7-16G, 16GB RAM, 4x Gb LAN/2x 10GBase/2x Thunderbolt 2

1 x Qnap Turbo Station TS-453 Pro, 2GB RAM, 4x Gb LAN

1 x Kingston ValueRAM SO-DIMM Kit 16GB, DDR3-1600, CL11 (KVR16S11K2/16)

1 x APC Back-UPS 1400VA, USB (BX1400U-GR)

 

At first the 4 bay qnap, and much later the bigger one - although more probably a similar model, when it has thunderbolt 3 and use it as a DAS too.

 

The qnap will host also a VM for the License Servers and a backburner manager.

[philippelamoureux]

I've had a crash on my 2 SSDs recently and I've lost everything. Now I backup everything in the cloud. I have a 1000 gb plan and a fast unlimited internet connection. I put all my assets/source files/renderings on the cloud. I don't want/trust hard drives anymore!