Jamie Orillion Photography & Design

One reason I say NEW(ish) is because I’ve been having this system in place for some time now, but I’ve just caught up with things that I’m finally able to actually make a post about it.  I won’t get into crazy detail, but I will give you the general idea.  I had previously done a post on archiving and backing up all of my data, but I didn’t have a solution for all of my photography because of pricing and space issues.  Now I have something in place that I can easily grow on and it works pretty seamlessly.

I am going to be the first to admit that I definitely didn’t come up with this idea on my own.  Doing research for a long time took me to the blog of Image Mechanics.  They did a post on their archiving system and I figured it would be perfect for me.  I basically am running the exact same system with only a few minor changes to suit my needs so I won’t get into a mile of details.

Backup In a nutshell:  I currently run a RAID 10 on two separate Sonnet 5 bay cases.  I chose Sonnet because I was able to find a great system that allowed me to use only one eSATA cable per case and I could choose my own drives. Each Sonnet case has can hold up to 5 1Tb Drives.  One case has 2 1Tb drives which are striped (data spanned across the drives) and each case have the same 2 1Tb drives which are mirrored.  Basically all of my data is written and backed up on an additional set simultaneously.  If you don’t have one you will need a RAID card for your computer to be able to do this.  I also have an additional set of 2 1Tb drives that I keep off site and back up once a week.  I use Retrospect to back up weekly.  This ensures that if I have a fire in the studio I’m only out a week at most.  I’ll probably move to a 3Tb system of working files, but I’m trying to keep it as small as possible and just archive frequently.

Now for archiving… Mimicking the system I recently stumbled upon:  I have a 2 bay Sans Digital case which allows me to set up a RAID internally.  The case is hooked up eSATA and old data is copied to two drives which are RAID1.  The case also allows me to insert drives without attaching any sort of mount so it is a quick and easy in-and-out.  Data is written simultaneously (mirrored) to each drive.  I label each drive with the same number adding an A or B and I keep the A drives on site and I keep the B drives off site at my house.  I currently archive to 250gb hard drives to span out my data.  In the event that drives in the same set are corrupt I don’t loose 1TB of data I would just loose 250gb.  Don’t get me wrong… Either would suck, but it’s what I do.  Not sure if the 250gb system is as cost effective as the 1Tb drives, but projects are anywhere from 15-35gb so 1Tb archives would probably be overkill anyway.

Once my drives are written I eject them and put one in a case in the studio and take the other drive home to put in a separate case for offsite archive.  The cases I use are the Pelican 1520 series.  I can hold 16 hard drives in each case.  Each case was custom formatted for my drives and the inserts are made of anti static foam which is cut to the drive size.  The cases are also water tight and crush proof.  I ordered the cases through Cpd Industries which actually cut the foam and all.  The website looked a bit sketchy, so I called and placed my order, but everything was legit and came in very quick!

You may ask “Why Hard Drives?”.  I was archiving with archival grade DVDs (which weren’t cheep to begin with).  I’d burn 2 copies of each project.  One was kept in the studio and the other was kept at home.  Doing design and photography I am typically asked to rework old projects, reference them, or pull old images for new projects.  If the files were archived I have to thumb through tons of DVDs not to mention the data was typically spanned across anywhere from 4-8 DVDs (for archiving you would actually double that number: I was actually burning 8-16 DVDs total).  If the data was spanned and I needed all or a specific file that was written on both I had to restore every DVD.  Now… I keep a text file on my computer which is searchable.  I search for the project title and it shows me which drive it is on.  I then pull only that drive, mount it, and it is as if it never left my computer.  I pull what I need and I’m good to go!

So that’s it in a nutshell:  Good thing I wanted to be brief ;)