[Leica] Backup hardware: USB3 HDD

[Adam Bridge]

I agree with Frank. Backups require a variety of solutions. Having a “direct connect” hard drive is a fundamental part of that solution. Having an off-site backup is another. There are a variety of solutions for this as well. I’ve been using arq software to backup my images to Amazon’s “Glacier” storage although I could have used any of the Amazon S3 storage tiers as well. Depends on how quickly you want to be able to restore. Since I’m unlikely to need to download on a moment by moment basis Glacier, which uses off-line storage, is a reasonable bet. It seems reasonably affordable. Amazon knows a lot about secure storage solutions and they won’t use my images to sell me ads or market me. 

Virtually all my images live on a large Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt 2 external RAID. I back that up to a Drobo. This doesn’t entirely solve the image integrity issue, however. I’d like to have a check-sum to verify each image against and a more rigorous file system than Mac OS X currently employes. I’m hoping that in the future Apple will create a file system built around data integrity like ZFS. But this seems unlikely to me as Apple focuses more and more on iOS products. I suppose I could build a Linux box with ZFS but I’m beyond the place where that seems interesting to me and it doesn’t solve the problem on the Mac. And I don’t do Windows.

If we’re going to keep terabytes of data around we have to care about keeping it reliable. It’s just a different part of the game. I wish the hardware and OS guys would really focus on this but as a selling point to consumers it isn’t important.

Adam

> On Sep 27, 2015, at 11:19 AM, Frank Filippone <red735i at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> Frys Electronics has a Western Digital 5TB external USB3.0 drive on sale for $120. This is a massive amount of storage (in Leica M240 terms, about 200,000 raw  images). If you are looking for a backup HDD, this is a cost effective solution.
> 
> Please, no outbursts of WD is no good, brand Z is better.  Or some techie version of why you should only use NAS drives.  This is a simple, cost effective, low tech way to backup your computer.