Backing up to DVD process

[Snurk71]

I try to be a smart and back up my files (almost got burned once), though I know I'm not as careful and regimented as I need to be. I'm sitting on about 25 GB of picture files right now, and it's growing a lot faster now with RAW files.

I store my files on one internal drive (160 GB), back up nightly to a second internal drive (160 GB). I have an external drive (250 GB) for a second backup, and occassionally back up to DVDs to take to work for "offsite" storage.

I'm looking to upgrade my offsite performance because I don't burn the DVDs often enough (lazy). I've thought about getting a portable external and running a backup to that weekly. DVDs are easy to burn, and pretty cheap now. But how do you deal proceduraly with a volume that spreads across 6 discs? I have a somewhat convoluted directory structure for how I store files - I have subfolders under subfolders of a main picture folder. So it's not easy to keep track of what's new and what's old to attempt to only burn recent additions or modified files.

Maybe a related note, I'm doing the direct drive backups via XP's standard backup application (incremental each night for 6 nights of the week, then a new, full, replacement backup weekly). I do the DVDs as a direct file burn. Any better/faster/more efficient way to handle the backups - either to the drive or DVD?

I'm not a hard core techie, but dabble just enough to probably be dangerous. So setting up a RAID or something like that might be just beyond my grasp.

Thanks

 

[jfulcer]

I think you have a good start on making sure you are doing your backups. It's easy to setup a schedule that you work with - doing incremental backups through the week is a good way to make sure you catch everything. I've got a few thoughts:

1) You need to try to segment what you are backing up. It may require you to have a more understandable scheme for keeping your files organized. I organize my folders by year and then by event. If I modify any of those images, I keep a copy of the modified version in that directory.

With that structure, it makes it a lot easier to do backups. I have a DVD for 2006, 2005, 2004, etc.. I refresh those discs by making a new copy every 6 months or so. For more recent files and documents, I do (or try to to do) a weekly backup. A copy of those is stored at a friends house so if something happens to this house, I still have copies.

2) Invest in a dual layer DVD burner. You can fit 8.4 gigabytes on one disc which would make backups MUCH easier. And they are really really cheap right now.

3) Purchase a piece of software that actually is designed by someone that specifically does backups, and not as an afterthought by an OS maker. I use Nero and am pretty happy with it. This will help you a lot with volume spanning.

Feel free to ask any more questions.

 

[Groucho]

I don't buy into dual-layer discs. They have dropped in price but are still much, much more expensive per gig than single-layer DVDs. Plus I'm still a little bit leery about their long-term reliability - they're probably fine, but I'm can't help but be a touch nervous.

I'm not a fan of XP's built-in disc burning solution - matter of fact, I think it stinks. I much prefer Nero or similar.

The way I back things up is that each of my RAW files ends up on two DVDs. When I have enough RAWs to fill a DVD, I burn them. I then use an indexing program to keep track of what files are on what disc. There's a free one called Diskbase (a quick Google search should find it) that's not too bad, and there are many others. This way you won't need to insert disc after disc trying to find that one file.

Again, for the RAWs, I think it's best to keep them "as is" from the camera - don't rename them or anything, that way it's easy to organize them sequentially. If you also want to back up your JPGs from one giant folder, it might be best to use a backup program. There's a rather sparse one built in to XP (which it sounds like you're already familiar with), or one is bundled with Nero (and probably other DVD burning suites.) Start with a full backup of your JPG picture album, this will grab everything and mark it as archived. After that, do incremental backups, which will only grab the files that weren't archived last time, and mark them as archived. I don't think that the built-in XP backup will break a large backup (say, your original one) into smaller pieces, so that complicates things - and your backup-to-disk backups are already changing the archive bits.

Since you're shooting in Raw now, my inclination would be to do a DVD backup of all your JPGs (or just the older ones from before you shot raw), then burn your RAWs every time you have a DVD's worth ready to burn. The JPGs are getting backed up pretty well already, so hopefully you'll be safe with them already. Heck, having nightly backups scheduled already means that you're way ahead of most people.