Photography Backup Solution

[Declan Taylor]

I recently went through a serious data loss and I'm looking at starting a whole new backup system for photography/videography.

 

As it stands now, I import my photos off of the SD cards onto my laptop (Lightroom processing). I keep the current year's photos on my laptop and archive everything else off onto a portable HDD. All videos go straight onto an HDD which I edit off of (is that an okay thing to do?) Obviously there is no redundancy here and I need to change what I'm doing - but I need advice!

 

I want: a hard drive system that:

• Can be my primary source for videos (editing off the hdd) and archived photos that don't fit on my laptop hard-drive (again; lightroom working straight from this source)
• Backs up all of those media files that don't have a home on the laptop
• Act as a time-machine style backup for my macbook's hard drive (music library, documents, etc).
• Is simple durable enough that I can fly the system across the country twice a year (I'm a university student).

What do I do? Is RAID something that could do this? 

[Crunken]

i don't have a lot of knowledge in this area but look into getting a NAS, sounds like it's what you're looking for

[LamoidZombieDog]

Alright. So theres lots of price options here. One, You can get image for Windows which is a backup program, and you can set it to back up as many times as you wanted (maybe once every other day) onto an external hard drive, the downside to that is if you get a virus, it could get onto that drive if you dont turn off the drive fast enough, or it can also fail. though if it fails, hook up a new drive, and it will re back everything up. Otherwise, You could Set up a NAS Server (fairly expensive) otherwise, your last option is to get 2 Equal capacity Drives (1TB for example) and a raid card, and set up raid inside your PC. if you put 2 2TB drives in raid 1, You would have 2TB total. Raid One essentialy takes everything you save on your one hard drive, and copies it to the other.