Protecting Your Scene Collection

[Fred588]

Even if the producer will replace a lost scene its still a royal pain (somewhere down South) to lose a valued collection to a hard disk crash, virus, or whatever. Very large disk drives are now available at very reasonable prices. In the past two weeks, for example, I have purchased two eight-terabyte drives for less than $400.00, and that was for both and including the tax. I now have five of these in my network and they work quite well. Even a one-terabyte drive should be enough for most people's video collections. I would highly recommend (and I have no financial interest whatsoever in doing so) putting two such drives on your system and using one to mirror the other. If you have concern about some malware wiping them, leave one of the drives turned off except when adding a new file.

[quicksandRVA]

Source: am IT guy

My recommendation for your collection is the and as normal files: BACK IT UP. A "RAID" (Redundant Array of Identical Disks) is a great way to do it. QNAP has several RAID devices that are easy to set up and work over USB or your home network. They're extremely secure as well. If you set it up correctly, which is not hard as the devices come with instructions, you will have two identical disks such that if one dies, you can simply replace it. You will always have a good copy. That said, backing up your backup is also good. Carbonite offers unlimited automatic cloud backups for $60/year. It's also extremely secure and easy to get your stuff back.

[Herzeleid]

I totally agree with you guys. I have a 1TB external hard drive that I keep all my quicksand videos, pictures, etc. on, and as soon as I download a scene I transfer it straight away to this hard drive. Also, i only connect the hard drive when I'm actually going to use it, so that keeps all my precious scenes safe, plus it frees up my Mac's hard drive for "Normal " stuff.

[Fred588]

I hope you simply omitted to say that you also keep your scenes in a SECOND location.

I totally agree with you guys. I have a 1TB external hard drive that I keep all my quicksand videos, pictures, etc. on, and as soon as I download a scene I transfer it straight away to this hard drive. Also, i only connect the hard drive when I'm actually going to use it, so that keeps all my precious scenes safe, plus it frees up my Mac's hard drive for "Normal " stuff.

[Herzeleid]

Of course, Fred. I forgot to mention that I have another portable hard drive that I keep all the scenes that I've paid for, as well as my 1TB hard drive . . . you can't be too careful you know !

[Kinky Desires]

This is my setup; a 120Gb SSD for the Windows installation, a 1Tb SSD for program and games installations, then 4x 4Tb SSHD hybrid drives in a RAID 10 configuration for all my music, videos and documents! It's a little extreme and yes it was expensive too, but it definitely gets the job done

Raid.jpg

I haven't been backing up my scenes anywhere else, but RAID 10 does protect against a potential drive failure just as the 'mirror' method you originally suggested does. One thing that did grab my attention from your original post though was the potential concern about malware wiping them - I hadn't really considered the possibility of that, but honestly how likely is it? I have McAfee antivirus installed and always keep both it and windows up to date with the latest updates, and I am very wary of clicking on dodgy looking links on web pages or suspicious e-mails.

If I am browsing the web and something looks dodgy, I'd test it out by booting up a Windows 7 "virtual machine" with VirtualBox and test it out with that, and then just close the window and revert the VM back to it's previous 'snapshot'!

[Fred588]

I agree the risk is relatively small given your system but for me I prefer the concept of a manual backup, provided one has the discipline. My system is rather large for a home system with roughly 66T of storage across 11 drives and I actually have five pairs of drives mirroring each other. It is fairly safe from malware as the system itself is not on line, but not quite so safe from me inadvertently erasing a file when I meant to rename it. With a RAID system, if I understand those correctly, both copies would be gone.

This is my setup; a 120Gb SSD for the Windows installation, a 1Tb SSD for program and games installations, then 4x 4Tb SSHD hybrid drives in a RAID 10 configuration for all my music, videos and documents! It's a little extreme and yes it was expensive too, but it definitely gets the job done

Raid.jpg

I haven't been backing up my scenes anywhere else, but RAID 10 does protect against a potential drive failure just as the 'mirror' method you originally suggested does. One thing that did grab my attention from your original post though was the potential concern about malware wiping them - I hadn't really considered the possibility of that, but honestly how likely is it? I have McAfee antivirus installed and always keep both it and windows up to date with the latest updates, and I am very wary of clicking on dodgy looking links on web pages or suspicious e-mails.

If I am browsing the web and something looks dodgy, I'd test it out by booting up a Windows 7 "virtual machine" with VirtualBox and test it out with that, and then just close the window and revert the VM back to it's previous 'snapshot'!

[marcl]

As a professional sysadmin, I agree with the mantra that RAID is not backup - it will protect you (somewhat) from a hard drive failure, but not from accidental deletion or malware.

And while it is possible to mitigate the risk of malware by using virus scanners, applying security patches and being careful about what links you click on and which sites you visit, you can never be 100% sure that something will slip through and delete or encrypt all your files.

To be on the safe side:

• Backup to at least one external hard drive that is only connected while running backups. Better yet, have two or more on rotation, so there is always a safe, disconnected copy.
• Backup anything essential that you cannot afford to lose to another location - cloud backup services are good for this, if you have the bandwidth.
• Test your backup from time to time - if you cannot restore files when you need to, the backup is useless. Ideally try restoring to a different computer.

And if this thread continues, should it perhaps move to the technical forum?

[dlodoski]

As a professional sysadmin, I agree with the mantra that RAID is not backup - it will protect you (somewhat) from a hard drive failure, but not from accidental deletion or malware.

And while it is possible to mitigate the risk of malware by using virus scanners, applying security patches and being careful about what links you click on and which sites you visit, you can never be 100% sure that something will slip through and delete or encrypt all your files.

To be on the safe side:

• Backup to at least one external hard drive that is only connected while running backups. Better yet, have two or more on rotation, so there is always a safe, disconnected copy.
• Backup anything essential that you cannot afford to lose to another location - cloud backup services are good for this, if you have the bandwidth.
• Test your backup from time to time - if you cannot restore files when you need to, the backup is useless. Ideally try restoring to a different computer.

Spoken by someone truly responsible for something critical, somewhere. (I used to help organize disaster recovery drills, back in the day).

And if this thread continues, should it perhaps move to the technical forum?

The technical forum is pretty much for forum issues. I think that this is worthy of General Discussion.