Content Backup Methods - What do You Do?
richardandtracy
Posts: 5,924
Another thread made me wonder about what I am doing regarding content backup.
In 2004/5 I took a copy of every .zip file I ever downloaded and burnt them to CD, so if I had a disaster with the PC I could recover them. 15 years on, I have never touched them since, apart from trying to read to see if they are still readable - one isn't, the rest read OK. At the moment I am basically relying on my DAZ & Rendo accounts as my backups and not bothering with freebies. Not sure how wise this is. Think it's safe, but it's not in my control, which is a potential risk, but it's at someone else's cost, which is a benefit.
Can I ask, what does everyone else do for their backups and what is your reasoning?
Regards,
Richard
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Comments
There really is no good backup media, don't know if there even has been for the last 25 years. The drives are growing fast and empty space tends to automatically fill up.
I thought that buying a BD writer with 50GB disks would finally be the solution, but then I started counting the number of connected drives (14) and with their combined capacity of almost 20TB's... Once again I found the device too small and slow for any backing up. Technology is just moving forward faster than the backup methods can keep up, and no... I don't consider clouds for one second.
The only backup method I use, is to leave stuff on the drives when I replace them with bigger ones.
...put my IM downloads folder on it's own dedicated backup HDD as I've also had DVDs become corrupted over time (lost a lot of nice freebies, some no longer available).
While there are 1 and even 2 TB USB sticks available they are still pretty expensive (caveat emptor when it comes ot low cost ones as often they tend to be fakes). Also transferring such a large amount of data would take a very long time (my system has only USB 2.0).
kyoto kid, I have already been wondering about having a complete copy of the content directory on a separate drive. You are tending to persuade me in that direction. My machine is RAID compatible so could do it automatically in theory, but I'd need 2 identical drives and probably need to put the OS on it too, so that ends up being a bit much. Good suggestion about putting all the zip files on a second drive, though. Thanks.
Regards,
Richard.
Same here, I have an external hdd for them. It's probably the easiest and cheapest option.
I'm paranoid when it comes to make a backup for all my stuff and therefore I synchronize 2 servers with 10TB hdd's on a daily basis and I hold an additional external drive without internet access as a 3rd copy of all my stuff as well and of course I backup every single versions of DazStudio back from version 2.3 to 4.15 and last but not least I maintain several huge databases for all the stuff from Daz, Rendo etc. instead of DIM or SmartContent and I use a software called Easy2Sync from a german developer to synchronize all those Terrabytes as soon as something has changed, e.g. new items.
I backup to a dedicated internal HDD as well as use an online service that has saved my butt more than once (Carbonite). I don't back up my Daz assets, as if that stuff ever gets nuked, I can just redownload it. I do back up my scene files, custom morphs, and custom textures.
My goodness, modeller, that sounds like a pretty professional setup to me. I'm just a hobbyist, and no income stream would be impacted, I'd just be rather disappointed. Might have an Anglo-Saxon word or two to say, but otherwise Id have no financial problems as a result.
Looks as if I now have a sensible alternative backup plan. I will probably have it as an internal drive, though. Our fleabags (aka 'cats') enjoy chewing loose cable ends if they ever find them, and we're not the best at putting everything away.
Regards,
Richard.
I like cats
and "my goodness" is well said Richard! 
but you're right it is a professional setup and I own 26 domains as well for the same reason, I'm in the development stage of a company and it is a huge project, this has to do with my job in the past, I worked as an electronics engineer and later as an IT systems engineer, now I develope a new career. Well that's it, I call it paranoid but in reality it has to do with my new career and of course I don't talk a lot beyond that, most of the time I have no time to post in a forum, but at the moment I have time enough because I had an accident with my bicycle. I agree not all users here should be paranoid like me if there is no good reason for it and I think a simple backup is probably in the most cases sufficient.
I have a 12 bay NAS in the office, which every machine is backed up to (along with hosting media, IP cameras etc) and then an offsite NAS which replicates that once a week. It's 52tb total, about 35tb used at the moment.
Every machine is imaged automatically on a weekly basis (rolling 4 week retention) and as well hourly file syncs to allow in-place rollbacks (with weekly/monthly/yearly snapshots).
Not 100% - but would be pretty catasphronic circumstances to lose all that. For me, my digital stuff is pretty much priceless, so I dont mind investing in safeguarding it.
Boy, I can see that. The 35TB is massive compared to the data we store at work. As an engineering company, the 750Gb we backup daily amounts to 35 years of 2D & 3D CAD & all test/qualification/verification documents for a Technical dept currently of 5, but has been up to 15 depending on projects. The only CAD files no-longer available to us are the ones that were stored on 9" floppy disks from the 1980's, once we went over to 5.25" floppies, the files are currently available.
Regards,
Richard.
I would be astonished if your office would look like a hobbyist room
...I think your setup is pretty standard for a company like yours. 
I use backblaze, not the best i think but is cheap. If your total needs for a single PC+ext HDDs is 1TB or less (or is from multiple pcs), their B2 cloud storage with any free backup software compatible with AWS s3 is an even cheaper solution.
Yeah, at work... I had been some four years with my current employer when our IT guys started complaining that my email archive was already taking "ALMOST 10GB" and they were running out of space... When I told them that in my mind that was just a good start and offered to bring some drives that I had removed from my system as too small, they somehow took it as an insult (strange fellows...).
Turned out that they had just 250GB's for everything on the network shared drive, which contained everything produced in digital form during the past 25 years and around 100 users filling it every day.
Took still yet another year before they finally understood and increased the space up to whooping 2TB's.
I don't have anything as elaborate as Jack, but I do have full set of zips on 2d internal hard drive along with backups of content directory and zips on 2 external drives. One stays in office, one stays in safe deposit box and I usually switch them monthly. More often would be better, but that's about the best I can do :/
I just have an 2TB drive that Windows 7 Backup/Imaging runs on weekly. As I need to buy a 2nd 2TB drive and split my DAZ 3D Library from my system disk I'll need to buy a 2nd 2TB drive to back that up as well. So 2 x 2TB system & content drives & 2x2TB Windows 7 backup/imaging drives.
I now have 2 Ring (doorbell video) cameras and they do 60 days storage on the net if you subscribe to their $10 monthly professional monitoring service. I will be adding 2 more, one for the front yard and one for the back yard. However, I'm not satisfied with such extreme wide angle lenses being used to record activities. Those wide angles are great for activity detection but not so great for high detailed identification recordings. The same way those phone security cameras have arrays of cameras and even lidar for security biometrics so do home and business security cameras need such arrays or narrow focus FOV (say typical 35MM for example) cameras recorded at FHD or 4K. I think an array of 6 cameras, a row of 3 on top and a row of 3 on bottom would cumulatively cover the current wide range FOV of these cheap security cameras but in high details. Would need local storage and great compression because such high detailed recordings would be huge. Battery and power use would need to be expanded. No such cameras exist though. I'm not such why, when Samsung / phone service providers can sell something as sophisticated and advanced as a Samsung Galaxy A10e camera for $50. I like seeing the whitetailed deer, birds, and other animals that wander through the yard on occasions so the cameras are good for that besides the intended security uses. Those extreme wide angle views of the deer are really not good in details when viewed at a desktop 27" FHD or 4K monitor though, so there is another reason to hope these security camera systems will get on the stick and improve their cameras.
I don't understand what ring cameras have to do with content backup.
I have an external 4 terabyte drive. I backup the installers, the database and my various versions of studio and dim to it. About once a year I backup the whole d drive where studio resides because I make tons of modifications to the locations of things because of the stores bad file structure.
Just talking about volume of data to be stored.
Ah! Thank you :)
Well I don't have money to spend on sites, drives, etc. Wish I did...lol Over the years I have used DVD's to back up my files, later I used a websight similar to dropbox and set it so I was the only one who had access to the files, that way I don't break copyright, more recently I have considered using a spare server on Discord I created, since I just finished copying all my several hundren bookmarks to it for access on the newer computer.
Problem is...no matter what method you use, nothing lasts forever, DVD's, Hard Drives and even websites break or disappear. So to counter this, I use multiple methods, starting with what I keep on the comptuer that I currently make use of, burn to DVD's, upload to a storage site and finally, once I have Nitro, will use that Discord server or create another one. This way, if one or more has a problem, I still have one or more to fall back on and not lose any files.
Secure cloud storage as a consideration for your content backup, of course. Come on, it's the year 2021 now. LOL.
Secure cloud is an oxymoron.
I backup ALL my archives from Daz and others and the unzipped libraries, thumbnails and manifest files. I back them up to multiple drives AND to two hard drives that I pull out and store elsewhere. I've had too many losses over the years and learned my lesson ;).
Laurie
My comment is a bit OT, but
I use Crystaldisk Info. It's monitoring hard drives health, and warns when it's time to replace.
I used many types of backup systems, none proved really safe and simple enough to be reliable for home use.
As for cloud, my wife website disappeared when the "cloud" server was destroyed by a blaze.
I have 2 External HDDs (10TB and 8 TB) and a separate 2 Bay NAS. I make a differential backup of important files (not just DAZ Studio related) every week and a "full" backup every 2 to 3 months. A full backup is about 3TB, differentials are 50GB to 120GB. The backup [program does use a compression scheme.
I have a setup of two 4-bay NAS machines, configured as high-availability cluster. each NAS is configured as RAID-5, and I use a share of about 5 TB for DAZ content.
Granted, it is (much) slower than using the internal 2TB SSD (esp. when one of my computers "decide" to do one of its regular becakups), but safety is close to US Fort Knox
Most recent estimates for SSDs is 10 years. I just searched for "lifetime of ssd at rest".
How does one back up their Daz Studio installation?