What are you using as additioal or backup storage?

My second HD is nearly full and since I just acquired a 50D just before going to Arches I am going to need more space.I am looking at the Seagate 500GB USB drive which seems ot have good reviews. Any other suggestions?
John

I just print 8x10s of every file. Isn't that enough?

I use a Seagate Freeagent 500GB, so far I'm pretty happy with it. I researched into it before buying the Seagate, it seemed like Seagate came out tops over Western digital in all tests/reviews. Ontop of the external drive I use DVD's too, and an older Maxtor drive.

I highly recommend the Drobo. It's a RAID-like storage device. You can mix and match drives of different sizes and manufacturers (something you can't do with typical NASs) and it "just works". Get the fire-wire variant if you have FW800 available.

I've been running one with four 320GB drives in it for about a year. Just before I went to Zion last week one of the drives failed . I went down to Best Buy; bought a new 500GB drive, slapped it in, and let the Drobo rebuild the array while I was gone. RESULT - No data loss and complete protection the entire time .

The advantage of the Drobo, besides multi-drive protection is that you can start with drives you have lying around. I think you need at least three SATA to get going. As you need more storage space just replace the smallest drive. You can expand what the Drobo is managing up to 16TB.

I also use single external drives but they can fail at any time. Don't rely on a single drive as a backup! Consider having offsite storage too.

I have a RAID setup on my Dell that utilizes two 500GB drives. I also have two 500GB Western Digital external hard drives - once a month, I back everything up to each of the WD drives. So, everything is stored in 4 separate locations. I'm pretty ruthless about cleaning out my image folders, so that's plenty of storage space.

But since all of those are in the house and could be destroyed in a fire, I was looking into online backup this weekend. A friend recommended Mozy. $4.95/mo for unlimited online storage. It includes software that tracks changes and periodically syncs up your computer with the online folders, so after the first lengthy upload, the rest is pretty easy.

I use two Western Digital external drives, one as a working drive, one as a backup of that drive. At this time, I don't have any off-site or online backups, but I am considering doing something about that pretty soon.

I am using Lacie 1TB external hardrive. Everything is backed up each hour with Time Machine on my Mac. It's pretty slick, don't have to worry about manually backing up my files and risking forgetting something.
I am backing up entire system. In case of failure, it will be easy to recover all.

I wouldn't go anything less than 1TB with a 50d. I have a 40d and I personally use a buffalo 2TB network drive which has been mirrored so if one drive goes bad, I still have a copy on the other drive. I work at a large computer store and I've heard too many horror stories of lost data.

Jack

Another vote for the Drobo. I have one with four 1TB drives and it backs up two iMacs and two external 1TB drives. I like the redundancy it provides and a drive can fail (in the Drobo) and there is no loss of data. I plugged it in, it sits in the background and does its thing (I use Time Machine to do the backups every hour). Great little device and great peace of mind.

Another Drobo fan here. Once you have the enclosure, it's incredibly easy/cheap to expand your storage ... perfect for your situation.

Thanks for the note on Mozy Rick! I was paying WAY more with Amazon's service.

Buffalo Terrastation at home and a USB drive at work.

I use 2 500GB MyBook Western Digital externals, one is a mirror to the other. I try to keep my C: drive as clear as possible but that means I have to keep my externals on all the time so I can access my files. Both are almost full, so I have another pair of 500GB MyBooks in the on-deck circle.
I use a 1DsIII and so far the 500GB drives have been plenty big.
I worry about going to 1TB drives. Say that they are almost full, then 1 dies. I'm probably wrong on this but I would imagine it would take days to copy the functioning drive to a new drive so that you would have 2 copies again,especially with USB 2.0 which is what I use.

Drobo looks like a great solution and Mozy seems like an immediate solution and it is off-site. I new ya'll would have the answers. Thanks everyone!
John

Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ is what I use. I have 4 1-TB HDs and it rocks! With the Netgear NAS NV+ you can use different HD configurations. I started with 2-500 GB and slowly added 1-TB as I could. I have it setup with RAID 0.

Darr,

As a backup device, I would strongly recommend that you do NOT use Raid 0. It is very dangerous. You can email me if you'd like more information about the various raid configurations and their effects on performance and reliability.

I'll also say that the NAS systems in my opinion offer a great deal flexibility over Drobo because they are meant to be stand alone data servers. Drobo didn't exist when I made my choice, but I would still go NAS or server today.

For others who may not understand the different RAID configurations, RAID 0 is a poor backup solution because it offers no redundancy or mirroring. RAID 0 is a striped configuration where your data is written across all of the drives in the array resulting in a performance boost. However, if one of the drives in a RAID 0 array dies, you potentially loose ALL of the data on the array.
RAID 1 is a mirrored solution where your data is written to multiple drives simultaneously. You don't get the perfomance boost but you do have redundancy. Losing one drive does not result in data loss.
RAID 1+0 and RAID 5 are striped and mirrored configurations if you have 3 or more drives but there are performance considerations to know about.

Drobo does offer a network device so you can use it as a standalone network server. While dedicated NASs can offer a lot of flexibility they often require more advance system administration knowledge, like what the RAID configurations are and how to build them. Also, they typically lock you into having to use drives from the same or a specific manufacturer and of the same size. If you want to grow your storage space, your options are limited - replace a subset of the array with larger, similar drives.

Drobo lets you use any combination of sizes and manufacturers, and upgrade one drive at a time when expanding. This, coupled with nearly ZERO administrative overhead, makes it an easy transition as you can use drives you may already have vice having to buy a set of matched drives. For me that is a BIG advantage over the traditional NAS.

For those of you using the Drobo, what kind of performance do you get out of it (and what connection type are you using - USB or Firewire)? I currently use large internal drives and duplicate to older drives in drive caddies which allow moving the duplicate offsite. These internal drives run at about 50-70MB/sec for me at the present time and that's slow enough

Are you able to get that performance level out of your Drobo connected drives? I'm was a little disappointed they don't have an eSATA version

Compared to eSATA, the original USB Drobo (what I use) is SLOW. Speed is not Drobo's strength. I don't have exact measurements for you, but I've read reports from others who track it at around 15-20mb/s.

I would honestly avoid the original USB Drobo, for primary digital photography storage. It's relatively slow considering the size of today's digital photo files. Buy the current Firewire version, or even wait for higher speed connections like eSATA. (You know they're coming.)

mozy.com just saved my a$$ BIG time as my Maxtor 320GB bit the dust....thank GOODNESS I have everything from that drive backed up there! Seriously I can NOT recommend mozy.com nearly enough. I also use a 500GB WD Mybook . I am going to look into that Drobo which Kalin mentioned, looks like something I should be using as well :D Thanks Kalin!

I use a RAID 1 array as my working drive and then back it up to a external USB WD 640GB drive. When I outgrew my last external USB HDD I was going to get an eSATA drive for external backup but it was hard to turn down a 640GB drive for only $60. :)

For you guys who use Mozy, are you backing up external drives? FAQ says they're not supported, but it seems kinda fuzzy. As long as the drive is mounted, doesn't seem like it should be an issue.

I like to be very redundant in my photo back up. I've had two drives fail on me (both Lacies), so I'm a bit paranoid and don't think a single back-up is enough. I store all of my photos on two separate drives. I now use Western Digital MyBooks which I've been happy with, though I might look into other options when I need more storage. I also back up my best photos two more times on two more drives and my very best on yet another drive. I also put my very best photos on Mitsui Gold CDs (rated to last 300 years) and put those in a safe-deposit box. So my very best photos are stored six times over, but since I've narrowed down the selection quite a bit it doesn't take up that much extra space. I may look into other off-site storage options like Mozy or maybe just store a hard drive at my parents' house once it's full. For now, I'll often keep a 250 GB drive in my car for off-site storage.

I'm currently living on the edge with only using an external WD MyBook. My coworker told me about Drobo a few months back and had considered it, but it looks like it uses too much disk space for the protection. But then again, I may go with it considering you can get a 1.5TB drive for $150 now - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337 - and the device is cheaper than getting some other RAID enclosure that I've found.

I finally decided to give Mozy a try. It will backup external drives, but it won't backup your Time Machine data if you're on a Mac which is one drawback for me.