Data storage issues

[DanZemke]

2 hours ago, fpmtngal said:

I think I have my data issues solved in the short-term, my sister has offered me a couple of drawers.

Wise decision.  The least expensive solution and a way to strengthen bonds. 🙂

[DanZemke]

On 5/24/2019 at 6:53 PM, Carlos said:

Online storage is far safer and cheaper than sticking a drive in a bank deposit box.  And easier.  And more up-to-date.

 

I suspect you haven't looked at the cost of actual hard drives recently.  So you may have given well-intentioned advice that no longer holds. Or you may have underestimated the quantity of her storage needs.

"When I get home I’ve copied the working files to an older 5 bay RAID device, set up with 2 drives mirrored and the 5th drive by itself"

It sounds like she needs terabytes of storage, not gigabytes.

Let's try a specific example.  3 TB of data, for two years, stored in a safe deposit box.  

Solo18 says her safe deposit box costs her $75 a year.  Let's use $100/yr for this example.

A 4 TB drive seems like a reasonable choice to store 3 TB of data.  Let's assume fpmtngal wants to store two copies.  One in Las Vegas and one at her sister's place.  The two 4 TB drives will cost about $150.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-SATA-3-5-Inch-Desktop-ST4000DM000/dp/B00B99JU4S

So for year one, the off-line storage approach would cost her $350.  For year two 3 TB of redundant long-term storage would cost her $175 per year.

For this use case, do you still think that online-storage is cheaper?

On edit: I didn't include the safety deposit box annual cost in the two year example.

Edited May 30, 2019 by DanZemke
Simple math error

[DanZemke]

On 5/29/2019 at 12:53 PM, hemsteadc said:

I'm not sure cat litter is much of a desiccant.  The only time it absorbs moisture is when she pees in it. Silica gel packs at Walmart are very cheap.

My impression is that most are, but the silica gel implementations are much more effective than those based on clay.

I suspect the confusion here is that Lou was thinking of silica based cat litter and you were not.

Here's an example (one of many - the only reason I picked this one, is that it has silica in it's top-level description).

https://www.amazon.com/Mattys-Pet-Stop-Clumping-Lavender/dp/B075JQPV1Z/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=pets+cat+litter+silica&qid=1559234228&s=gateway&sr=8-7

[Carlos]

3 minutes ago, DanZemke said:

For this use case, do you still think that online-storage is cheaper?

Yes, of course, since it is.

[DanZemke]

15 minutes ago, Carlos said:

Yes, of course, since it is.

OK, perhaps I'm out of date on cloud storage and access pricing.  As a mobile only user (like the OP),  where would you suggest I store 3 TB of data that costs less than $350 for two years?

On edit: neglect to include the annual safety deposit box cost - corrected.

Edited May 30, 2019 by DanZemke
Simple math error

[Carlos]

First, remember that she's looking for backups.  She would still use local storage for working, as it would be crazy to use online storage for live files in the case of images and video.  Even if you use something super high end like Amazon backup, it's less than $200 per year.  And there are lots of less expensive options offering a terabyte for $10/year.  For example, Acronis is a well-recognized name in both enterprise and personal backup, and you can get their software with online storage for $50 for 5TB.  Dirt cheap.  Backblaze is a few bucks more, but also automatically backs up any external drives you may also use (if that's needed).

Shipping drives around exposes them to theft/loss, so the data needs to be encrypted.  Does the OP know how to do that reliably, and then to always remember the passphrase to decrypt it?  They are also exposed to damage, particularly regular (non-SSD) drives.  And of course, the backups are old, while online backups are always up-to-date if you have an internet connection.

I have multiple backups, because after 35 years in IT, I know what can go wrong.  I have my desktop and laptop in sync.  Then BOTH get their own backup hard drives.  The laptop's is an SSD and goes traveling with me.  Then ALL machines are ALSO backed up to Google, iCloud, and Amazon individually.  The online backups are the ones I will count on if the house is robbed or catches fire.  The local backups are for normal restores such as when setting up a new computer.

 

[hemsteadc]

7 hours ago, DanZemke said:

...re, but the silica gel implementations are much more effective than those based on clay.

I use Dri-z-air in the RV (calcium ..something) and it definitely removes moisture into the drip pan.  If cat litter did that it would be quite a mess.  Besides, like I said, those packets at Wally's are very cheap.  Unless you just like DIY stuff, you aren't saving much money at all, if any.

Edited May 31, 2019 by hemsteadc

[DanZemke]

Carlos,

Nice rant, but I remain unconvinced. 

fpmtngal's new approach of keeping her archive drives at her sister's house seems like a good one.  Cost effective, good enough and probably more importantly,  simple.

Some day, maybe we can have a face-to-face conversation.  I suspect I would enjoy that.

BTW, I'm an IT expert too.  Hired on with IBM straight out of grad school and retired from IBM several years ago.

[Carlos]

What rant??  Just facts.  You can research and verify them.  I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything.

Good enough is for each person to decide.  Having weeks old backup would never fly for my customers, or for me.  It's also cheaper and safer to store backups online.  Whatever someone chooses after being exposed to facts is not my concern, but they should at least know and consider every option and know the actual costs.

 

[DanZemke]

hemsteadc,

I think we agree on both counts.

Calcium chloride is a salt that consumes moisture and eventually (in a humid environment) morphs into salt water.  Salt water is corrosive - not friendly for electronics.  Lou's cat litter suggestion specifically said silica gel and warned about calcium chloride.  Silica gel is sort of like a sponge.  It collects the water until it's saturated, but doesn't turn into a corrosive liquid.  Like a sponge, the water needs to be removed before it can collect more water. For sponges, we squeeze the water out.  For silica gel, the moisture is usually removed by heating it.

I don't know how much the Walmart packets cost, but for me, I suspect building my own equivalents from silica gel cat litter wouldn't be worth my time.  Especially since, unlike calcium chloride, silica gel can be conveniently dryed out.

[DanZemke]

3 minutes ago, Carlos said:

Having weeks old backup would never fly ..

We seem to be looking at her expressed needs differently.  IMO,  she was not asking about backups.  She was asking for advice on how to store terabytes of old personal photos, that she might occasionally want access too.  Perhaps you understood her request differently.

Your repeated mantra of it's cheaper to store backups online doesn't appear to apply to her use case.  And I'm certain it doesn't apply to mine.

Suggestion - let's agree to disagree and move on.

 

 

 

[Lou Schneider]

On 5/30/2019 at 10:16 AM, Carlos said:

First, remember that she's looking for backups.  She would still use local storage for working, as it would be crazy to use online storage for live files in the case of images and video.  Even if you use something super high end like Amazon backup, it's less than $200 per year.  And there are lots of less expensive options offering a terabyte for $10/year.  For example, Acronis is a well-recognized name in both enterprise and personal backup, and you can get their software with online storage for $50 for 5TB.  Dirt cheap.  Backblaze is a few bucks more, but also automatically backs up any external drives you may also use (if that's needed).

You're ignoring the time and expense of of moving several Terabytes in and out of the Cloud. It's not a big deal if you're staying in one place and have unlimited, dedicated high speed Internet, but if you're moving around and relying on park wifi or a metered hotspot plan, transfering that much data can be a huge problem.

1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes so even an "unlimited" hotspot plan that allows you 20 - 100 GB a month won't cut it.

And no, you can't camp out at MickeyD's for a few days and use their free wifi.

Edited June 1, 2019 by Lou Schneider

[Dutch_12078]

1 hour ago, Lou Schneider said:

You're ignoring the time and expense of of moving several Terabytes in and out of the Cloud. It's not a big deal if you're staying in one place and have unlimited, dedicated high speed Internet, but if you're moving around and relying on park wifi or a metered hotspot plan, transfering that much data can be a huge problem.

1 Terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes so even an "unlimited" hotspot plan that allows you 20 - 100 GB a month won't cut it.

And no, you can't camp out at MickeyD's for a few days and use their free wifi.

Once the initial upload is completed, only the changes need to be transferred. We average ~150 GB/mo on our unlimited plans, including maintaining cloud based file backups on two laptops, two tablets, and two smart phones.

[fpmtngal]

This is really an interesting discussion and has brought up a number of useful pieces of information. 

Uploading all my personal photos to the cloud isn’t practical for me, even now that I still have a house. My internet is ViaSat and my plan is limited to 25GB per month, barely enough to keep up with my software updates. So uploading 6TB (what I have now on various hard drives) isn’t practical. 

I also am somewhat leery of cloud-based systems. My photography hobby goes back to the days of ImageStation, a site owned and run by Sony. After a while they pulled the plug on it (with lots of advance notice). It was a pain to recreate those albums elsewhere. 

Then, a few years ago, the photo hosting site I use decided to change their site. Originally they would leave the EXIF data attached to the file (something I wanted) but decided they would market to pros trying to sell their work and didn’t need it included. So they stripped out the data from all existing files as well as any new uploads. I’m not happy about it, but the idea of recreating all of my albums elsewhere, plus going back to the many places I’ve linked to them to update the links is far more work than I want to do. 

Granted, these are specialized problems that don’t apply to most strictly storage companies. But it’s left me with a distrust/concern about them in general.

What I do like is the idea of 4TB disks. I haven’t looked at larger disks before and ran across some comments about systems not necessarily being able to access such disks. There’s always something that I don’t understand, I just assumed I could buy the larger disks (4 should be enough for all my needs - 2 actual and 2 for a second copy). Only the comment about system limitations bothers me. I couldn’t find any information about disk size restrictions as far as my LeCie RAID device (it’s older and Thunderbolt 1). I haven’t tried to find out about my docking station, it’s a little older than the RAID device.

If I want to do the copying using the RAID device I would need to buy 5 so that I had the same disks in the slots. Or I could buy 4 and use the USB3 docking station (single slot). That would take a lot more time, I think I’d rather buy an extra disk that I might use later on. 

Any other considerations I need to be aware of?

[Carlos]

18 hours ago, Lou Schneider said:

You're ignoring the time and expense of of moving several Terabytes in and out of the Cloud.

I'm ignoring it because as others said, it happens once and then you're done.  Yes, your initial backup should be done on a terrestrial line with some good speed.

12 hours ago, fpmtngal said:

Granted, these are specialized problems that don’t apply to most strictly storage companies. But it’s left me with a distrust/concern about them in general.

You are correct, you were using a PHOTO storage and sharing site, not a file storage or backup company.  All of the backup companies encrypt your data and they don't even have access to it.  They wouldn't modify your stuff.  The photo storage companies DO modify your files, for good or bad.

[DanZemke]

17 hours ago, fpmtngal said:

I couldn’t find any information about disk size restrictions as far as my LeCie RAID device (it’s older and Thunderbolt 1). I haven’t tried to find out about my docking station, it’s a little older than the RAID device.

Macs began supporting disk drives greater than 2.2 terabytes with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) in Oct of 2007.  So assuming your running a much more recent version of the operating system, you should be fine with 4 TB external external USB drives on your mac.  But the LaCie box probably runs it's own code for the RAID part.  Since they seem to primarily focus on mac customers, they probably would have started supporting larger drives around the same time.  So if your RAID box was first released after 2009, 4 TB drives will probably work.  But if I were you, I'd do a little more research.  Determine what model of LaCie RAID box you have and go to https://www.lacie.com/support/

You may be able to retrieve the original specs/documentation.  If that doesn't turn out to be fruitful, there may be a way to ask LaCie a simple and straight forward question.  Will my LaCie raid box work with 4TB drives?  If that fails, Google may be your friend.  Others have probably had the same question and google may be able to find those discussions.

Not that you're transitioning to a space constrained environment, consider getting into the habit of downloading pdf files of the documentation for things you may need to refer to in the future, and trash the paper version.

Here's a good price ($105) on a good 4 TB drive for raid devices, whether you use it in your raid or not.  I have several of them.   And BTW, Seagate bought out LaCie a few years ago.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1345906-REG/seagate_st4000vna08_ironwolf_4tb_3_5_internal.html/?smp=Y&ap=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxMjnBRCtARIsAGwWnBMBQL30harsAw7EnxdpuV3eVre0R0tycsdshRvpGxSt1OZ20tPoT3kaAuY7EALw_wcB

[fpmtngal]

20 hours ago, DanZemke said:

Macs began supporting disk drives greater than 2.2 terabytes with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) in Oct of 2007.  So assuming your running a much more recent version of the operating system, you should be fine with 4 TB external external USB drives on your mac.  But the LaCie box probably runs it's own code for the RAID part.  Since they seem to primarily focus on mac customers, they probably would have started supporting larger drives around the same time.  So if your RAID box was first released after 2009, 4 TB drives will probably work.  But if I were you, I'd do a little more research.  Determine what model of LaCie RAID box you have and go to https://www.lacie.com/support/

You may be able to retrieve the original specs/documentation.  If that doesn't turn out to be fruitful, there may be a way to ask LaCie a simple and straight forward question.  Will my LaCie raid box work with 4TB drives?  If that fails, Google may be your friend.  Others have probably had the same question and google may be able to find those discussions.

Not that you're transitioning to a space constrained environment, consider getting into the habit of downloading pdf files of the documentation for things you may need to refer to in the future, and trash the paper version.

Here's a good price ($105) on a good 4 TB drive for raid devices, whether you use it in your raid or not.  I have several of them.   And BTW, Seagate bought out LaCie a few years ago.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1345906-REG/seagate_st4000vna08_ironwolf_4tb_3_5_internal.html/?smp=Y&ap=y&lsft=BI%3A514&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxMjnBRCtARIsAGwWnBMBQL30harsAw7EnxdpuV3eVre0R0tycsdshRvpGxSt1OZ20tPoT3kaAuY7EALw_wcB

Oh you would have to link to B&H. I spent a certain amount of time yesterday on their site looking at various Pelican cases. I really need to come up with a better way of carrying my 18 or so lenses, something better than several large camera bags that easily get too heavy for me to use. They work OK, but don’t pack well. I can see that drive order costing me a whole lot more than the drive itself, the Pelican cases would be a convenient solution while getting something like tool boxes require modification and work (plus time). I’m short of time right now.

Is the Iron Wolf better or faster or more reliable than the BarraCuda? Both are Seagate SATA drives. I saw a 4TB BarraCuda drive 

I bought my LeCie in 2013 and it came with 2TB drives. My computer is running the current Mac OS, so no problem there. Based on what you posted, I suspect that I wouldn’t have a problem with bigger drives, but don’t know that for a fact. And since my docking station is a single slot ESATA/USB3, and I no longer have E-SATA as an option on my computer, I went ahead and ordered a new, 2 slot docking station that’s USB 3.1. I can use that to transfer data faster than my current dock. Plus I might try traveling with it, though I don’t know if it would be more likely to fail than the RAID device (at least I wouldn’t need an adapter).

PDF manuals - excellent advice there. I’ve been doing the pdf documentation for a number of years - got tired of dog-eared camera manuals. It’s so incredibly useful for someone like me who can never find the hard copy manual when I need it.

[DanZemke]

1 hour ago, fpmtngal said:

"Is the Iron Wolf better or faster or more reliable than the BarraCuda? Both are Seagate SATA drives. I saw a 4TB BarraCuda drive?"

    If you intend to keep them powered on most of the time, the higher price of RAID drives may make sense, especially if you have multiple drives in one enclosure (vibration).
    
    But if you only intend to use the drives for occasional backups, you don't need RAID drives.
    
    Backup speed for modern 4TB drives is almost entirely determined by the rotational speed.  
    
"Based on what you posted, I suspect that I wouldn’t have a problem with bigger drives, but don’t know that for a fact."

    Just for fun, if your 2013 LeCie doesn't support 4TB drives, I'll buy you an equivalent LeCie box that does.
    
    Is this a stunt?  Sort of.  
    
    I'm very confident that your 2013 LeCie will work with 4 TB drives.  Confident enough, that I'm willing to fund a transaction with zero percent probability of loss 🙂

 

[fpmtngal]

LOL! You’re on!

Thanks for the info about the hard drives. 

I ordered 2 each of the BarraCuda drives when I ordered the 2 bay docking station, due in Tuesday. I can use the docking station to transfer all of the files I have on miscellaneous older  1TB SATA drives that I have that are poorly organized (and maybe organize them). That is all archive files to be left at my sister’s house. 

Then I’ll have to decide what I’m going to do about the LeCie. From what you say, if I want to travel with it at all (still undecided about that) I would definitely need the Iron Wolf disks -5 of them. That’s overkill for my travel needs - until I remember that “travel” just became “home.” 

I guess if I’m going to travel with the docking station I would also need hard drives that are more robust, so ordering the slightly more expensive ones from B&H would be important. And as long as I’m at it (ordering from B&H), I might as well choose the more expensive but more “plug and play” Pelican cases, don’t have to think about how to modify anything like a stacking wheeled tool box set-up, since I’m not particularly handy, I’m not sure I could pull off well.

Oh since I’m ordering from B&H, there’s a lens...

[DanZemke]

21 hours ago, fpmtngal said:

 I would definitely need the Iron Wolf disks -5 of them.

Sorry, I didn't successfuly communicate.  I don't think you need RAID drives for your LeCie box or you docking station.  There are two primary differences between desktop drives like the Barracuda and RAID drives like the IronWolf.  The desktop drives are more agressive at parking their heads than the RAID drives are and the RAID drives are more expensive. Assuming your only going to run your raid box, when it connected to your computer, you don't need a drive optimized for 24x7 operation.  The desktop drives are usually less expensive and are actually less subject to damage by jostling them while running.

"poorly organized"

Shame on you.  Most folks have learned, that if your going to store lots of data, it has to be rigorously organized.  Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to give advice on this subject 🙂

On that next lens, consider buying a grey market one.  The savings can be substantial and the lens are usually identical to those from US Dealers - without a manufacturer's  warranty.  How many name-brand lenses have you bought that were defective on arrival, or failed without a fault of your own?  I shoot with Canon, and have never experienced that.  I suspect it's the same for all of the main brands.  Of course, you could save even more money by not buying another lens.  But where's the fun in that?

[fpmtngal]

Thanks for the additional information about the drives, sounds like the barracuda is the right way for me to go, I’m not running any of my computer stuff 24-7, no need to, but will be traveling so robustness has higher priority for me.

In fact, I might have saved myself lots of money, maybe. Apparently Harbor Freight has a case that’s a knock-off of one of the Pelican cases. I read a review of it by someone who shoots the same “other” brand of camera that I do and he seemed to be pretty impressed with it. It’s half the cost of the Pelican, so maybe a trip there would be in order (need to go to town for some other stuff anyway). 

I once ordered a lens from B&H, made by my camera’s manufacturer, that had a troubled reputation. I returned two of them before getting a refund. So it can happen, though that’s been the only time. The fact I’m still using 2 lenses I bought new in 1980 is more the norm.