Travel Photography - Personal off-site photo backups

My home LAN is set to do an incremental back up to a personally-owned thin client with a large hard drive via VPN every night. This lets me maintain an off-site backup of all my important data. I have not, however, been backing up my photos because of their sheer size -- the master directory has 210 gigs of photographs, and I've been scanning my old negatives on a regular basis. Each scan is about 55 megs, resulting in about 1.3 gigabytes of data a night. This is an awful lot of data to move over the VPN.

I was wondering how other people manage off-site storage of their photo data.

Portable USB hard drive here. Stored off site at work.

looks like your main issue is the bandwidth.. can't really get around that unless you can physically take the backups to your off-site location or buy a higher tier connection plan.

my setup is a raid6 box at home that is backed up to a personal server on the backbone. the uploading to the server is pretty slow (i limit it to ~40kB/s so my home internet isn't bottlenecked), but the downloading is fast.

There are off site solutions where you can send them the initial load on media and they will load it for you which will save you from uploading hundreds of gigs of data to start. After that you can just upload the changes each night.

But I don't see the value in doing it that way, you will have to pay monthly for it, and should you ever need the data it will take forever for you to get it (forever in relative terms)

Staples has a 500 GB external drive for $50, and a 1TB drive for $60 this week. If you currently are at 210 GB, and add 40 GB (about) per month, a year from now you will still probably be OK with the 500 GB drive.

I would buy two external drives. Do a full backup and put one off site. Each day for a week or two, do an incremental of the files you add on the other drive, and the last day do another full backup to it. Take that off site, bring the other one back, and repeat. If you were to get two of the 500 GB drives, the total cost would be $100 or about $8.33 per month. You won't find an online service to come close to that.

Do you have bandwidth constraints or charges? Yes, it's a lot to move, but at 2Mbps it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. If it's set to run in the middle of the night then running flat out for a few hours vs. being idle doesn't really make a difference does it?

I have 260GB on Carbonite and it just ran in the background continuously for 2 months. I set it to low priority so it slowed down when I was using the machine and ramped up when it was idle. I figure optical/copper cables and such don't get tired from over-usage.

I also have a 1TB external drive that my in-laws bring with them on their visits every few months that I back up to, and I hand them a set of new DVDs (one of each is also in my on-site safe). It's not timely, but it's just a 3rd level backup.

Do you have bandwidth constraints or charges? Yes, it's a lot to move, but at 2Mbps it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. If it's set to run in the middle of the night then running flat out for a few hours vs. being idle doesn't really make a difference does it?My backup runs at 3 am. I don't know whether my ISP imposes bandwidth constraints or not, but I'm a little afraid to risk it -- I am absolutely dependent on a reliable, reasonably-high speed internet connection.

I have 260GB on Carbonite and it just ran in the background continuously for 2 months. I set it to low priority so it slowed down when I was using the machine and ramped up when it was idle. I figure optical/copper cables and such don't get tired from over-usage.All my critical data (including the photographs) live on my file server on a 3-terabyte RAID 5 system. The file server does the backup transfers to the off-site system, so it doesn't interfere at all with my other computers, other than chewing up bandwidth.

I also have a 1TB external drive that my in-laws bring with them on their visits every few months that I back up to, and I hand them a set of new DVDs (one of each is also in my on-site safe). It's not timely, but it's just a 3rd level backup.I've got a separate USB drive that I've been using for backups of the photos, but I really want something off-site. Maybe I'll just dump a copy of the photo directories onto a USB drive this weekend, take it to work Monday, and add the directory to the nightly backup -- if my ISP gets snippy, I'll call them and work it out.

While I've got the bandwidth to do online backups, I currently use a pair of 1TB lacie drives for my photo backups.

I have a 12TB RAID 5 system and use external HD's as backups which I keep at an off-site location (in-laws). :D

For a fee, amazon will take a harddrive and put it on its cloud. S3 is really easy to use with lots of apps written for it to do incremental backups etc. http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

I put all the photos I want to keep on Smugmug.