View allAll Photos Tagged backblaze
*** Boring Question Alert ***
To my utter shame, I still haven't sorted out any sort of backup process for my raw files, even after "losing" all my 2018 and 2019 raws. I've managed to ignore this up until now, but I've reached the point where I've nearly run out of space on my 1 TB laptop :-(
If you have some sort of backup process, and can be bothered, please can you tell me what you use? I'm kind of thinking I might need to bite the bullet and invest in a NAS drive (Synology). Hmmmm. 4 bay, 5 bay, 6 bay - overkill? Dunno, but I reckon I'm amassing about 1 TB of files per year. Also considered cloud storage, but Backblaze et al would be no good on their own (as I understand it), as I need the physical storage my side as well?
Any ideas would be welcome!
*** End of Boring Question ***
The Knuckle Stone on Carrhead Rocks soaks up the early morning light.
Just outside of Yogyakarta in Indonesia are the ruins of Prambanan. Getting to this place is a long way from home, so we tried to take advantage of everything in and around the city. Prambanan is a Hindu temple that was first built in 850 CE. It began a painstaking reconstruction in 1918. I can't imagine what difficult work that must be.
Actually, it was quite nice to get out of the crowded city. Will and I had spent a long night walking around down near the markets. The streets were so crowded in the busy night streets that it was unbelievable. I had always known that Indonesia had hundreds of millions of people, but when stuck in the throngs, you can really feel it. Also, that was a disconcerting night because it was the first time I stepped over a dead body.
I have a few new reviews for you too! These were mentioned in the most recent newsletter that went out a few days ago. Both of these are short and sweet, since they are simple but great products. The first one is for sharing large files with others and moving files around between computers easily. It's called DropBox and you can read a short DropBox Review here.
The second tool I've been using is for backing my files up onto the Internet (the cloud). This gives me piece of mind in case there is a fire and my local backups are also destroyed. Even if you don't have a ton of photos and just want to back up your family digital photos, it's a smart idea. And it's super-cheap. You can read more at the Backblaze Review page.
from the blog at www.stuckincustoms.com
Old File revisited, just reorganizing drives and cleaning out deleting files (or salvaging like this one) getting all to one master drive and uploading to backblaze. Danny Bartlett of the Royal Crowns, no memory of the venuw
I spent the last few days taking a bunch of pictures of scenic things, but I haven't processed any of it, so here's a picture of something old. This Arby's restaurant with the old-school hat sign sat along Cermak Road in a little finger of the suburban Village of Hillside that poked down into the Village of Westchester, and I always meant to come over here at night to get a picture of the sign. But this is the only picture I ever got, shot on the spur of the moment while stopped at the light the night I drove Robin's parents' old van into town a year and a half ago. Not too long after this, the Arby's closed, and the old sign came down. So I processed this picture and tucked it away in some random folder on my desktop to post on a rainy day, then forgot all about it. And that, friends, is what saved the picture.
I shall now relay a tale of woe.
As you might have noticed, I take roughly 1 million pictures per year. (This is only a slight exaggeration.) This leads to storage problems, as I like to keep big files, and our machines don't have infinite space. So for the last four or five years, I've kept all my photos on a separate hard drive. We bought a new computer sometime in 2019, and we moved all our pictures to a brand new, 3 TB external drive dedicated to nothing but photography. And just to be safe, we backed it all up to the cloud via the Backblaze company. Once we went into pandemic lockdown and Robin started working from home, the new computer stayed upstairs with Robin, and the old computer became the machine I used in my office space in the basement. (Fortunately, I hadn't thrown the old machine out, even though Robin had told me to.)
This went on for a while, but then Robin came up with the idea of trading machines, since all my pictures were associated with the external drive attached to the new computer, and she mostly did her work on a company lap top. And so that's what we did. But wouldn't you know it, within a few weeks of the trade, the external drive holding all my pictures suffered an epic, catastrophic, nonrecoverable failure. I have no idea why. I'm not a hardware guy -- or a software guy, for that matter -- and I can't begin to guess other than to go to my automatic fallback position that all technology is doomed to failure all the damned time.
"Say, Clint," you might be saying. "It sucks to have a mostly new 3 TB hard drive throw a rod and blow a head gasket, but why are you telling this story? You've got that nifty Backblaze cloud storage backup system. Everything's tucked safely away out there in internet land, right?"
Well, you'd think so. That's what we've been paying for, at least. But when Robin logged into the Backblaze account to access all the pictures, there was nothing there. Backblaze has spent the last several years constantly telling me it was in the middle of a backup, but when we went to get the data, the cloud was empty. I'd had nearly 2 TB of pictures dating back to the year 2004, and I thought every bit of it was out there floating in space ready to be retrieved the moment something went wrong. But all Backblaze had was two folders, something from, like 2006, and another small album from 2015 or so. Everything else had vanished without warning like that old Arby's sign on Cermak Road.
Now, before you start calling around to make sure I'm not standing on any ledges, it's not as bad as all that. In a stroke of luck, we'd left most pictures older than 2018 on the old machine. So the 2006 Alaska trip, the 2009 Hawaii trip, the 2013 wedding trip to California, all that was saved. I sadly had deleted the big trip pictures from 2014 and 2015 off the old machine to clear up space ("What the heck? It's all on that external drive and Backblaze, anyway!"), but we still had the bulk of our library. And, of course, we still have whatever processed versions I posted to the flickr. But everything from about halfway through 2018 and into 2019 and 2020 is gone. That's pretty much everything I took with that D3400 that died last summer, all 107,000 pictures. That includes about 20 trips, countless local excursions, the second half of our Oak Park residency, and the pictures I took last summer of my family in Owensboro.
So the question, then, is why? I mean, yeah, hard drives die. But that's why you have cloud backup systems. What the heck happened with Backblaze? We gave these people money to keep our pictures safe, and they skipped out on us. What gives?
I don't know, but here's my theory. The premise with Backblaze is that they run constant, automatic backups of everything on whatever drives you tell them to back up, so that the clouds mirror whatever your hard drive looks like at any given moment. But let's say the drive doesn't actually die all at once. Let's say it dies more slowly, so that it's still accessible, but pieces of it wither and vanish a bit at a time. Since Backblaze is mirroring the drive in real time, it mirrors the failure. As data slips off the drive into eternity, Backblaze deletes anything they might otherwise have saved.
This seems like a very obvious flaw in the Backblaze process.
And that's mainly why I'm posting this. One, I feel like Backblaze is based on a stupid premise, and that they failed to perform the service we'd been promised and had been paying for. And, two, somebody out there in internet land might be following a similar system, and they should be warned. So here's the warning. Don't use Backblaze. They're not safe.
Ultimately, this doesn't work out to much more than a first-world problem, and I'm mostly over it. I found one picture of family from last summer that I'd emailed somebody, so at least I have that. There were pictures I'd meant to have printed to hang that are gone, and that bums me out. Finding pictures for the state origin stories will be more difficult now -- I don't have anything from New Mexico or Idaho, and my Utah options are far more limited than they used to be -- but glaciers are outpacing me on that series, so I have time to get stuff eventually. It's just annoying. But so are a lot of things. In the end, I'll just need to be a little less tech-heavy with my data management processes and a little more redundant. And I can always go find a different Arby's.
Look closely and you can see fire crews setting and managing this back fire just above our neighborhood at Topaz Lake.
For this shot the interior bracing for the vertical mounted drives has been removed. This shot shows the SATA expansion planes suspended above the metal case floor by nylon offset pins that also leave room for the custom wiring harness to pass underneath. Nice clean design.
Backblaze holds 45 internal SATA disks. We decided to arrange them in groups of 15 drives (neatly matching the SATA controllers as well as the interior physical layout).
Our unit has three "sets" of 15 disk drives, configured with Linux Software RAID6
The RAID6 LUNS are aggregated via Linux LVM and the XFS filesystem is placed on top.