Thinking of dropping dvd backups - not sure now about bucket strategy

[deanwhitling]

For quite some time now I have been backing up to dvd plus 2 hdds. My buckets are therefore always around 4.3 gb.
Since hdds are much cheaper and easier, I am thinking of dropping dvd backup and just using hdd.
I'm now not sure about storing in buckets - effectively my new bucket size will be 1tb hard drives.
I'm so used to my old method that I'm not sure how to proceed. Has anyone else done this and/or can offer some advice ?
Thanks, Dean

[Matt Limb OBE]

Hello, had similar thoughts a few months ago and by the look of it I am using a similar work flow with 4.3 ish folder buckets, which fit nicely onto the DVD.

After much though here was my decision, for what it is worth!

Do not regard the DVD as a backup.  They are an archive. 

Backup means you up update and keep fresh the backup daily.  Archive is a onetime archive done when a 'bucket' is full.

Looking to the future, Blue Ray will be how big a bucket (that is my next step and replace the DVDs) and what will come after that, even bigger 'archive' storage without a doubt.

My final decision, think archive and backup and keep both - just in case!

[deanwhitling]

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't clear enough in my initial post - I was talking about archiving. I currently archive to dvd plus hdd and I'm thinking of only archiving to hdd now.
The same question stands as in my opening post -  since I'm archiving to large hdd's, I'm not sure what to do with my buckets now ie what size to make them

[DrewFulton]

I have just recently made this decision as well and the reasoning was that as I am now starting to shoot videos with the D800 and save my D800 files as DNG with NEF embedded, the files are becoming so large that DVD buckets are getting to be tedious with like 30 files in them.  Instead, I am simply creating folders by project or location with media organized in folders by date just for a way to organize things.  For example, my HD has the folder structors like this...  2012/Borneo/20120705/ and then that is full of the files.

I find that once I get things into Lightroom, I don't care so much about the folder structure. 

Finally, as far as archiving goes, I still have 500+ DVDs (x2) of my old archive.  For the future, I probably will simply create a mirror and maybe someday go for a web based archive.  I just stumbled upon Amazon's Glacier service and for the first time, online archiving media is starting to get down to a reasonable price for a professional.   $10/month/TB isn't too shabby.  Of course, you have to upload it all which is its own issue.  Anyway, I might also start going for 3 mirrored drives, one stored off site and alternating backups.  Just a thought. 

Drew

[Roelof]

I was tempted to to drop the buckets on opticals but i din't.
A few weeks ago an old file appeared te be corrupt but also the copies of it on my both hard drive backups...
My rescue was the DVD i made!

I switched from DVD to Blue-ray however.
Roelof

[deanwhitling]

Based on the feedback and some thinking on this I am going to archive to one large yearly bucket called Der_2012 or Raw_2012, and then as follows:
120824_JobName
This way it will line up sequentially and I can keep an easy track on what date I have backed up my archive. Having the date will also give me a marker for my imports into idimager - ie where I'm up to with that.
I'll try this for awhile and see how we go. Thanks all for the comments and advice
Cheers, Dean