Don't spill liquids on it. Doing small hardware upgrades every few years > spending a lot of money on a computer hoping to be future proof. Good chairs and monitor are important, don't cheap out. Bigger is almost always better for desk sizes. Always backup, and often. Have an external hard drive, internal backup drive, and sync your current projects and archived projects to the cloud/Dropbox/Google Drive.
Don't spill liquids on it. Doing small hardware upgrades every few years > spending a lot of money on a computer hoping to be future proof. Good chairs and monitor are important, don't cheap out. Bigger is almost always better for desk sizes. Always backup, and often. Have an external hard drive, internal backup drive, and sync your current projects and archived projects to the cloud/Dropbox/Google Drive.
Don't spill liquids on it. Doing small hardware upgrades every few years > spending a lot of money on a computer hoping to be future proof. Good chairs and monitor are important, don't cheap out. Bigger is almost always better for desk sizes. Always backup, and often. Have an external hard drive, internal backup drive, and sync your current projects and archived projects to the cloud/Dropbox/Google Drive.
Don't spill liquids on it. Doing small hardware upgrades every few years > spending a lot of money on a computer hoping to be future proof. Good chairs and monitor are important, don't cheap out. Bigger is almost always better for desk sizes. Always backup, and often. Have an external hard drive, internal backup drive, and sync your current projects and archived projects to the cloud/Dropbox/Google Drive.
so you don't drink around your workplace? do you have perhaps a special cup holder?
Yeah I have two different HDD's that dupe each other in case of catastrophic failure of one. Never hold the only copy of sensitive data a RAID setup, ever. Trust me.
I drink plenty (I try to drink a good amount of water a day just for health) around my workstation at work and at home, just try to keep the area clean for your and the computer's sake lol. Every 3-4 months I will open up the rig and do a complete dust out and check up on fans and hardware. I have worked on and built many computers in the past, and a lack of a simple dusting by an owner has been the number 1 cause of long term death of hardware, easily, that I have witnessed. Fans get coated, weighed down, live a shorter life/come really loud over time as the motor goes out. Dust can also coat important motherboard parts and cause massive overheating issues as well, just in general causes heat dissipation issues.
Good monitors and calibrating them should be top of the list for any digital artist. Calibration is HUGE, a poorly calibrated monitor or TV can result in some pretty shitty transition from your workstation and what you see, to everyone else viewing that work on their end. Just a couple points in contrast can turn a cool grey into a crispy, clearly value crunched, ugly black.
Also make sure your computer doesn't get BSODs while you work. Which means no beta drivers (there's a reason they're called beta). No unnecessary software - if you want to test stuff do it in a VM. Get quality hardware, not some cheap junk with crappy drivers - cheap addon cards for USB ports and cheap USB devices have been culprits in the past for me. Mixing RAM from different manufacturers can pose dangers (happened to me with a Thinkpad laptop). Make sure to enable auto-backups if your software supports it. When installing software never do express installs - manually check everything for adware/malware and other unnecessary stuff. Avoid registry cleaners, RAM optimizers and similar crapware - Win 7/8/10 runs nicely out of the box and doesn't need tampering. You won't find stuff like this on studio workstations either. If it's too slow get better hardware or a SSD.
Some people even go as far has having dedicated work / game machines, but I never felt this was a problem for me. Steam and GoG don't come with crappy DRM, like past DVD based games, and there is little danger.
When you do everything right, you can keep your machine running for weeks, and longer, without crashing or rebooting.
A few have touched on backup, but if you want to do real backup, keep in mind the 3:2:1 rule, 3 copies of anything important, two local, and one remote. This will ensure that even if one of your local copies fails, you can easily recover it, and if your house burns down, you've still got that remote copy. Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do, DVD media degrades over time, and 5 or 10 years later, it's likely that some of your data will be corrupt. Long term physical data storage should go onto a hard drive of some sort, but again, multi-location storage is much better.
I've got a specific working directory that gets mirrored every day first to a network attached server (these can be put together from a for a few hundred dollars, or more if you need more capacity/features), and then important stuff from that file server is mirrored to a 1TB google drive account (there are other options for remote storage as well).
I would not call a single raid array "backup", both drives can fail at once - I've had two drives in a raid array crap out on me, not sure the reason was a power supply failure or a raid controller failure or what.
A few have touched on backup, but if you want to do real backup, keep in mind the 3:2:1 rule, 3 copies of anything important, two local, and one remote. This will ensure that even if one of your local copies fails, you can easily recover it, and if your house burns down, you've still got that remote copy. Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do, DVD media degrades over time, and 5 or 10 years later, it's likely that some of your data will be corrupt. Long term physical data storage should go onto a hard drive of some sort, but again, multi-location storage is much better.
I've got a specific working directory that gets mirrored every day first to a network attached server (these can be put together from a for a few hundred dollars, or more if you need more capacity/features), and then important stuff from that file server is mirrored to a 1TB google drive account (there are other options for remote storage as well).
I would not call a single raid array "backup", both drives can fail at once - I've had two drives in a raid array crap out on me, not sure the reason was a power supply failure or a raid controller failure or what.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Just listen to this. I've had a machine fail this year and then my SINGLE external backup drive get corrupted. I managed to pull my files off it but damn man, it reminded me that I'd been a fool lately and needed to do proper multi-backup regularly.
OH, and use a machine that you can repair yourself. I've been using an iMac for general dev (via bootcamp, as its absolute top spec and really quite usable, and we did an iOS project a few years back that required it for publishing) but when the power supply went, I had to wait 20 weeks while their straight-out-of-highschool genius team guessed their way through a dozen parts and a grand of my money to ultimately fail at figuring out what it was. Terrible support, definitely not the same company as a few years back when good service was their thing. Went weeks at a time without responding to emails and calls until pushed by their paid telephone support people. Cost me SO much in time, and gave me a few grey hairs considering I'm more than behind on our game. If it were a PC I'd have sorted it in a week. Going forward, really basic mac mini for publishing, and a PC I build and I can repair myself.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do
Eh, I think it's fairer to say it's the "least smart option". Anyone who is backing up their data at all is doing the smart thing. Ultimately backups have a cost though and especially for students and younger people who don't have the resources to buy a NAS, ordering a spindle of blank DVDs for $25 is a hell of a lot better than leaving your data on your local system drive to go down with the ship.
Being able to fix your own hardware is a huge cost and time saver. A trip to a computer store to swap out your PSU/GPU is a lot cheaper and less stressful than dealing with tech support, waiting, and shipping.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the worst backup option, yet better than nothing. All mechanical, chemical, magnetic based media age (HDDs, tape, BlueRay, etc.). But since it's only 4 GIGs and
quite slow it's really not that smart. Many archives have the same
problem: data must be copied to new media every few years to prevent
failure due to age. Data Formats pose a similar problem, that they get outdated and expire. For programs like ZBrush, keep a copy of the version you created your files with! Don't assume that every newer version will be able to open your old data.
The best strategy is still to have multiple
backups at multiple places - at least one of them should be off-site so
you prevent against burglary, fires, etc. For very sensitive info - e.g.
business documents, personal documents - you may even consider renting a
deposit box at your bank and put it all on one or 2 USB sticks or
similar.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do
Eh, I think it's fairer to say it's the "least smart option". Anyone who is backing up their data at all is doing the smart thing. Ultimately backups have a cost though and especially for students and younger people who don't have the resources to buy a NAS, ordering a spindle of blank DVDs for $25 is a hell of a lot better than leaving your data on your local system drive to go down with the ship.
I'm not so sure. Backing up to media with a short shelf life gives a fall sense of security. "Oh I don't have to worry about backing that up properly, I have it on DVD". Getting a google drive or dropbox account makes a lot more sense that DVD backups, and is easier, and there are free versions if you're short on cash. You might consider DVD backup better than nothing, but I don't consider it backup at all. It's backup on media that degrades - it's really not smart no matter how you look at it.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do
Eh, I think it's fairer to say it's the "least smart option". Anyone who is backing up their data at all is doing the smart thing. Ultimately backups have a cost though and especially for students and younger people who don't have the resources to buy a NAS, ordering a spindle of blank DVDs for $25 is a hell of a lot better than leaving your data on your local system drive to go down with the ship.
I'm not so sure. Backing up to media with a short shelf life gives a fall sense of security. "Oh I don't have to worry about backing that up properly, I have it on DVD". Getting a google drive or dropbox account makes a lot more sense that DVD backups, and is easier, and there are free versions if you're short on cash. You might consider DVD backup better than nothing, but I don't consider it backup at all. It's backup on media that degrades - it's really not smart no matter how you look at it.
+1 on all this.
Amazon Glacier is super cheap offsite backup if you are strapped for cash (roughly 0.70USD/100gb at the time of writing); there's a little bit of a delay for retrieving your files if you want them back, but that's much better than losing the data. Lifehacker did an article about setting it up here.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do
Eh, I think it's fairer to say it's the "least smart option". Anyone who is backing up their data at all is doing the smart thing. Ultimately backups have a cost though and especially for students and younger people who don't have the resources to buy a NAS, ordering a spindle of blank DVDs for $25 is a hell of a lot better than leaving your data on your local system drive to go down with the ship.
I'm not so sure. Backing up to media with a short shelf life gives a fall sense of security. "Oh I don't have to worry about backing that up properly, I have it on DVD". Getting a google drive or dropbox account makes a lot more sense that DVD backups, and is easier, and there are free versions if you're short on cash. You might consider DVD backup better than nothing, but I don't consider it backup at all. It's backup on media that degrades - it's really not smart no matter how you look at it.
+1 on all this.
Amazon Glacier is super cheap offsite backup if you are strapped for cash (roughly 0.70USD/100gb at the time of writing); there's a little bit of a delay for retrieving your files if you want them back, but that's much better than losing the data. Lifehacker did an article about setting it up here.
Awesome thanks, I'm going to look into that. I've got a 3TB NAS (with room for more), but I'm currently paying for the 1TB/$10/m google drive account, so I'm only baking up the *really* important stuff remotely which I regret. It would be great to use a service that scales, with google I've got to jump to the 10TB/$100/m plan if I want more.
Hmmm looking at the retrevial fees it doesn't look that great though. Urgh.
Yeah, the retrieval fees aren't great, but it's a pretty great last ditch backup solution (if both your house and your workplace burn down at the same time or whatever, and the data is super important, you can at least get it back rater than it being lost in the abyss).
I think there are a few tools that automate the retrieval process at a slower rate to keep the costs lower, and I believe that you can download segments of your backup too, so you aren't stuck with downloading the whole thing in one blow.
I haven't actually had to retrieve anything yet, and I have a significantly smaller amount of data uploaded (~5gb, just the bare essentials); so it'd be less of a worry for me I suppose.
Also, backing up to DVD is just about the stupidest thing you can do
Eh, I think it's fairer to say it's the "least smart option". Anyone who is backing up their data at all is doing the smart thing. Ultimately backups have a cost though and especially for students and younger people who don't have the resources to buy a NAS, ordering a spindle of blank DVDs for $25 is a hell of a lot better than leaving your data on your local system drive to go down with the ship.
I'm not so sure. Backing up to media with a short shelf life gives a fall sense of security. "Oh I don't have to worry about backing that up properly, I have it on DVD". Getting a google drive or dropbox account makes a lot more sense that DVD backups, and is easier, and there are free versions if you're short on cash. You might consider DVD backup better than nothing, but I don't consider it backup at all. It's backup on media that degrades - it's really not smart no matter how you look at it.
+1 on all this.
Amazon Glacier is super cheap offsite backup if you are strapped for cash (roughly 0.70USD/100gb at the time of writing); there's a little bit of a delay for retrieving your files if you want them back, but that's much better than losing the data. Lifehacker did an article about setting it up here.
Awesome thanks, I'm going to look into that. I've got a 3TB NAS (with room for more), but I'm currently paying for the 1TB/$10/m google drive account, so I'm only baking up the *really* important stuff remotely which I regret. It would be great to use a service that scales, with google I've got to jump to the 10TB/$100/m plan if I want more.
Hmmm looking at the retrevial fees it doesn't look that great though. Urgh.
NASes are frigging amazing, I set up a 12TB one (with 8.1TB usable) a while ago and literally save all my work directly to it. You can't go wrong with a combination of on-site & on-line backup
I do backups to Blu-Ray once and a while. They're not really meant as a long-term solution, just something I do every year or so in case I find out an old file I need has gone corrupt at some point, as tends to happen on mechanical drives.
I don't fully trust any form of data storage, let alone mechanical (I've had a LOT of mechanical drives fail on me over the years).
yeah, blu ray here as well. about as slow as a DVD and probably not much more durable either but 25 G a pop with 50 G as an option and good for a few years and thus serviceable during a project. in terms of durability i did have very few fails on any of these media over the years. and all on really cheap brands of early generation CD/DVD's. have about 400 discs on backup right now, too.
hard drive more reliable, really? i use them for short term storage but my impression is that they fail quite easily if you keep them in an external case and move them back and forth. not much shock protection there. i've certainly lost a few over the years.
The main benefit to using hard drives is that you can put them in a RAID. Backing everything up to a single drive is inherently risky, all storage is vulnerable to deterioration and damage, the best way to secure your data is through redundancy.
Or, as the adage goes: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
RAID is only useful for protecting against hardware failure though. It's not a long term backup strategy. Mirrored raid protects against HW failure, but when something overwrites you data, it will also be overwritten on your RAID mirror. 2nd problem is that the RAID is live - which means electronics can fry it. If you use HDDs, then they need to be offlined after you complete your backup, and then they should be safely stored, like DVDs or Blue-Rays.
However since they have mechanical parts they can age too, especially when not in motion for an extended time. i.e. HDDs aren't good for long term archival. You need to spin them up once in a while. But they offer a good MB/$ ratio, so you may just buy two and have a backup of your backup. This is really advisable, no matter if you use HDDs or DVDs for backup - I had both die on me after 2 - 3 years of storage, but the backup saved the day!
Replies
I drink plenty (I try to drink a good amount of water a day just for health) around my workstation at work and at home, just try to keep the area clean for your and the computer's sake lol. Every 3-4 months I will open up the rig and do a complete dust out and check up on fans and hardware. I have worked on and built many computers in the past, and a lack of a simple dusting by an owner has been the number 1 cause of long term death of hardware, easily, that I have witnessed. Fans get coated, weighed down, live a shorter life/come really loud over time as the motor goes out. Dust can also coat important motherboard parts and cause massive overheating issues as well, just in general causes heat dissipation issues.
Good monitors and calibrating them should be top of the list for any digital artist. Calibration is HUGE, a poorly calibrated monitor or TV can result in some pretty shitty transition from your workstation and what you see, to everyone else viewing that work on their end. Just a couple points in contrast can turn a cool grey into a crispy, clearly value crunched, ugly black.
Make backups, get a big desk and if you plan on using a tablet DONT go under Medium sizes.
Some people even go as far has having dedicated work / game machines, but I never felt this was a problem for me. Steam and GoG don't come with crappy DRM, like past DVD based games, and there is little danger.
When you do everything right, you can keep your machine running for weeks, and longer, without crashing or rebooting.
I've got a specific working directory that gets mirrored every day first to a network attached server (these can be put together from a for a few hundred dollars, or more if you need more capacity/features), and then important stuff from that file server is mirrored to a 1TB google drive account (there are other options for remote storage as well).
I would not call a single raid array "backup", both drives can fail at once - I've had two drives in a raid array crap out on me, not sure the reason was a power supply failure or a raid controller failure or what.
OH, and use a machine that you can repair yourself. I've been using an iMac for general dev (via bootcamp, as its absolute top spec and really quite usable, and we did an iOS project a few years back that required it for publishing) but when the power supply went, I had to wait 20 weeks while their straight-out-of-highschool genius team guessed their way through a dozen parts and a grand of my money to ultimately fail at figuring out what it was. Terrible support, definitely not the same company as a few years back when good service was their thing. Went weeks at a time without responding to emails and calls until pushed by their paid telephone support people. Cost me SO much in time, and gave me a few grey hairs considering I'm more than behind on our game. If it were a PC I'd have sorted it in a week.
Going forward, really basic mac mini for publishing, and a PC I build and I can repair myself.
Amazon Glacier is super cheap offsite backup if you are strapped for cash (roughly 0.70USD/100gb at the time of writing); there's a little bit of a delay for retrieving your files if you want them back, but that's much better than losing the data. Lifehacker did an article about setting it up here.
Hmmm looking at the retrevial fees it doesn't look that great though. Urgh.
I think there are a few tools that automate the retrieval process at a slower rate to keep the costs lower, and I believe that you can download segments of your backup too, so you aren't stuck with downloading the whole thing in one blow.
I haven't actually had to retrieve anything yet, and I have a significantly smaller amount of data uploaded (~5gb, just the bare essentials); so it'd be less of a worry for me I suppose.
I don't fully trust any form of data storage, let alone mechanical (I've had a LOT of mechanical drives fail on me over the years).
hard drive more reliable, really? i use them for short term storage but my impression is that they fail quite easily if you keep them in an external case and move them back and forth. not much shock protection there. i've certainly lost a few over the years.
Or, as the adage goes: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
However since they have mechanical parts they can age too, especially when not in motion for an extended time. i.e. HDDs aren't good for long term archival. You need to spin them up once in a while. But they offer a good MB/$ ratio, so you may just buy two and have a backup of your backup. This is really advisable, no matter if you use HDDs or DVDs for backup - I had both die on me after 2 - 3 years of storage, but the backup saved the day!