how shall i store photographs
- Thread starter just jon
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TCR4x4
Wishes he had a couple more Inches
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Leave them as JPG. DVDs and CDs are only short term solutions,as they can degrade.
I have about 5 seperate backups. 2 offsite and 3 onsite.
I have a NAS drive connected over wifi which backs up everyday, I have a internal harddrive which backs up everyday, a carbonite subscription which automaticly and continuosly backs up to and offsite server. I also do weekly backups to hard drives, one which is kept offsite and one kept at home
I have about 5 seperate backups. 2 offsite and 3 onsite.
I have a NAS drive connected over wifi which backs up everyday, I have a internal harddrive which backs up everyday, a carbonite subscription which automaticly and continuosly backs up to and offsite server. I also do weekly backups to hard drives, one which is kept offsite and one kept at home
Nod
Tootles
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Since the files are already in JPEG form, they may as well stay like that. Multiple copies on external HDDs as well as in the computer. If you have more than one machine, keep a copy on both (or all). CDs and DVDs can degrade over time, so if you use them as an extra layer of backup, check them from time to time and if they show any sign of degradation, create new disks (maybe on a different brand - the degraded disk may be a sign that that brand is unreliable over time). If you're allowed, keep a copy on your work machine (if you use a computer at work). In essence, you can never have too many backups, as long as you keep them up to date. Depending on the size of the pictures folder, it might fit on a large capacity memory card - very portable and takes up no space, just remember where it's kept!
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Not wishing to hijack the thread - but the answer may be of interest to others too - does anyone use SSD for back-ups, or are there reasons not to?
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Forget DVD unless you want to spend all your time doing that - DVD is just too slow. If you have a couple of external drives and maybe an off site disk that would be more than enough. Depends how much data you have. With Terrabytes of images DVD is just not feasible.
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In addition have you thought about cloud storage if you have a decent broadband speed?
Raymond Lin
I am Groot
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Get a drobo 5D (this is your working drive, USB 3/thunderbolt with mSATA SSD), back it up to a drobo FS on the network, cloud storage to CrashPlan.
Each drobo will protect against drive failure, you can set it against 2 drives out of 5 if you want. That's 4 HD fail out of a possible 10. If you don't have that much data (that is if you have less 4TB of data, and having 20Tb storage in each drobo) you can afford to have 6 HD fail and still can keep working. To lose all your photos you need to have 9 HDs fail instantaneously. To fix it, just replace the broken drive with new one, it will just rebuild the data all on its own.
Plus the drobo 5D has built in UPS.
That's my plan
Downside, each drobo will cost about £1,500 with 4TB drives in each of the 5 bays.
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Raymond Lin said:Get a drobo 5D (this is your working drive, USB 3/thunderbolt with mSATA SSD), back it up to a drobo FS on the network, cloud storage to CrashPlan.
Each drobo will protect against drive failure, you can set it against 2 drives out of 5 if you want. That's 4 HD fail out of a possible 10. If you don't have that much data (that is if you have less 4TB of data, and having 20Tb storage in each drobo) you can afford to have 6 HD fail and still can keep working. To lose all your photos you need to have 9 HDs fail instantaneously. To fix it, just replace the broken drive with new one, it will just rebuild the data all on its own.
Plus the drobo 5D has built in UPS.
That's my plan
Downside, each drobo will cost about £1,500 with 4TB drives in each of the 5 bays.
And you have the super fun happy risk of drobos just.... Losing your data.
Based on the experiences of a lot of photographers, digital operators and other industry techs - I wouldn't suggest drobo to be a serious professional grade storage system.
D
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And also 1 drobo = 1 drive in backup terms. You still need multiple drives / locations.
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I agree. RAID is NOT back up... it's redundancy against a disk failure. If you have your images on a RAID system, you still need to back it up!
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I use a 2TB external HDD and I also upload to an online site like smugmug.
The site allows me to link directly into Lightroom and also to download and share as when I need with any compression of the file etc.
The site allows me to link directly into Lightroom and also to download and share as when I need with any compression of the file etc.
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try storing on a couple of pen drives cheap and easy
if your paranoid make hundreds of copies
i shoot raw and store raw as you have more flexibility
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Bristolian said:
Further to this, Kingston have just announced they are launching a 1TB USB3 flash drive, now if the cost is right that really could be the way to go, fast, big capacity and nice and small.
UPDATE
Just seen this on engadget, so maybe not at the moment, but lets hope the drop in price soon.
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EOS_JD said:
I'm currently trialling a zenfolio account, the benefit of storing your images of there seems a great bonus considering all I wanted it for was a website. I've also have an external hard drive and an internal hard drive. As a hobby I feel this is ok, and the zenfolio account backs up my best images in jpeg in case the worst did happen. I may in the future think about an off site backup external hard drive.
Something you may find of interest if you're a Linux user (probably unlikely, but still...) is that there's a FUSE filesystem driver that lets you access a Flickr account as if it's part of your hard drive. You copy files into a specific location on your hard disk and what it actually does is upload them to flickr, and of course you can do the reverse by copying back from that folder to another location on your hard disk. It came in handy for me when I accidentally wiped my hard disk and I was able to mount Flickr as if it was just another external hard drive and copy all the files back.
All that said, I'm just a hobby photographer so it's not nearly as important to me if my photos go walkabout as it is to you professional guys.
All that said, I'm just a hobby photographer so it's not nearly as important to me if my photos go walkabout as it is to you professional guys.
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im not sure whats wrong :/ movie files transfer at 80-120mb/s whereas photos are usually below 20mb/s (raw files from a 7d)
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im not sure whats wrong :/ movie files transfer at 80-120mb/s whereas photos are usually below 20mb/s (raw files from a 7d)
I would have to agree with Neil, I have the Lexar USB 3 reader and my photos (albeit usually Jpeg, transfer really quickly cf. USB2 readers).
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yep in a usb 2.0 port pictures transfer faster... movies don't though
usb 3.0 must work better with larger files than lots of small files
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flashp said:Shoot film for stuff you can't afford to lose
Unless wherever you're storing your shots goes up in flames! At least with digital you've got loads of copies on different hard drives all over. (Or you should have!)
