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Helpful Hints/D.I.Y.: New Archiving System - Full Hard Drive

Kathy Rappaport

pro member
Well, these last few years I have been able to archive all my images on my hard drive a (500 gigabyte) and a 1TB and 500mg backup drives. I have been bad at only putting my backups on the remote drives and rarely burned a DVD unless it was a wedding. I also have been a "pack rat" and kept images that should have gone into the trash/recycle bin. For the last couple years I also have a backup of my best images on my website.

Before I grow my business too much I knew I needed to rework this system. If you have any suggestions to a revamped archiving system I'd appreciate it.

My first order of business is going to go through my catalog and re-edit my images using lightroom and deleting the marginal images; Create a DVD of the saved images - both JPG and RAW files and then creating a multi remote hard drive archiving system.
 
I am anxious to hear some suggestions as I have the same kinds of issues to deal with. I seem to have a real problem deleting anything. My garage and attic shows symptoms of similar inability to part with things. Thanks for asking the question.
James
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Hi Kathy and James
No more DVDs for me…

I use SATA HD with a usb dock for sata drives such as http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/usb-gadgets/a7ea/
You'll find plenty on the Internet, just Google "usb dock for sata drives"…

I feed it with raw files only.
When a disk is full, I put it in a safe at the bank. I just bought 3 new Westren Digital 750 Gb for a pretty good price (even if I know I'll find double capacity for 1/2 price quite soon…)

I keep the 16 bit tifs and/or PSDs on Firewire disk for dayly use (generally they stand there for 1 year)
I don't back-up these as every new RAW software version gives me better result than before and I don't edit that much in CS…

I have another network HD (1Tb) were I store the RAW files as a primary back-up. This let remind me that it is almost full…
 

Kathy Rappaport

pro member
Good

That's great - I was hoping not to burn DVD's.

I already have the SATA drives. So basically, I just have to copy the files over again.

I like that idea!
 

Kathy Rappaport

pro member
Thanks Nik

Thanks, Nik - I have that too.

I guess I just need to house my images on the external as the primary and get used to the archive being off the hard drive and make another copy.
 

Nicolas Genette

pro member
At home, with not a lot of photography (raw and psds for print), I use raid 1 (mirroring) for internal security, with external backup.
At work, we have a large raid 5, which cost less per gb and is safe (redundancy), some external raid for backup, and another one outside for even more security.

Check raid5 internally, and robopro for example for backup. I also would advice everyone to have an outside bakup, in case of fire or burglary.
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
For what it is worth, this is the drill here for original camera files ("processed" images are handled a different way).

1. Files are only deleted from the original memory card when they have been:
• Loaded onto the hard drive of my workstation, and
• Archived onto a backup DVD

2. Every night, all files - not just image files - on my workstation (and as well, on Carla's) are copied to a USB-interface hard drive (on an "accretion" basis - that is, files that are no longer present on the source are not removed from the "mirror" drive; ones that have changed are in fact overwritten).

3. The DVD backup process is run manually, after every big shoot, and perhaps once a week otherwise. Simply, a disk (or a set of disks, if necessary) is assigned to hold one or more directories for a given camera (that is, as on my hard drive, a directory holding up to 1000 shots worth of files from a camera). The backup is on an "incremental accretion" basis, where all files that are new since the last run are added to the disk.

Actually, there are two disks (or sets). They are used alternately (so that one can be in off-premises storage at any given time). The "incrementing" decision is based on a directory held on the disk (not on the O/S archive flag), so both disks (sets) eventually accumulate all files from the directory(ies).

When one set is completed (all directories on it are "static", as shot numbers have moved to another directory), one of the two subsets ends up in off-site storage and the other on-site (in a safe).
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hi Kathy,

I haver a SATA drive to back up every drive I have. In addition I have a DROBO TB drive for all active projects so I have redundancy.

I will take this one step further and move a backup off site. That's the most important thing to do.

Asher
 

Rod Snaith

New member
Ah ha, finally a topic that I know something about. :)

I was a business systems analyst for 18 years, and developed a healthy distrust of either writable CDs or writable DVDs. Not often, but often enough, you'll find that DVDs or CDs written on one drive won't work in another from a different manufacturer, even though the standards are the same. I lost many files archived on an Acer desktop when I switched to Dell, and the day of my wedding, the wedding music that I burned on my Dell wouldn't work on the DJ's Toshiba system.

This is what I currently recommend:

1) For a running backup of system files, choose a RAID setup. The RAID setup will be determined by your need, but generally RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 5. This provides you with fault tolerance in case of failed drives. For important data, I also recommend a nightly data backup to thumb drives.

2) For archival purposes, nothing beats a plain old USB hard drive. Cheap and easy to store. Accessible by MACs, PCs or Unix boxes. Just straight file copy (or use ZIP/ARC if you prefer) the files from your RAID array to the USB drive, then store your USB drives off-site.

Hope that helps.

Rod
 

John Murrell

New member
On the software side I use Photo Manager Deluxe for archiving pictures. I'm not a pro so maybe this might not suit everyone. It has many batch processing features. I found this useful if I am using a certain camera or I am repeating a mistake in capturing an image. Afterwards I can correct the same errors in multiple image simultaneously. When done there are a few backup options.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
On the software side I use Photo Manager Deluxe for archiving pictures. I'm not a pro so maybe this might not suit everyone. It has many batch processing features. I found this useful if I am using a certain camera or I am repeating a mistake in capturing an image. Afterwards I can correct the same errors in multiple image simultaneously. When done there are a few backup options.


John,

That's a helpful hint indeed. I'd wager that a lot of us have multiple copies of 10% of our pictures or more yet no backups of at least some! I wish this was more than for the PC platform. A lot of us work in Mac OS. Still, we can try this under Parallels.

Asher
 
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