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06/29/2011 07:24:14 PM · #26 |
| I'm going to be lazy and not read the entire thread, but just want to put point out something, having an external drive is NOT backup if it is not redundant. Way too many people "back up" data to a sole external drive and brag about how they backup their data. I used to use two identical external drives but ended up going with a Drobo and Mozy for online storage. I'm fortunate that I upped again for two years before they came out with the new price plan. I will be searching for another service soon since I'm at 1.4TB and growing quicker now that I shoot video. |
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06/29/2011 07:46:01 PM · #27 |
 Originally posted by Cory:
I have my crap spread across five or six different locations, not a single one is complete, and I fear data loss every day... It is on my to do list... Along with a ton of other things... |
Ironically, this man works in I.T.
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06/29/2011 08:29:48 PM · #28 |
Originally posted by Neat:
I've never shot in raw, is it a huge benefit, how much on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best? |
10 |
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06/30/2011 03:23:11 AM · #29 |
Originally posted by MargaretN:
Originally posted by Neat:
I've never shot in raw, is it a huge benefit, how much on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best? |
10 |
11
i shoot raw and delete ALL but the ones i know I'll never use, bad focus, bad composition, blur, etc. and then i just upload them to google storage which is $20 a year for 80gb. |
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06/30/2011 04:29:54 AM · #30 |
I personally love looking at my crappy photos, many of those ones tend to be nostalgic -- events with friends, bowling, hanging out... I don't need those to be perfect, so I stockpile everything. I tag and organize in Lightroom, and store it on my PC/hackintosh harddrive. I back up my collection every 2 weeks or so to an external that I had lying around from a previous upgrade.
The upside to this is: it's cheap in the long run, and you don't miss out on anything. You pay once and you're done.
The downside is that if anything ever happens - fire, flood, earthquake, theft - I'm completely screwed. |
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06/30/2011 06:17:14 AM · #31 |
Personally, I like them grilled or roasted. It is important to freeze them if you don't use them within a day or two, as they go bad quickly.
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06/30/2011 07:08:45 AM · #32 |
Originally posted by Nobody:
Personally, I like them grilled or roasted. It is important to freeze them if you don't use them within a day or two, as they go bad quickly. |
Freeze them?? LOL, Nobody does that! ;-)
Strangely, I actually did freeze some RAW files recently. I had a hard disk drive go bad, and there were a few RAW files that I found had not been backed up. I froze the drive and successfully extracted the files. |
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06/30/2011 07:27:35 AM · #33 |
I don't want 200 RAW images of potatoes and crock pots. How long do we need to keep RAWs for validation purposes after a challenge is over?
(I realize I could keep the one RAW from each challenge, but that takes more time than deleting them would.) |
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06/30/2011 07:33:01 AM · #34 |
Originally posted by adigitalromance:
I don't want 200 RAW images of potatoes and crock pots... |
Question: What do you do with 200 RAW images of potatoes and crock pots?
Answer: Make Stock, of course!
There is no hard answer to retention time (no set statute of limitations), but a month would be a very safe practice in all but the most extreme case. The only case where I could see SC requesting an older original would be where they suspected repeated intentional cheating. |
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06/30/2011 07:48:17 AM · #35 |
I think "what to do with TIFF's" might be a better question! :-)
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06/30/2011 08:10:34 AM · #36 |
I keep three file trees:
Captures
Masters
Photosales
Captures has all my shots, and it's where I work on stuff to see if it becomes something I'd want to print or show. Or post.
Masters has the ones that I "picked", in RAW, PSD, and JPG for printing (and reduced for posting).
Photosales are the ones I have printed and proofed for sale. Mainly this would be the JPGs. But within here, I have folders for prints and canvas, since canvas requires (for me) adding edges.
In the end, I know that as long as I keep and protect the second two folders, I'm safe. However, the first folder, Captures, is generally a problem, because now when I shoot I come back with 12 GB or more of photos. When I shoot, as soon as I import to lightroom and rename, I back up all the RAW files to DVD (now takes three or more!). Then presumably I can delete what I want, and I am covered. However, I tend not to delete anything that's in focus and has future potential. And of course, I play with files to see that, so I run NIK Color Efex from LR, which produces a TIFF file (big). And any tries in PS can produce files 50 - 300 MB. So storage is still a problem.
So I'm in a bit of trouble with my Captures folder now--I am overrunning my 2TB data drive. While I have a lot more storage available externally and in removeable drives, I think that it's not an issue of storage; it's an issue of having too many files to deal with (even with Lightroom). My solution will be to 1) delete any TIFs and PSDs that didn't make my cut to Masters level, and 2) more time consuming, go through and delete the many perspectives/angles of a particular subject I shoot, especially on the older folders.
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06/30/2011 08:36:11 AM · #37 |
| SmugMug has unlimited photo uploads for $5/month or $40/year. Doing it online also gives you protection in the case of a disaster at your home (fire, flood, tornado) |
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06/30/2011 09:05:04 AM · #38 |
Originally posted by hopefulcrafty2:
SmugMug has unlimited photo uploads for $5/month or $40/year. Doing it online also gives you protection in the case of a disaster at your home (fire, flood, tornado) |
Off-site backup is definitely a highly-desirable thing. Web-based storage is still a PITA, due to the time required to transfer hundreds of GB of images (for me) over a relatively slow connection. Even relatively fast cable or DSL connections usually have much slower upload performance than download. For instance, my provider offers an 18Mb/s connection on the download side, but the upload side is limited to 2Mb/s. That's 0.25MB/s, or about a minute to upload a single RAW file. :-P
For my money and time, it's more economical to keep a portable hard drive off site. |
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06/30/2011 09:05:59 AM · #39 |
If you feel that you just have to hang on to all the old party pix and bloopers, convert them to jpg, and batch resize them to a certain file size like 150mb each, or to a good screen size like 1280px for storage. They probably are not something that you would ever need to edit and work up to full original size for printing or sale. It reduces the file sizes so much that you would never run out of space on a 1 Tb external hard drive.
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06/30/2011 09:15:10 AM · #40 |
Originally posted by Neil:
...So I'm in a bit of trouble with my Captures folder now--I am overrunning my 2TB data drive. While I have a lot more storage available externally and in removeable drives, I think that it's not an issue of storage; it's an issue of having too many files to deal with (even with Lightroom). My solution will be to 1) delete any TIFs and PSDs that didn't make my cut to Masters level, and 2) more time consuming, go through and delete the many perspectives/angles of a particular subject I shoot, especially on the older folders. |
Neil, you are in a tougher place than I; you simply shoot a whole lot more. Still, I can't say that I see selective deletion as adding value for you. If you value your time at just $50/hr, which is very reasonable, you could buy another TB of drive space long before you'd clear out 1TB from your existing files.
I've had to make the same case here at work. Although *organizing* our corporate drives so folks can find stuff is important, scouring for old files to delete has little value. I've proven it to myself by doing the exercise and figuring out the GB/hr recovered. It doesn't pay back.
With regard to DVDs, I would not trust them further than I can throw them... and the desk they're stored in! And again, burning endless DVDs is a non-value-added activity for me. If I decide to burn 1TB of data to DVD, it will take me about 10 hours to burn, label and store them. That's $500 of my time at $50/hr. I'll buy another drive instead.
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06/30/2011 09:27:19 AM · #41 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by hopefulcrafty2:
SmugMug has unlimited photo uploads for $5/month or $40/year. Doing it online also gives you protection in the case of a disaster at your home (fire, flood, tornado) |
Off-site backup is definitely a highly-desirable thing. Web-based storage is still a PITA, due to the time required to transfer hundreds of GB of images (for me) over a relatively slow connection. |
I forget which one it is, but one of the "cloud" storage sites will send you a 1TB "loaner" hard drive, which you load up and send back with your initial batch of files.
Since I'm still dealing only with JPEGS (and not too big at that) I still burn backups to CD as I go along (when I fill a camera card); I've seen enough dead hard drives lying around that I don't think one of those is that much better (except for the time factor) than optical media, and I rather like having the files on two different forms of media. |
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06/30/2011 10:12:57 AM · #42 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by Nobody:
Personally, I like them grilled or roasted. It is important to freeze them if you don't use them within a day or two, as they go bad quickly. |
Freeze them?? LOL, Nobody does that! ;-)
Strangely, I actually did freeze some RAW files recently. I had a hard disk drive go bad, and there were a few RAW files that I found had not been backed up. I froze the drive and successfully extracted the files. |
So you put them in cold storage....... |
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06/30/2011 10:22:26 AM · #43 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
...I've seen enough dead hard drives lying around that I don't think one of those is that much better (except for the time factor) than optical media, and I rather like having the files on two different forms of media. |
I know all too well about HDDfailures... I've currently got *two* in-warranty failures (my main data and a backup drive) in the RMA process :-P
The thing is, in order for you to lose data stored on HDDs, both your main drive and any backup(s) have to fail simultaneously. The probability of this happening is vanishingly small. The one assumption here is that if a drive fails, or shows signs of imminent failure (SMART monitoring) that the user replaces it ASAP. Any delay raises the prospect of a dual failure and loss of data. Evidence my recent experience. Data drive failed, I replaced it, re-loaded data from backup, and lo, within a couple weeks, I found that the backup drive was sending up distress signals. I immediately called the manufacturer for an RMA for the backup drive. It is still operating at this writing, but I have also offloaded the data to another backup device so that if it does go down, I still have the data in two places.
Failure of DVD media (can't read back previously-written data) are more difficult to guard against. You don't have any kind of warning. Unlike a backup drive, you aren't constantly exercising them, so you don't know their read performance is degrading. It's when you *need* the data on them that you find they are unreadable. |
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06/30/2011 11:19:58 AM · #44 |
Originally posted by Nobody:
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by Nobody:
Personally, I like them grilled or roasted. It is important to freeze them if you don't use them within a day or two, as they go bad quickly. |
Freeze them?? LOL, Nobody does that! ;-)
Strangely, I actually did freeze some RAW files recently. I had a hard disk drive go bad, and there were a few RAW files that I found had not been backed up. I froze the drive and successfully extracted the files. |
So you put them in cold storage....... |
BBspot Labs: Hard Drive Cooling |
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06/30/2011 11:28:25 AM · #45 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
Originally posted by GeneralE:
...I've seen enough dead hard drives lying around that I don't think one of those is that much better (except for the time factor) than optical media, and I rather like having the files on two different forms of media. |
I know all too well about HDDfailures... I've currently got *two* in-warranty failures (my main data and a backup drive) in the RMA process :-P
The thing is, in order for you to lose data stored on HDDs, both your main drive and any backup(s) have to fail simultaneously. The probability of this happening is vanishingly small. The one assumption here is that if a drive fails, or shows signs of imminent failure (SMART monitoring) that the user replaces it ASAP. Any delay raises the prospect of a dual failure and loss of data. Evidence my recent experience. Data drive failed, I replaced it, re-loaded data from backup, and lo, within a couple weeks, I found that the backup drive was sending up distress signals. I immediately called the manufacturer for an RMA for the backup drive. It is still operating at this writing, but I have also offloaded the data to another backup device so that if it does go down, I still have the data in two places.
Failure of DVD media (can't read back previously-written data) are more difficult to guard against. You don't have any kind of warning. Unlike a backup drive, you aren't constantly exercising them, so you don't know their read performance is degrading. It's when you *need* the data on them that you find they are unreadable. |
Just a small addition - the probability of simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) failure is increased greatly when both drives are installed at the same time, used the same amount, and from the same batch, ala RAID. |
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06/30/2011 11:54:36 AM · #46 |
Originally posted by Cory:
Just a small addition - the probability of simultaneous (or near-simultaneous) failure is increased greatly when both drives are installed at the same time, used the same amount, and from the same batch, ala RAID. |
True. But not as much as you'd think. Let's say we know that the MTTF for a particular type of drive is 8 years in a particular application. The distribution of failures for multiple drives from the same lot, installed at the same time, will be all over the map, though, and the probability of two of the drives failing at a given time is vanishingly small. It is, however, inevitably higher than for different drive types, lots, and of course ages. Just not nearly as much different as you'd expect. |
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06/30/2011 01:29:07 PM · #47 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
Since I'm still dealing only with JPEGS (and not too big at that) I still burn backups to CD as I go along (when I fill a camera card); I've seen enough dead hard drives lying around that I don't think one of those is that much better (except for the time factor) than optical media, and I rather like having the files on two different forms of media. |
Be careful with CDs/DVD's as they start to approach the 5 year mark, they start to lose their readability over time. I've also had several disks go bad from using a "normal" sharpie to write my label. Apparently it's not ph balanced and will (over a period of years) eat away at the cd/dvd. They sell special dvd markers, but I can never find them in my drawer of crap. |
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