Storage Advice

[dewmuw]

I've got to a stage now where I have a growing collection of CD's with images on and last night I had one of those heart stopping moments when I thought I'd lost a year's worth of photos!!

So my question - what is the best way of storing images and ensuring their security? But also to aid their retrieval when required?

[Ben]

I personally use a mix of DVD-R's and a 250GB external firewire hard drive.

Each time I do a shoot I backup to the firewire drive, and then once there is aound 4.7GB worth of worthy photos, they go onto a DVD.

[dewmuw]

I personally use a mix of DVD-R's and a 250GB external firewire hard drive.

Each time I do a shoot I backup to the firewire drive, and then once there is aound 4.7GB worth of worthy photos, they go onto a DVD.
What's the benefit of firewire over USB - if there is one?

I work in Manchester - know any cheap suppliers?

[RichardtheSane]

Currently I am investigating storage, backup and catalogue options.

My setup now involves an incemental backup of my entire photo's directory to an external firewire hard drive every week. I have had some.... concerns... about backing up to DVD in the past. Some of my early backups even after a year were having difficulty being read recently so I am on the lookout for other more reliable alternatives

But I am forever looking for ways to catalogue the collection (already a huge task!) and keep it catalogued and updated

[RichardtheSane]

What's the benefit of firewire over USB - if there is one?

I work in Manchester - know any cheap suppliers?

Basically USB take a toll on system resources, so if your system is performing other tasks then USB2 will slow down. Firewire will not.

[dewmuw]

Basically USB take a toll on system resources, so if your system is performing other tasks then USB2 will slow down. Firewire will not.
Thanks.

How do you catalogue at the moment?

[RichardtheSane]

Currently I don't exactly. :?
I use a directory structure with catacories and then just have the photo's in directories. But this is getting harder to manage as I keep loosing shots then spending ages finding them because they can only bein one catacory.

I'm looking for something searchable with thumbnails etc. Once I have it I know it will take forever to actually add all my images and I will need two seperate catalogues, one for RAW and one for tiff/jpeg.

[Ben]

Best place in Manchester I use is: www.microdirect.co.uk

Most of the drives you can get are both firewire and USB2 so you can use whichever you feel works best for you.

[nemesis099]

What I have done is purchased 2 internal 300GB SATA drives (I store other things on them as well) and a SATA Raid card with 2 plugs and I mirrored the drives so that I have 2 copies of my data, one on each drive. If one drive dies the other drive has all my data on it. Also if a drive dies then I simply replace the 300GB drive and rebuild the RAID so I have 2 copies again.

I will admit this is usually a more expensive solution to the problem but I also have a lot of other data I would hate to loose and I have had CDR disks go bad and I'm not convinced that DVDR disks will last any longer.

One thing this I would not do is setup a RAID other then a mirror RAID simply because if you have a hardware failure other then it is hard to get your lost data.

The external USB/Firewire drive solution is another backup that should work fine but if that drive fails you loose your data if it isn't backed up. For those that do that and burn to disk I would check those disks every once in a while to make sure they still work.

Long post but I used to be a computer person and hard drives are something you buy that will break I repeat WILL BREAK. It is just a matter of time before they wear out so I highly recommend that you store data on multiple drives or storage mediums.

[dewmuw]

I currently have three sets of my cds - one at home, one at work and one store off-site. I do worry though that they will degrade - however, the same is true for negatives!

[photoguynorth]

I would strongly recommend NOT using RAID or a single external drive as your only backup. Both of these processes leave a significant chance that corruption can occur taking both drives out. Both systems will protect you from a simple disk failure, but if the controller (or Operating System) burps, then you can have corruption on both disks, possible losing all your images. It is also possible for a disk to fail in such a way that it corrupts the other disk.
Despite their weaknesses, CDs and/or DVDs are valuable backup media - but you have to make multiple copies. I have personally yet to have a 'good' brand disk go bad over years of burning. I still make 3 copies though, just in case. If one copy goes, I have two others to look at and copy from. I also keep one copy in another location, in case of fire or whatever.
The best way would be to use two disks, AND back up to CD/DVD regularly.

[dewmuw]

I would strongly recommend NOT using RAID or a single external drive as your only backup. Both of these processes leave a significant chance that corruption can occur taking both drives out. Both systems will protect you from a simple disk failure, but if the controller (or Operating System) burps, then you can have corruption on both disks, possible losing all your images. It is also possible for a disk to fail in such a way that it corrupts the other disk.
Despite their weaknesses, CDs and/or DVDs are valuable backup media - but you have to make multiple copies. I have personally yet to have a 'good' brand disk go bad over years of burning. I still make 3 copies though, just in case. If one copy goes, I have two others to look at and copy from. I also keep one copy in another location, in case of fire or whatever.
The best way would be to use two disks, AND back up to CD/DVD regularly.
CD or DVD?

[photoguynorth]

CD or DVD?
I have more experience with CDs, but the price of DVD media is low enough now that it makes sense. I have started to make DVD copies, but still have CD copies for now. The DVDs are also easier to retreive from (less disk swapping) so hopefully they are as stable as CDs.

[nemesis099]

I would strongly recommend NOT using RAID or a single external drive as your only backup. Both of these processes leave a significant chance that corruption can occur taking both drives out. Both systems will protect you from a simple disk failure, but if the controller (or Operating System) burps, then you can have corruption on both disks, possible losing all your images. It is also possible for a disk to fail in such a way that it corrupts the other disk.


I disagree. If you have a mirror RAID setup and it is not the boot drive then it should be fine (granted there is always a chance of failure). It should be setup in windows as 2 extended drives that mirror each other this way if hardware dies it is no problem. You have a third disk in the computer to boot off of so that if windows has problems the storage disks are not affected. A few rules is not to install anything on the storage drives you only have files you want to keep on it (no applications). This will also allow you to take the drive out and take it somewhere else plug it in and get to your data. I've used a setup of just having 2 drives one to boot and the other storage for 6 years now and I have never lost data from windows having problems or hardware failure (although with no mirror if the drive failed the data is gone) and I was programming at the time which caused some weird Windows errors.

I'm not saying that backing up to CD and/or DVD is a bad thing nor am I saying that this is foolproof. The only way to have a foolproof system is to be able to save your information to other servers in other places so that if a fire happens at least one copy won't be in the area. Also I know people that do the same thing I do and back everything up to CDRs/DVDRs just in case.

[robertwgross]

I've got my images stored all over the place. All of my original RAW files are stored off to CD-R. Then the TIF files are on my primary hard disk. In most cases, the important TIF files are also copied to a secondary hard disk. Further, the important TIFs and JPEGs are copied out to DVD+RW disks and stored elsewhere.

This way, it is virtually impossible to completely destroy any image.

---Bob Gross---

[tim]

I have an external hard drive with all my images on it. I keep it away from the PC, hidden, in case my house is broken into. Every so often I burn some DVDs and keep them offsite at my parents place. Remember, if your house burns down it doesn't matter how many copies there were inside, they'll all be useless.

[nemesis099]

Remember, if your house burns down it doesn't matter how many copies there were inside, they'll all be useless.

This is so true. I'm lucky that I have friends who have lots of storage (RAID with tape backup) and they like that I keep files on it as long as they get to put it into a database (I know my friends are computer geeks).

[photoguynorth]

I disagree. If you have a mirror RAID setup and it is not the boot drive then it should be fine (granted there is always a chance of failure).
That's (unfortunately) just not correct. There are many ways the data can get corrupted - and some of them will corrupt both drives in a RAID array. I'm not saying every blue screen will cause damage, nor every type of hardware failure, but you are susceptible to data loss on both drives. Leaving the OS off the volume does not change this. I hope you never find out that I'm right.
RAID was designed as a system to enhance up-time for computers, not data integrity. What you have is better than nothing, but you are not really protected as well as you think.