Image storage

[friz]

I am a fairly recent convert from celulose. I am still having trouble wrapping my brain around the concept of my images being saved as a string of zeros and ones. With film as an image deteriorates there are techniques for fixing and preserving them. If there is a failure in digital storage it is complete. My current system is to use an external HD that I back up my primary storage (PC HD)every so often. I will soon run out of space on the HD and be required to save photos on DVD or CD. How secure is this medium and am worrying for nothing? Also does any one here have a different storage stratagy that I should be looking at.

Thanks,

[mrfixitx]

See this threat on backing up photos.

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=590165

[friz]

Thanks,

[friz]

Thanks, again. The thread mentions archival DVD's that are designed to hold data for longer periods then standard DVD's. Learn something new everyday. These may be the answer to my long term storage needs.

[sandpiper]

You say that you are running out of room on your external drive and so will have to consider CD / DVD etc. Why not just buy another external drive?

Personally, I have a load of external drives. I have two sets at home, one set at the computer one in a box upstairs regularly updated. A third set is kept at a friends house and updated every few weeks.

Any shoots I am working on are also on the internal drive of my PC and a 250Gb pocket size external drive, which I actually work from and just plug into my PC at home and laptop when away from home.

Basic procedure is to download a new shoot to the PC internal drive, the main external drive for that subject type and the 'working' external drive.

I then work on it on the small external, backing the modifications up to the PC internal at the end of each day.

When I get a chance the main (original) file set for the shoot will be backed up to the on and off-site backups.

When I finish working on a shoot, the finished set of original RAWS (minus the binned files), Tiffs and Jpegs will replace the original set on the various main externals. Only when backed up to all three sets will they be deleted from the PC and working external drive.

Consequently, I always have all images on at least three drives. The drives are not kept together, I never leave the working drive with the PC overnight in case of break-in and somebody steals the PC and all drives with it.

There are NO safe methods of keeping files without multiple backups, hard drives fail, so do CDs / DVDs, not to mention the possibility of physical loss due to theft or fire etc.

I actually prefer digital files in this respect as it is so easy to duplicate them and keep copies off site. Back in my film days, negatives and transparencies were rarely copied. Granted, they were unlikely to suffer a media failure like a HD, CD, DVD etc. but they were susceptible to fire, flood etc., and had to be kept in very tightly controlled conditions to prevent deterioration. Looking at my early stuff (30+ years old now) there is some deterioration, although correctable with scanning and photoshop. Looking at my fathers shots going back quite a bit longer, most of his negs and trannies are past saving.

[Flembo550]

You seem to have a similar train of thought to me, copy and save in several places.
As I'm new to the DSLR I have noticed my file sizes have enlarged (jpeg 5184x3456) 5mb plus..
Because I'm new I wanted to post some pictures to gain comments and feed back, If I reduce the file size will this affect the quality?

[crn3371]

Yes, reducing file size on a jpeg will reduce quality. Storage is cheap. Get more storage rather than reducing file size.

[sandpiper]

Yes, reducing file size on a jpeg will reduce quality. Storage is cheap. Get more storage rather than reducing file size.

I think he means reducing the file size to post the image for c&c. You can't post a full size image.

Flembo, yes, there will be a quality loss but if you sharpen a little after resizing and keep the compression of the resized version within reason (save it at a "high medium" or "high" quality setting) then it will still look fine, the loss will be hard to see, although very fine detail may not show properly.

Remember not to resize and save the original image, as you still want the original on your hard drive. The easiest way is to use "save as" and rename the file, that also keeps the exif intact which will help when people give comments and advice. If you use "save" and haven't duplicated the file, it will overwrite your original. If unsure, it may be best to copy the images you want to use first, then resize the copy.

[IslandCrow]

I recently bought a 2TB external drive for around $100 on New Egg, so storage is definitely pretty cheap. You may also want to think about off-site storage. This can either be a second external drive you keep at a friend or family member's house, at work, buried in the back yard, whatever. . .or use a service like Carbonite that allows you to store your files in Cyberspace (well, ultimately on a hard drive located somewhere, but we'll just call it cyberspace). Even a hard drive is probably not going to survive a fire, tornado, wormhole, etc.

The advantage to using a physical hard drive and just storing it someplace else is if you do lose all of your files, copying them back from the hard drive is pretty simple, whereas downloading all of your files from an online service is going to take some time (it literally took me weeks to upload all of my files to the Carbonite server). The disadvantage is that you have to go get the hard drive any time you want to make a backup.

As for online services, they really do make backing up a snap. I just select the folders I want to keep backed up, and the program quietly runs in the background uploading files any time I make changes, so I'm backing up continuously.

I stopped bothering with CDs and DVDs awhile ago. They just became too cumbursome. First, I didn't have a really good system for keeping track of what I had and handn't backed up (not that a smarter or more organized person couldn't figure that out). Also, now that I have a 20+ megapixel camera, it really doesn't take that long to fill up even a DVD. But that may not be a bad thing, because I hate waiting too long between backups.

[tonylong]

You seem to have a similar train of thought to me, copy and save in several places.
As I'm new to the DSLR I have noticed my file sizes have enlarged (jpeg 5184x3456) 5mb plus..
Because I'm new I wanted to post some pictures to gain comments and feed back, If I reduce the file size will this affect the quality?

Two things will affect the file size.

The first is reducing the actual image size. This can be needed when posting for the Web or sharing via email, etc -- a frequent image size is 1024 pixels at the widest, although Facebook now can display images "Full Screen Size", which is pretty cool.

The second parameter for a jpeg file size is Quality -- this determines the amount of "jpeg compression" is applied.

For printing, having a full file size and max Quaility works, but for Web viewing just bear in mind your max viewing size and set a Quality level that will work for you. Typically, uploading a batch of 5MP images to the Web can be tedious. I'm always fine with a Quality setting of 6-8. Or, if uploading directly from my computer to POTN, I'll either set the 1024 limit with a file size limit of 150KB or will set a lower image size to, say, 800 pixels and then a Quality of maybe 5.