PHOTO STORAGE

[mdaddyrabbit]

What do you guys use for storage of your photos, software and hardware wise. I want a way to keep up with mine in a more neater way than I do now. I store them on DVD-RAM disk but I only have one drive that will read a RAM disk.

[Frederick Fisher]

There are several things to consider before deciding on a storage option. First what are you going to store, RAW, TIF, PSD, JPEG or all of the above. Second item is how many "keepers" do you accumulate in say a year.

I have choosen to store my images on hard drives that I can plug in and out of my computer. In the long run I think it is a cheaper per Gb option (and safer) than DVD's or CD's.

I have two plug in bays on my computer. This allows me to store on one plug-in drive and backup to the other plug in drive. I also save time because the data transfer rate is faster and I can more vast amounts of data without have to swap a CD or DVD. Hitachi just announced the first 1/2 terrabyte drive (500Gb).

The final advantage is you are protected more from media obsolescene. Anybody remember JAZ or Zip disks. Very nice storage in their day but when they disappear you have to transfer all of that data to another media. The hard disk does not change that rapidly except that they keep gaining more and more capacity:)

[FlyingPete]

I have a pair of 120GB ATA drives on a cheap RAID card in a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration installed on a 'file server' which lives in a concrete bunker under our house. I copy all my images to that box over a network connection, I also copy all my images to one of two removable ATA drives on a monthly basis and keep them offsite (at work), one of the drives is always offsite.

We did mess around with replicating data to a remote machine via DSL, but it was too much load when one of us got back from a holiday or assignment with 10GB of photos!

Paranoid - perhaps, but I have had too many CD failures for reasons mainly unknown (probably media or write speed related). Can't speak for DVD variants, but having all images online and available is very handy, better than sorting through CD/DVD's.

[mdaddyrabbit]

What kind of software do you guys use if any, maybe for faster searches?

[toddb]

I use Photoshop CS and I set it up to produce the side car files (xmp). That way all my Raw tweaks saved in a file that can be moved instead of being tied to the main Photoshop database. What I usually do is archive to DVD once a month and always export my cache so that when reading from the DVD at a later time the previews are already created. I keep them in RAW because at this time I feel that they are then best archive format. They are much smaller with the same info as a tiff would (I can easily automate exporting it to another format). The other reason is because I still feel that the RAW converters are always getting better, so why settle for what's current. If you are an automater like I am, Photoshop's actions and scripting capabilities are very good for processing large amout of photos.

That's not it though, I have an external drive that I use as soon as I copy from my CF card, I make a second copy to this external drive. It's big enough to contain all my photos so when my system drives start running out, I can easily access them without having to go to the DVDs. I also make a second copy of the DVD and take it to work so I have two copies on DVD, the external drive and the most recent on my system drives. I figure, just as when DVD recorders came out, I will transfer my current DVD archive to HD-DVD (or blue ray) when it becomes available so I keep up with the current technologies.

I think DVD (as CDs are) will have a good life span. The next gen will probably be backward compatible with CD and DVD. Bottom line, there is no perfect solution, but having multiple copies in different places is always a good bet (farther apart the better). Personally, I don't trust any media at this time. That's why I make two DVD copies because I've seen these dye base media "go bad" after a while (be very aware of those sticky lables, media manufactures recommend not using them). I had some VCD (in the old days) that played fine the first month, but after that they started to rot. That's why I have 2 seperate DVDs and all photos archived on an external drive. I don't use the cheepest media for archiving so I haven't seen any problems (I've been using TDK mostly).

[FlyingPete]

I have nothing fancy for file searches, just by date:
YYYY-MM-DD Subject
e.g. 2004-12-06 Elizabeth's Birthday

I tend to keep all of the shots from that year in its own folder.

[Alan Neilson]

I've just got a 250 Gig Maxor external hard drive which had all my photographs on, some are still on my hard drive in the PC as well and I still have some on CD from before I got the external hard drive. It was bought second hand and there was two on offer I nearly bought both so that I had second back up, but decided just to get the one and still use CD's if I really wanted other back up's.

As for catalouguing photo's I have got also just got a copy of portfollio 6 I think the current version is 7 which I am just getting my head around. before I just set up folders on my hard drive which then had sub folders in i.e Buildings might have a sub folder for churches, another city scapes, Landscapes with sub for costal, mountains ect.
Which I still tend to hold the photos in. That is when I get chance to get things upto date, either out looking for photographs or reading on here in the forum lol!

[Jon]

Large hard drives and redundant copies on multiple drives. I organize them through my directory structure: broad area of interest | narrower sub-topic | still narrower (if necessary). \Photos\Aviation\NASM\Udvar-Hazy for instance.