What are you all doing to archive your images

[AzzKicker]

As my business continues to grow and the more games I shoot my HD space is filling up quickly. Especially since I keep copies of originals and edited versions. I'll take 500 pics each game or so.

I know I can get a few External drives but even those have their moments. I'm thinking NAS for my house.

Any ideas.

[cory1848]

Drives are so cheap these days that just archive the drive. I would rather spend $75 on a new 500 gig drive, fill it up, and store it than burn 100 DVDs or so.

I run a server with 2 TB of space that works well, although its starting to fill up too.

[mminnig]

We had a system and are now re-evaluating...
1. We have two internal hard drives (one for 08, one for 09).
2. Every morning each one automatically backs up to an external drive (one for 08, one for 09)
3. Weekly we bring in two external drives from an offsite location and back up to those as well.

Our new fear, thanks to a bad experience with a PC and corrupt files, is that we could theoretically get corrupted files, not notice them for two weeks, and have them spread across all of our drives and erase all of our good files.

[In2Photos]

How long do you need to store images? Do your customers come back after a year, two, three and ask for prints? What type of website do you have? Something like SMugMug? Store a copy there.

[YP5 Toronto]

Burn Raw to DVD.

Process on and store on a raid 1 setup.

Upload jpegs to Flickr.

[Franko515]

I store the entire job (shots and edits, of course I narrow down the shots and get rid of bad shots) on 2 external drives, then store those files on labeled DVDs.

My Laptop just went down (HD) so it's a good thing I still have copies of all my work, except for a personal project I was doing :mad:


I am currently building (well waiting on parts) a PC and I will have 3 internal HDs

1 for OS and apps (250GB)
2 for Photo storage (640GB)
3 for Photo storage back-up (640GB)

Then back-up to 2 external drives (1 to be kept off-site) and finally burn completed job to DVD

I have lost all my files before so Im kinda cautious ;)

[Faolan]

Consider the Infrant ReadyNAS series, they come highly commended and they come barebones configs meaning you can add compatible HDs to the rig.

My own rig has 4 x 1Tb drives:

1) Primary data
2) Back up data
3) Version control
4) Standby drive.

All these drives are automatically updated whenever I edit, save or dump a load of images on them.

I also back up the main data drive once a week to my server now, though I'm looking at replacing that with a NAS (again).

[mminnig]

Do any of you keep versions that are 1 or more months old? Or, do you simply overwrite old data with new data all whevenver there are changes or updates?

We have a constant fear that something is going to go wrong with a file(s) and we are going to overwrite all of our copies of it in our typical back-up cycle.

[macroshooter1970]

I put them on multiple hard drives once a month.

[AzzKicker]

I use smugmug and backups of what I upload are available for that. However I have a lot of other stuff I dont put up there and a lot of old images I like to keep. I guess I could backup to DVD's . For now at least I have a 1tb at work I can copy to as well. I just dont like having images scattered all over the place.

[Default501x]

terabyte drives are only $100 a pop now, so i would say get 2 and throw them into your computer in RAID 1 or something and you should be set, it will auto backup anything you write to the first drive to the other drive.

i have a single WD 1tb for photos and another one in RAID with it and i have had no problems. its a great way to go.

[tim]

- A copy on my PC in RAW.
- A copy as a mirror, stored offsite and sync'd weekly.
- When i'm done with an event I archive it to a hard drive which sits in a drawer. Everything that's archived has a DNG copy of the RAW images made and stored offsite, along with PSD files for the album.