Jaze Posted December 27, 2009 Share #1 Posted December 27, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) So, I've got a D-lux 4, and am deeply in love with it. I just got back from a European trip where I got some excellent photos; however, because I'm an idiot, and have the Mac disease where one just assumes that everything is intuitive, I didn't RTFM, and emerged with lots of great 1.5 MB jpegs. I've been studying a bit now, because this camera wants me to get serious with it, and I'm thinking about how best to manage and process my photographs. I have a year or so old iMac, some external hard drives. I have Photoshop 2 (which I barely know how to use, other than to resize the images), plus Photoshop Elements which came with a camera and which I never installed. I have Aperture 2.0, but never actually used it because iPhoto seemed adequate for my needs. So basically I'm building this system from the ground up, and need advice as to how you all handle your work flow; I'm now shooting jpeg+RAW. THe age-old question "Lightroom vs. Aperture?" Should I update Photoshop? How do you handle your hard drive storage? I've only got about 12 GB free on my iMac, so I thought it'd be mostly on external hard drives. This is a tax-deductible enterprise for me, so I'd like to at least order before the end of the year. Any thoughts/suggestions would be gratefully appreciated! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted December 27, 2009 Posted December 27, 2009 Hi Jaze, Take a look here D-lux 4, Mac: setting up an initial work flow. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
h00ligan Posted December 27, 2009 Share #2 Posted December 27, 2009 I am going to offer a two prong approach to storage, and some may think it is overkill. That said, I'm an IT Manager who has been in the business for 17 years. Yes, absolutely you can get external storage In the way of usb drives (some even do raid). If you do, I would also consider as a backup server a Drobo. A Drobo is NOT enough on it's own, it's a backup solution not a storage solution. I'll stop now until you answer one fundamental question - what is your budget. From that I would be able to offer an opinion on how to get relatively large storage for the price with redundancy. Remember this though - all the external hard drives in the world to store your work don't matter if your house burns down and you lose it all. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaze Posted December 27, 2009 Author Share #3 Posted December 27, 2009 Well, the first part of my query - which management software to use - was solved by the book I'm using as my textbook (PERFECT DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY). The book's divided into two parts, the first 200 pages on digital photography, then about 300 on the digital darkroom. After introducing the various options, including Aperture, they effectively spend the rest of the book on Lightroom. So... Lightroom it was. I qualify for a discount, so I got it for $99. Budget? I've not given it too much thought - I was thinking I'd see how much everything cost before deciding what I could justify. All-in, though, I'd like to spend less than $500. I have two external high quality 500GB Firewire hard drives to devote to the project. Currently I automate back-ups through Time Machine. I guess I should also be doing the carrying physical back-ups to a remote site thing, or else using some variant of cloud-computing. I've not joined Mac.com, or mobileme or whatever it's called now, although I have a one year membership. But they only give you 1GB of storage space. I know that Google is now offering affordable web-based file storage. So what say you, h00ligan? What would you do with Lightroom, two 500GB hard drives, and $500? Thanks for your input. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
h00ligan Posted December 28, 2009 Share #4 Posted December 28, 2009 I'd spend $55 a year on Carbonite (because most people won't remember to carry off a drive on a regular basis). Carbonite now does versioning, which could be a huge plus. The downside is it will take a VERY long time for the initial backup (although you can tell it only to upload when the machine is idle iirc). And if you go shoot 100 raw files, that too will take a long time. I'd get a pro flickr account (if you don't have one) for $25 and put the stuff you are most proud of up there in high res (show it off and another backup). Much better than mobile me as you can make albums or photos private but still share a link to a specific one without revealing the whole directory - mobile me is missing this option. So now we're at $80 plus the tools you have already. I'd get a western digital Mirror drive - 2TB and set it to raid 0 (1 TB of space) -$220 and keep all my photo work on that drive. If one drive in the unit fails, there's another with the data. Honestly we could get into drobo's and things of that nature but the jury is still out. With the mirror drive, when you fill that one - label it with dates of the file contents (remember it's only for photos) and buy a second one. Obviously there could be a lot of opinions on this, however with your budget I really think this is the way to start. If you find you are eating a TON of drive space because you shoot a lot and keep a lot - then it would be worth considering a hardware raid addon - but that's going to get expensive. The Drobo has been tempting for me in the past, but I am nervous about all the failure reports I read and the fact the company's support forums are inaccessible without a drobo serial number (hiding something?). A hardware raid with tape backup will stay the preferred but again gets very pricey.. i think adding mirror drives for now will be a good start to the workflow - and having those drives dedicated to photos will allow you to keep them clean and orderly - as well as knowing which drives have which photos (as you expand). You could buy 2 if you want to hit the $500 for tax reasons. As for the two drives you have now, you could skip the mirror purchase for a while and RAID 0 the drives through OS X (not difficult but the drives have to be cleaned of data) to build 500 gigs of redundancy immediately without putting out more cash. This is for 10.4 but the procedure hasn't changed much (if at all). Again, please realize the raid process erases the drives and anything on them when you create the raid will be lost, so make sure you move any data you have on those drives to another space! (Mac OS X 10.4): Creating a RAID set Anyway, that's my quick and relatively inexpensive idea for your workflow. If you feel you outgrow the mirrored drives, you can start looking to get an external RAID addon as I said, but for now I would stay away from proprietary software based RAID boxes from small companies. You'd be looking at about $500 + drives for those units... on the SOHO low end. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaze Posted December 28, 2009 Author Share #5 Posted December 28, 2009 Thanks so much, h00ligan! I've been poking about through all of your links, and have a couple of questions/observations... 1. Carbonite seems good, but it only backs up internal hard drives, so if I'm keeping all my photos on an external drive (which is my plan), Carbonite wouldn't work for me. 2. I'll certainly do the pro flickr account, once I have enough decent photos to make it work uploading stuff 3. I'll start out by setting up those two 500GB drives as a RAID array; I'm hoping that by the time they're full, the next generation of Western Digital mirror drives will be ready, and that they'll have a 4TB option, so I wouldn't have to worry about running out of space any time soon. Do you know if Lightroom keeps thumbnails or something relating to any photo logged in through it? When I upgrade to a larger HD array, will there still be a visible record of the original external hard drive contents on my Mac? Thanks again for your suggestions and expertise! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
h00ligan Posted December 28, 2009 Share #6 Posted December 28, 2009 You know I'm embarrassed to say I didn't realize it wouldn't do external drives, i'll have to double check that! Another option is Mozy the only downside is they don't offer versioning - specifically if you delete an image, you have 30 days to notice it :/ Most failure is user failure which is why i ruled them out. It does allow external drives. Thanks for pointing that out to me! I agree with you on RAIDing the existing drives and waiting/hoping the larger one arrives for not much more money. At least a 2x1.5 TB should be out sooner than later if not a 2x2TB TBH, i'm not that familiar with Lightroom, I just started using it myself so I can't help you there - sorry. My guess is that it holds thumbnails in a database somewhere, so providing you have that on the master drive (should be default) you would be fine detailing where to actually store images. A cursory glance shows only the master raw files or jpegs in the particular storage folder so I think i'd be right in saying there's a master database. Worst case scenario, you'd open it before bed if you did a drive upgrade and generate more thumbs should you need. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
regedit Posted December 28, 2009 Share #7 Posted December 28, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) If you are not afraid of died capsule, time capsule for mac is a very good backup source since you can wireless set up time machine for any hdd (internal or external) connected to your mac. in terms of Aperture vs. Lightroom my answer is: LightZone - great photo oriented and simple pro image editor. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
farnz Posted December 28, 2009 Share #8 Posted December 28, 2009 Thanks for posting, h00ligan, this is really useful information. Fwiw, I've heard some negative comments about Mozy (and before anyone asks, I wasn't particularly interested at the time so Brain only recorded "Mozy: negative comments" without any further details ) but only good comments about Carbonite. Pete. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
h00ligan Posted December 28, 2009 Share #9 Posted December 28, 2009 Mozy doesn't do versioning to account for human error which is a strike, But I have found the restore process to be good, it didn't monopolize my system resource wise either. You can even order your files on disk should you need to. Honestly all the affordable online backup sites have negatives - which is why i advocated continuing to do a time machine backup (or maybe i erased that by accident on the many edits). Certainly if I didn't squeeze it in before, i would get a larger (1-2 tb drive) for system backups, excluding the photos which are already backed up with redundancy on the created raid or western digital mirror drive. Carbonite not backing up external drives definitely throws in a monkey wrench, but I'd still pay mozy the $55 a year even without versioning - it's pretty inexpensive and it's a last resort. For the price for encrypted offsite backup, i don't think you can beat it if you need external drives backed up. That said< I think mozy has a much larger userbase than carbonite - so you will see more negative comments. The real final thought is - for $55 a year, it's a pretty easy trigger pull for added security - which may never be used (with time machine and mirrored drives locally) Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaze Posted December 30, 2009 Author Share #10 Posted December 30, 2009 Thanks so much for all your input, h00ligan! I've just ordered my 2TB drive. I'll seriously consider getting Mozy - the splash page at the web site kind of creeped me out, though, with iJustine... And I'll open a pro account on flickr. Hopefully Lightroom will arrive soon, so I can spend some time over New Year's setting things up... Really, THANKS. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
h00ligan Posted December 30, 2009 Share #11 Posted December 30, 2009 I'm really glad to have been of help. God knows I'm useless at making photos so any way i can contribute to reciprocate the help I've received I'm happy to do that! I hope the setup works well for you and look forward to seeing some images! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.