Digital image saving/backup suggestions?

[Tony C.]

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I'd like to hear suggestions on the best way to save and archive important (digital) images. I assume that burning them to DVD is good option, but I would appreciate recommendations for both hardware, software, and burning while on the road (i.e. with a laptop at best, and perhaps even without).

 

All suggestions are welcome. Thank you in advance!

 

Regards,

 

Tony C.

[LJL]

Tony,

This is a big issue for a lot of folks. I still do not have it under control, but have learned a lot over the past several years. First off, there is no truly reliable archiving mechanism, so learn to embrace a few and be prepared for rolling upgrades over time. Folks talk about CDs/DVDs lasting 100+ years. The plastic disk will, but the media layer that gets its pits from the laser will deteriorate with time. Besides, what DVD player is going to be able to play the DVDs 30 years from now?

 

Presently, I keep my active work for the year on a 2TB RAID 5 array. (I use a HighPoint external box with 500GB SATA drives inside.) This provides excellent speed and working back-up for files. All RAW files are immediately downloaded to the array. I also burn DVD copies of the RAW files immediately for separate archiving. All product work gets burned to DVDs for offsite storage also. At the end of each year, the RAID 5 array is nearly full, and goes into "off-line" mode, but is still accessible whenever I need it. I just keep adding new RAID 5 arrays to my system. If a single drive fails, I can recover the entire system. There are also DVD copies (way, way too many) offsite. I am about to look into BluRay DVDs when the price of the burners come down. (LaCie has an extrernal unit released later this month for about $1,500.....still a bit high, plus the DVDs are not cheap yet.) I will probably go with external HDs in cases for back-up and off-site this year, as HD prices have really dropped a lot, and they are just as reliable as DVDs, but a lot faster to get to, index, and use.

 

For mobile storage, I copy all RAW files from my daily shooting to my MacBook Pro and a separate external Firewire drive or two. I do not burn DVDs in the field as it just takes too long, and is a pain carrying all those disks. When I get back, everything get pulled off from the MBP and dumped onto the RAID 5 arraay, and DVDs get burned and stored off-site from there.

 

My foraward plans are to keep rolling files forward every 5-7 years or as technology changes enough to warrant, like the newer BluRay DVDs. Will do the same with all external HDs too. My suggestion is to not count on a single copy or even two copies of things that are really important. Make at least three copies and on different devices or media and store at least one copy off-site from the rest. Storage is not that expensive, but it is a lot more than we ever had for film for sure.

 

Not sure if this is the kind of info you were looking for or not.

 

LJ

[neila]

The post above probably says a similar thing to my suggestion......

 

I've bought a remote drive that plugs into the USB port (on any computer) and it stores 400GB. Very easy to use and reliable too. Also, not expensive.

 

I tend to save my adjusted (photoshopped) images on DVD, but the original untouched pictures I store on these remote drives.

 

I own a recording studio and use this system for the AIFF (audio) files - not to stream from, but just to back up.

[john_r_smith]

Quite a lot to be said for negatives, wasn't there?

 

Seriously, though, the archiving of digital media is a very thorny issue, and we have the same challenges here at work where we have to deposit copies of all our work with the county museum. They will not accept digital archives, full stop, as they have no resource to check, refresh and copy the data to new media at intervals (perhaps 5 years, as suggested above). So for them we still produce B/W MF negatives and silver prints.

 

John

[Guest stnami]

.. when I start pushing up daisies. storing images will not be a priority....... they will just disappear into that ever increasing sea of images............boy if everything created was retained............................................)(**((^&*^$^$%@#!@$^&*&^&^&)()??<>?<<>?*()I(&*

[MitchoIankov]

Tony, I personally avoid anything that is not hard drive based.

Photography is hobby for me. I am in information technology where archiving always existed. I know all the problems of DVD,CD, tapes,… archival systems.

 

Use only HD solutions and be prepared to migrate to new hard drives every three or four years. Try to use mirrored (RAID) hard drives where possible.

 

Never relay on a single copy. It is more likely to loose data not because of a hardware failure but of your own (or a colleague’s) mistake. Software and operators mistakes are way more common (these days) than hardware problems.

 

Do off site (off room) storage. But be aware that someone can get its hands on (copy) it probably easier that on the primary storage/archive.

[bnelson]

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This backup issue causes me to think through the process much clearer and longer range than I have been thinking.

 

Do you backup and archive every photograph you take including the ones that clearly did not make it?

 

f so, and you take a lot of photographs, the cost will be really high over a long amount of time if you upgrade hard disks every 4-5 years. Plus the time to do this will continually increase.

 

I personally am not doing a good job of this now bu need to get a handle on it before it gets out of hand any further.

 

Bill

[marknorton]

No point archiving to a single DVD or a single hard drive. If it fails, you've lost the image. You need some element of redundancy. RAID 5 is the way to go, LJ uses HighPoint, I use ReadyNAS.

 

Keep in mind that any hard drive you are using now will fail at some point, it's a matter of when, not if.

 

For those who don't know what RAID 5 is, a RAID box contains 4 disks of the same capacity and information is distributed across them so that any one physical disk can fail and the information can be recovered from the other three. You only get 3/4 of the storage capacity (in my case 1.5Tb) but you know you are protected against a failure. At 10Mb per M8 image, that's enough for 150000 images.

 

All for about the same cost as a Leica 28mm/2.8 ASPH. Why do it any other way?

[LJL]

Mark,

Good points for comparison. I actually use both ReadyNAS and HighPoint for my RAID 5 set-ups. Both have been very reliable so far, and I keep a spare drive for each should one of the system drives fail. These are expenses that many do not take into account when shooting digital, but are worth consideration.

 

I agree with imants....when I am gone, I will not be worrying. However, until then, I have a business responsibility to my clients to keep their images as safe as I can for later use. I do have occasion to go into my archives for reprintings and creating new prints also. For contracted work, I prefer handing over the files to the client and letting them worry about them. I only keep copies of shots that I like from those. There is still something to be said for making prints of the shots you want and archiving those, but that is another issue entirely.

 

Mitcho's suggestion to use only mirrored RAID is a good one, but I have found that RAID 5 has been an excellent compromise for speed and redundancy, and takes less total space. However, the use of multiple drives in this fashion creates a dependency on both the drives and the system (RAID controller) for operation, so one has to stay on top of more things.

 

Archinving to DVD is not my preferred method, but I take the time to do it just to have another copy of things that are easier to store off-site. I feel that storing to HDs and rolling copies forward is a more practical and maybe less expensive way, but HDs do need to be run periodically, or they can have problems.

 

Newer technologies will continue to come along, and storage will become cheaper, so that is something to look forward to. Taking the time to do the work just seems like part of the operation, and no different than storing film and prints as before (and still). Just my thoghts on this.

 

LJ

[earleygallery]

I'm (still) mostly a film user. I've just bough an external hard drive to store my digital files on as well as free up space on the PC.

 

Most images will therefore be stored on a combination of film, CD & Hard drive, as well as being in print form.

 

However, all is stored at home - I guess it is prudent to keep the CD's for example at another location in the event of a disaster! On line storage is another possibility.

[ericperlberg]

I'll just add a few points. Raid 5 or Raid 1 both do a type of mirroring. Raid 1 is a bit cheaper to implement (I think you can do it in software in OS X).

 

The problem I see with a network area RAID solution (NAS) is that they are typically slower than Firewire 800 and eSATA solutions, at least the lower priced ones are (I think you'd need a gigbit ethernet network to get good speed). So if you're working with many large files this may be a bottleneck. Perhaps people using them could comment on how the speed of their NAS solution affects (or not) their productivity.

 

I had been using a very simple system, 2 LaCie 500 gig external drives, I save my stuff to one drive and use SuperDuper to nightly backup that drive to the other every night. But that means when a drive is full, I not only have to store the whole drive but also the powersupply and cables. Instead, I'd recommend buying an enclosure for 2.5" drives and then buying replaceable "internal" hard drives at a much lower price. The enclosures come as USB 2, Firewire and e-SATA. Firewire 800 and e-SATA are fast. This way you'll always be able to add state of the art or best value internal drives, you don't need matched pairs. In my sort of backup, your backup drive needn't be a fast one if you just backup nightly when you're not working but if you're working professionally then you probably should use a RAID backup stratetgy. Using enclosures you don't need to store cables and powersupplies, the drives are half the price of LaCie and other top line drives and take up less space to store. There are no downsides.

 

But then you have the long term storage issue (long term as in maybe 5 years). You need to ask yourself, how much you can afford to lose your images. If you absolutely can't afford to lose the data in storage then you need to think about off site storage as well as local storage. If your an amateur and losing your data is more a personal tragedy than a business tragedy, then you might not go to such lengths.

 

Sadly, there are no permanent solutions yet. But you can bet that people are working on them. There's money to be made!

[LJL]

Eric,

To your question about the different RAID 5 units and performance.....I have a ReadyNAS on a gigabit ethernet network and it is very fast. Read times are excellent, but as with all RAID 5, write times are a bit slower. There seems to be some bottlenecking with very large files sets, usually folders over 2GB in size. However, for individual files, things are very fast from any machine on the netowrk.

 

The HighPoint RAID 5 is eSATA and connected to my G5, so while it is accessible to all other machines, they must be shared to the G5. It is significantly faster than my ReadyNAS unit, so I tend to use it for working drives/instant back-up, and use the ReadyNAS unit for more archival stuff that I need to access. Again, its read times are super, so pulling files is quick.

 

For more casual use, I have Firewire drives that are backed up to others regularly, but not mirrored. (Soft RAID apps work, but they do take a performance hit, as they go through the processor.)

 

Tony's original question had a more portable focus. I use simple 2.5" notebook drives (ATA) in cheap aluminum cases that are Firewire bus powered for my portable work. There are newer eSATA configurations, and SATA drives, but for the cost, the older ATA/IDE drives in inexpensive cases work just as well. Nothing stays on them for long, as files get dumped the various desktop FW or RAID systems once I get back from a shoot. So far, things have been working well.

 

My constant mantra is always have more than one copy.

 

LJ

[johnwolf]

Tony,

 

I don't use RAID. Instead, I have four SATA hard drives -- two internal and two external in enclosures. One internal contains programs and the My Documents folder, and the other has all my photos. I use NovaStor software to do a nightly automated incremental copy (not a backup) of My Documents folder and photos to one of the exernal drives. Then I periodically swap the external drives and store one off-site. I could share the external drives on my wireless network and do the same backup from my notebook, but I don't use the notebook that much.

 

John

[dennersten]

No one have pointed out that CD:s and DVD:s are eventually dying. Expect 3 - 15 years depending how you are storing them. Harddisks are also dying so the only safe system seems to have a Raided system these days. Or making good backups.