Image storage: bigger and bigger storage drives?

[LocalHero1953]

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A follow-up to my question which led off the thread. 

 

I have ordered an internal Broadcom PCIe RAID controller card for my desktop, to which I can connect up to 4 internal drives as a single volume. I will start with 2x 1tb SSD drives, run in RAID 0 configuration for maximum performance. I will back up this 2tb regularly to an external HDD (cheap, high capacity, but not as fast and silent as an SSD), as well as continue with my Crashplan cloud backup. This should conform to a 3-2-1 rule that I've seen cited: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media and at least 1 copy offsite.

I can add two more 1tb drives, giving 4tb in total. If I ever need more storage, then I will replace them with 2tb or 4tb drives, which should, by then, cost peanuts.

 

I thought about a RAID configuration that included mirrored storage, or parity checking to facilitate recovery from drive failures. But I'm nervous about having to rely on proprietary software and systems to recover a striped and mirrored RAID drive, and would be more comfortable with a standard backup drive, even if it risks being out of date by a week. In fact I tend to run a local backup every time I empty a camera SD card into my PC, so the risk of an important loss should be minimal.

 

I looked at external RAID, like Drobo, but as a PC user I don't have access to Thunderbolt, and the USB 3 connection on a PC wouldn't be as fast. And frankly, I don't want another box to find space for.

 

Thanks to everyone for the comments which all helped stimulate my thoughts and research.

[Exodies]

I used to run a mirrored pair for my windows c: drive. I don't know whether it was a crappy raid controller but every time Windows crashed the mirror had to be rebuilt (in the background) which meant the system crawled along for an hour.

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[pico]

I am perplexed, wondering if I am living wrong somehow because I have no sophisticated, massive backup and restore for my little 2016 MacBook Pro, while others here have massive and sophisticated storage strategies. Am I living wrong, or do I just have skewed expectations? Do you all keep everything you photograph? That is not a bad thing. I can imagine producing a visual biography of a prolific photographer. Are you a candidate? Regardless, why do some of our friends here save so much?

 

(Oh, I use a 2TB drive with Time Machine. Far more than I need)

 

I throw away almost all my stuff regularly. Dunno why others keep so much.

Edited June 17, 2017 by pico

[almoore]

I throw away almost all my stuff regularly. Dunno why others keep so much.

Did you throw your negatives away after printing?

[david strachan]

I wonder who will look at our images, after our mortal lives has gone?

 

Do they know how to work Lightroom?

Are they interested...or have you already shown them your best images?

 

Just exactly why don't we cull more?  The bin is your best friend. 

 

I don't go for massive storage...it just becomes a self-fulfilling problem in itself.

 

...

[gyoung]

When I was doing database programming I always kept at least four consecutive backups, after I discovered that something I did a couple of sessions previously had unnoticed 'side effects' elsewhere in the application. Only one backup (even of you have several copies of that backup) and you can't go back far.

At least with Lightroom its 'non destructive' editing!

 

Gerry

[LocalHero1953]

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When I was doing database programming I always kept at least four consecutive backups, after I discovered that something I did a couple of sessions previously had unnoticed 'side effects' elsewhere in the application. Only one backup (even of you have several copies of that backup) and you can't go back far.

At least with Lightroom its 'non destructive' editing!

 

Gerry

With Crashplan and the like you can go back through incremental backup history - and I've done it, for similar reasons to you.

You can specify the backup retention e.g. daily for the past week, then weekly, then monthly, etc.

[gyoung]

With Crashplan and the like you can go back through incremental backup history - and I've done it, for similar reasons to you.

You can specify the backup retention e.g. daily for the past week, then weekly, then monthly, etc.

That sounds good, I'm talking about 20 years ago, and backups were on 250mb Zip optical disks... (I still have a couple of Zip drives lying around.)

Now I use WD 3tb external drives and a simple dos batch file with several xcopy commamds to copy anything with the archive bit set.

 

Gerry

[pico]

Did you throw your negatives away after printing?

 

Most negatives do not make it to printing, so those are binned, and I'd estimate that half the negatives that are printed are eventually discarded.

[ECohen]

I am perplexed, wondering if I am living wrong somehow because I have no sophisticated, massive backup and restore for my little 2016 MacBook Pro, while others here have massive and sophisticated storage strategies. Am I living wrong, or do I just have skewed expectations? Do you all keep everything you photograph? That is not a bad thing. I can imagine producing a visual biography of a prolific photographer. Are you a candidate? Regardless, why do some of our friends here save so much?

 

(Oh, I use a 2TB drive with Time Machine. Far more than I need)

 

I throw away almost all my stuff regularly. Dunno why others keep so much.

 

I'm with you.....and I think we are living wrong .......but I don't care.

Edited July 16, 2017 by ECohen

[jankap]

+1

Jan

[Chuck Albertson]

That sounds good, I'm talking about 20 years ago, and backups were on 250mb Zip optical disks... (I still have a couple of Zip drives lying around.)

Now I use WD 3tb external drives and a simple dos batch file with several xcopy commamds to copy anything with the archive bit set.

 

Gerry

I have one of those Zip drives, too. I'm still waiting for some digital archivist to knock on my door and offer a thousand bucks for it.

 

I'm even more rigorous about daily backups since all that ransomware nonsense started. Even for the people who were able to get their hands on some Bitcoins and paid the ransom, I don't think anyone got their data back, and a good backup was the primary savior. There was one Really Big law firm that lost its email system, for as long as a week. Even though the price of storage keeps dropping, it's a pain in the ass to periodically migrate everything to some new media, on the very reasonable assumption that some of the old media is ready to fail.

[Archiver]

For years, I've been using increasingly large external drives for image and file storage.  Right now, I've got 2 5TB drives and 2 8TB drives hooked into my system via USB3.  This seems kludgy, but it works for me.  As my working files increase, I buy larger drives and migrate everything across, and the old drives become further backups.  Very old files and files I only access once in a while are stored in external HDD's as well.

 

I'm at a point where getting a RAID array might be a good idea.  A friend who works in IT has suggested something from Synology.  We shall see.

 

@pico - I keep all my images, and take photos every day, and thousands when on holiday or work trips.  Almost any image can be relevant due to some unseen detail; for example, I once went out with a woman for a number of years; a few months after we got together, I found that I already had photos of her, in the background at a few group events we both attended.  At the time, I hadn't met her, but I had images.  Some of the images were blurry and poorly composed, but had I deleted them, I would never have known those images of her existed.

 

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Hong Kong, taking photos at Ocean Terminal shopping centre.  I later read an article about the French graffiti artist Invader, and how he had painted some of his iconic space invader characters in various locations in Ocean Terminal.  I went back through my images and found them, unnoticed by me at the time.

Edited January 11, 2018 by Archiver

[djmay]

For three years I have been using a WD MyCloud 3TB NAS. Between my wife and I, almost 2TB is used. I just installed a QNAP TS-251+ with two 6TB drives, mirrored, which means 6TB of storage. I have it set up on a network with gigabit switch. I use a Dell XPS 15 computer with 32gb ram. This makes everything fast, so I work off the NAS. This should keep me going for quite a few years.

 

And yes, I have almost every negative I shot, as well as some negatives that my father shot when he was a boy. I also have a letter that my grandmother's brother wrote to the family at the death of his father, from 1935 in Bratislava.

 

There is no telling the future historical significance of a seemingly insignificant event today.

 

Jesse

[Exodies]

Indeed. We may be documenting the evolution of carbon into silicon at this very moment.