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Smaller SD card sizes are preferable for the M246 workflows


setuporg

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I like to fit a day of shooting on an SD card so I get to ingest it at the end of the day.  Hence all of my M10 cards are 16GB.  With DNG+JPG (fine) they fit about 400+ shots.  The M60 shoots uncompressed DNGs only and fits about 300+, just right.  The M246, set on DNGc, however, started out with 800+ and with DNGc+JPG (fine) ended just under 600, still too much for a day.   So for the first time in forever I ordered 8 GB cards, which cost as much as the 16 GB now and go only up to 70 MB/sec (Sony SDHC I Class 10).  That brings the daily catch to a reasonable just under 300, on par with the M60.  I never reuse the SD cards, they become locked archival negatives as it were.   What card sizes work for you folks?

Edited by setuporg
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32 gig on my ME and my M9M; 16 gig on my Canon. Been using these for years but I do have a handful of 4gig cards for travels in case I fill up the regular cards. I can see no reason to keep SD cards as digital negatives given the ease of creating backups both with inexpensive hard drives and cloud storage. 

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I guess my question is - what is the downside to simply using the faster 16GB cards - and not filling them up?

If, as you say, a full 8GB card and a half-full 16GB card cost the same. They take up the same physical space if used as an archive, and you get the extra speed.

In the era when 4GB was "big" and files were small, I preferred to use four 1GB cards in place of one 4GB card, just in case of a card failure/loss/short-circuit - I'd only lose 1/4 of a shoot.

These days I use 8GB for my silver original M10, and 16GB for my black second M10 - just so I don't accidentally swap cards between cameras. It screws up the image number sequence if I put a card with an image number of, say, L1014567 into a camera that is only up to L1008975.

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Good point @AceVentura1986, I also use backup but having a hard original adds an extra level of it.  Also decreases the chance of erasing anything -- I lock the filled-up catd right upon removal from the camera.

@adan, strangely, never thought about it!  Perhaps it's human nature to fill up fillable things to the hilt.  The 8GB seems OK in the M60 and M246, even a 40GB/sec SanDisk, so it's still a solution but not filling up is a great option as well.

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15 hours ago, setuporg said:

Good point @AceVentura1986, I also use backup but having a hard original adds an extra level of it.  Also decreases the chance of erasing anything -- I lock the filled-up catd right upon removal from the camera.

To each his own, but just don’t really see the point in it, especially when considering retrieval of specific files.  No indexing system will match let the ease and efficiency of a computer hard drive search. 

If it works for you, great. To me it seems like lots of continuing effort when a simpler system is readily available. YMMV. 

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On 1/5/2019 at 9:02 PM, setuporg said:

I like to fit a day of shooting on an SD card so I get to ingest it at the end of the day.  Hence all of my M10 cards are 16GB.  With DNG+JPG (fine) they fit about 400+ shots.  The M60 shoots uncompressed DNGs only and fits about 300+, just right.  The M246, set on DNGc, however, started out with 800+ and with DNGc+JPG (fine) ended just under 600, still too much for a day.   So for the first time in forever I ordered 8 GB cards, which cost as much as the 16 GB now and go only up to 70 MB/sec (Sony SDHC I Class 10).  That brings the daily catch to a reasonable just under 300, on par with the M60.  I never reuse the SD cards, they become locked archival negatives as it were.   What card sizes work for you folks?

Is that a joke ?

Years ago there was a spoof sketch on the robgalbraith site someone opening a film cabinet with lots of compact flash cards, can't quite remember the joke it was either digital film is really expensive or much easier to store than 35mm.

I've always thought that if a picture is not captioned and archived properly and searchable using something like fotostation its not worth keeping. The way I archive (I'm a full time press photographer) is every picture I send I also send to myself using gmail and yahoo so I instantly have three copies including the one on my macbook, when editing I have three categories, edits and from the edits pictures to be sent that are captioned, still in the edits folder are pictures that never quite made it to the final edit(send) and anything that I like or could be useful in the future. Once the picture are sent they go into my main archive fully captioned etc. Every three months or so I dump all the pictures that never made it into the edits (Interesting etc)  folder and back everything up including my main archive on an external hard drive. If months later a newspaper phones and asks for a picture of a certain person doing something and quite often they will ask for something thats not been published before I can link the time and place from main archive to edits or what has become keepers.

Bit boring but thats what I do and the only time I've lost a picture is from a corrupt card.

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@Frase, of course I backup -- on multiple hard drives and even on durable tape that outlasts any hard drives.  But treating a card as a write-once, lock, read-only medium allows for an extra level of backup, assurance that erasing a card will not erase new photos, an extra way to stash things off-site, etc.  With $10/card there's no reason to reuse cards, in fact it was the best decision on the workflow I've ever made.  Each card gets a consecutive number, about 700 for me today, and each ingestion gets into a folder named something like 669_B2788-3085 (Cardnumber_CameraFilenumber-range).  I then sync it to Lightroom CC as a synced collection called 19Jan03_669, where the date is the first image's date and the suffix is the card number.  Overall fixing a folder size to a reasonable range tied to a physical origin creates multiple checkpoints.  E.g. when an image fails to sync to the iPad from the Lr CC, I can go all the way back to the card to see what's wrong.

Edited by setuporg
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I use whatever is the most cost-effective size fast cards (currently 64 GB or maybe still 32 GB), back up to my laptop each night into folders by day or by session, and put the chip back into the camera until it is full.  I have about three chips per camera, which at my rate of filling them, gives me 6 to 18 months worth of archive before I reformat and reuse a card.

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SD cards are not suitable for archival storage - without periodic use, they will lose data over extended periods of time.  What is worse, the longevity is determined by many factors you may not be considering.  Different vendors and flash storage technologies suffer from retention failure at different rates.  The temperature of the card during storage, and when it was written are critically important.  And finally, the number of previous erase/write cycles plays a role.

You probably won't notice issues for years, if you are writing to cards once and then storing them.  However, don't assume that you'll be able to pull data off a cheap SD card that has been sitting for 10 years.  I don't see anything wrong with using them as yet-another-backup, especially for short term redundancy, but I don't think they have much of a place in a long-term backup/archival strategy.

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1 hour ago, scsibug said:

SD cards are not suitable for archival storage - without periodic use, they will lose data over extended periods of time.  What is worse, the longevity is determined by many factors you may not be considering.  Different vendors and flash storage technologies suffer from retention failure at different rates.  The temperature of the card during storage, and when it was written are critically important.  And finally, the number of previous erase/write cycles plays a role.

You probably won't notice issues for years, if you are writing to cards once and then storing them.  However, don't assume that you'll be able to pull data off a cheap SD card that has been sitting for 10 years.  I don't see anything wrong with using them as yet-another-backup, especially for short term redundancy, but I don't think they have much of a place in a long-term backup/archival strategy.

First I heard of that. I pulled a cheap Transcend SD card that I was using in 2004 and had the first shots I made with my then-new Pentax *ist DS on it. It's perfectly fine, all the files were readable, etc. I filled the card a few times back then, did an important shoot with it, then, locked it, wrote "12-DEC-2004" on it, and stuck it in a case, and that in a drawer. Seemed to be just fine. (Of course, all the image files are backed up into my storage archive too. :) )

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16 hours ago, ramarren said:

First I heard of that.

I once worked in a research library. I wrote their first music archive software and worked for a stunningly bright and well informed librarian/faculty member who remained up-to-date. Bottom line: SD Cards are not considered archival media.

 

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3 hours ago, pico said:

I once worked in a research library. I wrote their first music archive software and worked for a stunningly bright and well informed librarian/faculty member who remained up-to-date. Bottom line: SD Cards are not considered archival media.

 

I would never consider them to be, but saying that they "lose data over time" seems a bit of overstatement. They can fail, for sure, but then what device can't? By and large, if my experience of being able to store photos for a decade and a half with no degradation is any yardstick, they're good enough long-term storage for a lot of stuff, if not "archival" in the sense usually applied (to wit: sit in a library file for 100 years). 

Personally, I don't really care about 100 years worth of storage. I figure after I'm gone, it's up to whomever gets my stuff as to whether they value it enough to maintain and preserve it. If they don't, it's as ephemeral as I am ... By that point, I'll be busy with other things or not busy at all. :D

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5 hours ago, ramarren said:

I would never consider them to be, but saying that they "lose data over time" seems a bit of overstatement. They can fail, for sure, but then what device can't? By and large, if my experience of being able to store photos for a decade and a half with no degradation is any yardstick, they're good enough long-term storage for a lot of stuff, if not "archival" in the sense usually applied (to wit: sit in a library file for 100 years). 

Personally, I don't really care about 100 years worth of storage. I figure after I'm gone, it's up to whomever gets my stuff as to whether they value it enough to maintain and preserve it. If they don't, it's as ephemeral as I am ... By that point, I'll be busy with other things or not busy at all. :D

My point is simply that these devices are not typically engineered to store data on the timescales I assume you are hoping for (years or decades), and it is very difficult for an individual to plan a backup or archival strategy without having some idea of the reliability and retention characteristics of the media.  One batch of cards of a particular manufacturer & capacity might succeed in storing data for 50 years in optimal environmental conditions... Another may only last 1 month under a different set of conditions.  Since I find it impossible to know what kind of card I have, my personal approach is to assume the worst.

Here is a quote from a paper that investigates mitigations for flash retention failure (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-data-retention_hpca15.pdf)

Quote

Today’s flash devices, which do not require flash refresh, have a typical retention age of 1 year at room temperature. For such a device, uncorrectable errors may start to accumulate after the flash device experiences 70°C for a total of only 32 hours (i.e., 1 year / 275.8) within a year.

Modern flash storage require far fewer electrons per bit to store data, so it may be the case that much older cards have better retention characteristics.  In any case - don't forget them in a car on a hot Texas summer day!

All devices can fail, so any backup strategy that takes this unfortunate fact into account is surely doing better than average.  Certainly it is better to have some extra copies on old SD cards, than to not have those cards at all!

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For such a device, uncorrectable errors may start to accumulate after the flash device experiences 70°C for a total of only 32 hours (i.e., 1 year / 275.8) within a year.

Ahem: I don't know about anyone else, but I don't store my SD cards, or cameras, at 158°F (70°C). By any manufacturers' data sheets that I've found, that's about 40°F higher than the recommended high point of the operating temperature range of my camera or cards. 

My cheap SD cards seem to last 10x-14x what this gentleman is suggesting at normal room temperatures (40° to 90° Fahrenheit). I'll go with my empirical evidence, and continue to NOT consider SD card an archival storage medium anyway. 

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I’m not entirely sure that an external hard drive, with its cables and known fragility’s, is all that much simpler or cheaper, or even all that much more reliable. And the others you mention are orders of magnitude more complex and expensive. 

Much simpler: make small archival prints and stick ‘em in a shoebox. Put a label on the shoebox. Lasts a lifetime. :D

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1 hour ago, ramarren said:

Much simpler: make small archival prints and stick ‘em in a shoebox. Put a label on the shoebox. Lasts a lifetime. :D

Love it! The only better way to preserve a picture is to make it so bad that it becomes Internet flame click-bait: it will proliferate forever. :)

BTW - has any noticed, or cared, that it Mac OS with SSD no longer has Secure Erase for the trash? Ask why.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

A friend who is very computer savvy (he was near the top of Google's technical team for a number of years) rated hard drives the best we can do for long term storage at this time. Certainly not flash drives, SD or CF cards or anything to do with tape or optical media. Hard drives; preferably Enterprise grade or better and preferably not the highest capacity but capacities that have been available for some years. At least 3 copies (when your in-use drive fails, you plug in the second only to see it fail because the problems is with the controller chip in the computer. Then you know what the problem is and can create duplicates from the 3rd drive) because without 3, you will lose data. Also preferably off site drives. Every 10 years, get a new set of drives and transfer the data and throw the old ones out.

I used to provide IT support for a number of architectural offices, and saw enough data loss to make all of the above very real. I don't take chances, and I haven't lost data since I got my first Mac in 1984. I don't have to tell anyone what happened to me regarding computers before then.

In any case, I keep my pictures on hard drives along with the corresponding catalogs. I'm up to about 15TB and can find a file quite rapidly while keeing everything safe.

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