S file sizes after PP

[Guest]

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Looking at my hard drives I decided to move some files off the internal drives to external ones. It took me rather by surprise that I had a number of S files sitting on my internal drives with a file size of over 1GB individually. The largest file was over 1.5GB. All sorts of layers baked in via Photoshop and/or other programs I guess. Some time ago I decided to "curate" (for want of a better word) my drives and just keep the RAW files on hand, while putting those outrageously large TIFs into various external storage units.

What are your experiences or best practices dealing with such XXL sized post-production files?

Thanks.
T

[irenedp]

I always keep the raw but create a tiff file. That means obviously that you are not keeping a PSD with all the layers -i usually, once I am happy with it, flatten the image. I never keep the print files unless they belong to someone else (hence a customer)  

Flattening layers significantly reduces space although some files (large panoramas) might still be huge. 

I keep two 4 terab external drives and as one gets filled the oldest of the two goes into storage. It is labeled and a new one comes in  All files are backed up in a NAS (so if I need to access an older file I do it from the NAS).

In addition I am considering to buy some ice-vault storage in either AWS or Azure  That is relatively cheap as long as you don’t access it often and can wait to access them (so just critical files for emergency reasons)  

 

Edited March 2, 2024 by irenedp

[Guest]

27 minutes ago, irenedp said:

I always keep the raw but create a tiff file. That means obviously that you are not keeping a PSD with all the layers -i usually, once I am happy with it, flatten the image. I never keep the print files unless they belong to someone else (hence a customer)  

Flattening layers significantly reduces space although some files (large panoramas) might still be huge. 

I keep two 4 terab external drives and as one gets filled the oldest of the two goes into storage. It is labeled and a new one comes in  All files are backed up in a NAS (so if I need to access an older file I do it from the NAS).

In addition I am considering to buy some ice-vault storage in either AWS or Azure  That is relatively cheap as long as you don’t access it often and can wait to access them (so just critical files for emergency reasons)  

 

Thanks for sharing your practices, Irenedp, that all makes a lot of sense. I've looked into a NAS setup, but haven't made up my mind yet. I guess I draw a distinction (like you obviously) between everything that comes straight out the camera (DNGs, mostly, which I always want to keep close to hand) and the files that have undergone some kind of PP on their way towards a final product (JPG or print, in my case).
P.S.: I have never heard of ice-vault storage

[Pieter12]

There was (is) a discussion on another forum that went off on a tangent about file integrity and recovery. If you have serious concerns about your digital archives, it seems that the implementation of a ZFS file system is the way to go. But of course nothing will help if you have files on a drive that physically fails--especially if that happens to be one of your back-up drives (don't ask). Mirrored RAID helps. I have to upgrade my storage and don't look forward to the task of either transferring what I have to new drives or starting over.

[epines]

I keep all my layered PSD files, since they represent quite a bit of work. And hard drives are relatively cheap now. I keep all backup hard drives in duplicate at my house, plus a third copy at my brother's house. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, epines said:

I keep all my layered PSD files, since they represent quite a bit of work. And hard drives are relatively cheap now. I keep all backup hard drives in duplicate at my house, plus a third copy at my brother's house. 

Like you, I also send a backup drive to a family member (two actually) on a regular basis. Speaking of the cost of hard drives, I remember well my first PC, an IBM behemoth made of military grade steel, with a keyboard seemingly made to NASA specs, and a monochrome monitor with a green, pixelated command prompt line. The capacity of the hard drive on that thing was a whopping 20MB. Worked fine with WordPerfect back in the day, though. So, with file sizes quoted above, present-day storage better be cheap, otherwise not much of our work would be able to exist or persist. 

[Guest]

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2 hours ago, Pieter12 said:

There was (is) a discussion on another forum that went off on a tangent about file integrity and recovery. If you have serious concerns about your digital archives, it seems that the implementation of a ZFS file system is the way to go. But of course nothing will help if you have files on a drive that physically fails--especially if that happens to be one of your back-up drives (don't ask). Mirrored RAID helps. I have to upgrade my storage and don't look forward to the task of either transferring what I have to new drives or starting over.

Thanks for the ZFS reference. I am not too worried since I'm pretty religious about backups and such. I was just commenting on PSD/TIFF file sizes and if people had a special approach towards handling/storing files that huge. More of a first-world problem I guess...

[djmay]

I keep everything. My NAS is my private cloud; I use it with multiple computers, tablet and phone. The NAS is Raid 1, with daily backups to an external drive and weekly backups to Backblaze. My largest image files are over 10gb.

Storage gets cheaper all the time. I built a computer in January with 64gb ram (expandable to 128), 2tb M.2 drive and 8tb hard drive. The price of 8tb was only a little more than 2tb.

[Eclectic Man]

I recently took a photo in my SL2 of a 4x5" negative (Intrepid Mk4).  The original jpg file is 7.7Mb, just inverting it to a positive and changing the contrast and brightness added 200Mb to the Tiff file size.  Why?

[Pieter12]

15 minutes ago, Eclectic Man said:

I recently took a photo in my SL2 of a 4x5" negative (Intrepid Mk4).  The original jpg file is 7.7Mb, just inverting it to a positive and changing the contrast and brightness added 200Mb to the Tiff file size.  Why?

Is it reasonable to compare jpg and tiff file sizes?