How to archive photos?

[OldMacs4Me]

Christmas day my old MacPro 4,1 went down. Turns out it is the fan on the GPU. Setting a 5 inch 110 CFM box fan next to the card has it running tickity boo while I wait for a replacement to arrive. However that took me a few days to figure out. In the meantime I had zero access to most of the photos I have taken over the past 20 years. Despite aggressive back-up strategies I am well aware that those electrons could be scrambled at any time and my entire digital collection lost forever.

That all got me thinking again in terms of how to archive digital imagery. I am currently gradually going through old slides, negs, prints and digital images looking for those very special images. As I find them I am printing them at 8x10 or 8x12. That's about as permanent as you can get and can be easily copied or scanned to make smaller or even slightly larger prints. Most of my 4x5 stuff is being printed at 11x14.

If I were to replace that old mac I would probably go with the Mac studio, but even there external storage would be a must, and various old HDs and SSDs would need a new method of connecting to the new computer.

Long winded intro but what are you doing to make your important images permanent?

 

[apostolosdt]

I run an MP 5,1 with lots of internal storage, but I never keep my galleries in there; only external disks, mostly platters, and in THREE copies. I know, pathetic perhaps, but it's keeping me at peace. Other photographers use more sophisticated techniques, I guess. But I never keep ALL the images I shoot; I always pick only the good ones. People say that, coming later, you may find something into a rejected photo, but I trust my own judgement and experience at that moment of clearing up.

Having said that, good thing about MP's is that, once something fails, you can always remove the good stuff and use them in another MP. An MP's are so cheap nowadays--as long as we keep finding them!

After 25+ years of shooting, my entire galleries occupy 350 GB space; if you don't count my family's shots, only half of it.

 

[kenoh]

All of my images are on Synology NAS devices for local fault tolerance. they are in turn then backed up to Amazon glacier

 

[apostolosdt]

All of my images are on Synology NAS devices for local fault tolerance. they are in turn then backed up to Amazon glacier

Like I said, other photographers may use more sophisticated storage methods.

What about the ratio of "images stored/images printed"? Some pro say a photo is a printed photo only.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Long winded intro but what are you doing to make your important images permanent?"

Short-winded reply:
External USB3 backup drive(s)?

 

[OldMacs4Me]

I run an MP 5,1 with lots of internal storage, but I never keep my galleries in there; only external disks, mostly platters, and in THREE copies. I know, pathetic perhaps, but it's keeping me at peace. Other photographers use more sophisticated techniques, I guess. But I never keep ALL the images I shoot; I always pick only the good ones. People say that, coming later, you may find something into a rejected photo, but I trust my own judgement and experience at that moment of clearing up.

Having said that, good thing about MP's is that, once something fails, you can always remove the good stuff and use them in another MP. An MP's are so cheap nowadays--as long as we keep finding them!

After 25+ years of shooting, my entire galleries occupy 350 GB space; if you don't count my family's shots, only half of it.

Very similar to my set-up and approach. Hopefully the new 5770 GPU will arrive today or tomorrow and the MP 4,1 can go back to being self contained. The fan set-up works great but bays 3 and 4 are not available as it's in the way.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

"Long winded intro but what are you doing to make your important images permanent?"

Short-winded reply:
External USB3 backup drive(s)?

Yep if I went with the Studio all I'd need is a thunderbolt multi platter housing for the full size spinners and eSATA to Thunderbolt cables for the SSDs. If I went with a mini there is no doubt a hub would also be a must, due to the lack of ports on those little guys. Thanks no. I'll be sticking with the old MacPros for the foreseeable future.

 

[Ben J.]

what are you doing to make your important images permanent?

I certainly don't think a print is 'permanent'. A digital copy is. If it's backed up in at least two places. I have all my photos on my fastest external drive, it's cloned to a cheaper less fast drive each night, and I have a portable drive at my neighbour's house, also contains a clone that I update manually every now and then.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner. Superduper is also good, they say. Not as simple as Timemachine, but these cloners work wery well and are extremely fast and work in the background.

So, get a couple of affordable external drives when you upgrade to a newer mac, don't have to be fast, USB-c or USB 3 will do, and put the photos on the fastest (internal) drive you have. Then get the cloning software. Well worth the investment and learning process.

My old MP 3.1 still sits in a corner with all the HDs intact, including decades of photos as they were a few years ago, for a little extra protection.

 

[ovbacon]

I think it all depends on how much you need to have connected to the machine at all times and at what speeds. I moved to a mini (and not the pro that has extra ports). I have a monitor connected via usb-c/tb4 and a external ssd that needs speed that is also via usb-c/tb4 (this one has all my photo libraries on it). I have a backup hdd that is connected via usb-a and also backs up my external ssd. That leaves me an open usb-a that I use to connect iPhone, iPad etc when I need them to connect to the mini direct. Other drives are connected on the network because there is no real speed needed.

I could connect my monitor via the hdmi if I needed another usb-c/tb4 port.

 

[Timpetus]

Following the 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 copies, at least 2 types of media, 1 stored offsite) is the best you can get. Unfortunately, photo files can get corrupted over time, and if you don't notice you might end up backing up the corrupt version and overwriting all the good versions in your backups. I'd love for someone to add a setting to backup software where the update version of backing up (only copying files that have changed or are new) would detect when a file is a photo and show you the new and old versions of the photo side-by-side before backing them up. Then you'd be able to watch for corruption and restore back to the main drive before overwriting the older, good files.

 

[ovbacon]

Following the 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 copies, at least 2 types of media, 1 stored offsite) is the best you can get. Unfortunately, photo files can get corrupted over time, and if you don't notice you might end up backing up the corrupt version and overwriting all the good versions in your backups. I'd love for someone to add a setting to backup software where the update version of backing up (only copying files that have changed or are new) would detect when a file is a photo and show you the new and old versions of the photo side-by-side before backing them up. Then you'd be able to watch for corruption and restore back to the main drive before overwriting the older, good files.

for this time machine is good as it stores everything new every time, it uses more storage but it doesn't overwrite.

 

[kenoh]

Like I said, other photographers may use more sophisticated storage methods.

What about the ratio of "images stored/images printed"? Some pro say a photo is a printed photo only.

I am sitting at about 1.5TB of images. Only a few selected printed - I am not very good at making wall worthy images.

The Synology devices are very easy to setup and the instructions for Glacier backup are very straight forward and offers a robust level of protection.

 

[dimme]

I use the 3-2-1 and then some method. External SSD's attached to a Mac Studio w/Time Machine, Daly backup (auto backup daily) to my Mac mini server, which has a second backup disk (auto backup daily) and also backs up to back blaze. Also monthly backups to 2.5 disk that are stored in my shed. (paranoid yes) I should also add I periodically run a data checksum program on my photo to check for data corruption.

 

[Le Big Mac]

More specific question - I use Photos (app) for organizing my photos. I back up to Time Machine.

But I also want to create an archive (for offsite). Should I just copy the photos db or is there a better way, like exporting them all to folders of some sort (e.g., by year). This is really an archive, so hopefully never need to use it, but obviously keeping organized in albums would be helpful. My thinking is to store the HDD elsewhere and periodically add new photos to it (e.g., end of month/year) and wouldn't need to update the older photos.

 

[dimme]

More specific question - I use Photos (app) for organizing my photos. I back up to Time Machine.

But I also want to create an archive (for offsite). Should I just copy the photos db or is there a better way, like exporting them all to folders of some sort (e.g., by year). This is really an archive, so hopefully never need to use it, but obviously keeping organized in albums would be helpful. My thinking is to store the HDD elsewhere and periodically add new photos to it (e.g., end of month/year) and wouldn't need to update the older photos.

I am not a photos user (except for iPhone snapshots) so I can't give specific recommendations. But I would suggest making your offsite archive not dependent on the photos app. I say this so you will be protected from any future changes to the photos app and it will also allow you to import the photos into another app, if something better comes along. Also if you could manage the space save the photos in a uncompresses format such as tiff.

 

[mtbdudex]

Well - related to this thread.
I used Aperture many years, my workflow was save by Calendar Year as my mindset.
Makes it easy for wife and I.
We put all photos there from devices; DSLR, iPhones, emails, etc.

Migrated the libraries to Photos a while back, with my 4TB SSD MacBook Pro M3 I do have all libraries on it.
(a key reason I got 4TB SSD)

However, I put them on my Synology NAS a 4-bay DS920+, 2 bays with 10TB HDD in RAID and a 3rd drive 6TB that I use as manual backup. I use Time Machine backup to the 10TB RAID, and monthly also manually drag to the 6TB 3rd bay.

The Photo libraries are not small, rather 20GB to 150GB's as can be seen below.

Issue:
What happens is I also have 2 other Mac's in the home, a 2015 iMac and a 2020 MacBook air.
They cannot open up the Photos libraries on the NAS w/o corrupting them.
The iMac is hard LAN (over 100MB/s typically) to the NAS, the MacBook air WiFi.
I've tried a few times, same result. They are all on latest MacOS.

Any idea why can't open these Photo libraries from the NAS?

Yes - I've tried to open with rebuilding from the NAS and no does nothing.
I've re-built the master library on the new M3 laptop and put onto the NAS, still same can't open from the NAS.
The Synology NAS is at the latest firmware also.

It's kinda frustating.

Mike R

Here's the NAS

 

[_timo_redux_]

I don't know how much of a solution it would be, but keeping your primary RAW and jpg files on the NAS and your catalog/metadata on various remote computers would be the way forward ... but not with Photos.app -- it's not robust enough. You'd need to move to some other DAM, and the choices are ... not great. The last hurdle would be to get approximations of your photo edits to your new photo editor/DAM, as well as any metadata you created.

Is it just easier to put all the photos libraries on a giant external disk and move that from computer to computer? I'm not sure I'd even do this; when I was working this December with a photo library in Photos.app that was on an external volume (not NAS) I had problems, which I think were permissions-based. A fair amount of work on a photo book was lost.

I have my own Aperture migration yet to do sometime in the future (we'll see.) My plan for it has changed a few times, but currently I think I'll be using the tools from Avalanche to move my photo files to a referenced catalog in Capture One.

 

[_timo_redux_]

And one more thing: I'm not 100% convinced Synology (or any other remote volume) can keep all the file attributes and file (not photo) metadata that MacOS has / likes. The only way to be sure is with a direct-attached volume. This is why I haven't tried remote storage and my Synology is under-used.

But people have reported success with just keeping the actual photos remotely. Presumably whatever file attributes are not preserved via remoting hosting are unimportant, and/or permissions issues are less/manageable.

 

[mtbdudex]

^^*
Thx for input, I’ll reach out on the Synology forum site to see what their take is. I’ve stored large video files multi GB and zero issues accessing / viewing.
It’s NAS 101 thing to be able to do it.

 

[_timo_redux_]

^^*
Thx for input, I’ll reach out on the Synology forum site to see what their take is. I’ve stored large video files multi GB and zero issues accessing / viewing.
It’s NAS 101 thing to be able to do it.

"First off, extended metadata is frequently lost across filesystems as no two filesystems tend to store it the same way. For instance, if you copy Mac files directly to BTRFS you'd likely lose resource forks, labels, extended attributes, etc."

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/hw3m0u

 

[chown33]

One potential solution to storing metadata on a NAS is to make a disk-image on the NAS, format it as APFS or HFS+, then mount the disk-image to access its content. Because the thing being mounted is an actual volume or disk or container in the required file-system format, it should work.

I would use a disk-image format of sparsebundle, in order to reduce the amount of data needed for a backup.

There are some obvious shortcomings with this approach, such as the need to mount both the NAS and the disk-image, the need to specify a max size of the disk-image, among others. Each person should decide for themselves which set of tradeoffs works best for them.

 

[_timo_redux_]

One potential solution to storing metadata on a NAS is to make a disk-image on the NAS, format it as APFS or HFS+, then mount the disk-image to access its content. Because the thing being mounted is an actual volume or disk or container in the required file-system format, it should work.

I would use a disk-image format of sparsebundle, in order to reduce the amount of data needed for a backup.

There are some obvious shortcomings with this approach, such as the need to mount both the NAS and the disk-image, the need to specify a max size of the disk-image, among others. Each person should decide for themselves which set of tradeoffs works best for them.

I was hoping some kind of iSCSI solution (maybe with a built-into-the-OS client) might also be possible, but every time I investigate it seems like a few too many hurdles to jump.