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Photo storage

While I know there are proponents of DVD as archival media here, I think it prudent to caution that despite that last posting there are well documented cases of DVD rot occurring in a very short time (1-2 years) after burning.

Remember, DVDs we buy from the store are pressed and will last a LONG time, but DVD-r etc is a burn process and is not the same at all.

Don't put too much faith in them. I don't have enough experience to speak of reliability of brands, and don't know whether the rot happens with higher end disks or not, but be careful with blanket statements like "dvd will last longer."
 
DVD = NOT RELIABLE

been burned (the DVD, but me too.....)

with a terabyte under 100 bucks it's a no brainer.
 
To OP: FW800 drives are your best bet for what you are wanting. HOWEVER, If you get 1TB external drives ensure that they are, in fact, two 500MB drives. Larger single drives TEND to have a higher failure rate if they're being accessed over and over. My brother has been in IT for 10 years now and this is the only real opinion he has on the matter beyond preferring Seagate drives. But even those are beginning to garner a high failure rate in the larger sizes as well. Me personally, I prefer Drobos or Western Digital external drives. My original MyBook 320 is still going strong after 3 years of heavy access via the AppleTV.

For the cost of thousands of archival DVDs you could easily buy 4 external drives and copy everything 4 times over with 2 drives in house and 2 off site that gets switched out with one in-house. The statistical probability that all four drives would die on you simultaneously is so astronomical that you could count it as zero. I might also add that this is vastly quicker than burning gobs of DVDs and easier on the environment that using up 10,000+ DVDs over the years.

As for OldCitrus, while I find him to be quite brash, "holier than thou" and rude for someone who's being posting for a mere month, I do agree with doing the occasional DVD backup. Currently I perform a single DVD backup 2x per year (on the LOWEST speed the drive allows for, this ensures a quality burn), which consists of 4 Dual-Layer DVDs, roughly 35GB of data. (FYI, I only backup post-post work to DVDs, never the original pristine RAWs, those are pretty safe on the redundant drives) This backup is then moved to my safety deposit box at the bank (along with one of my offsite external drives), and the former DVD backup is moved to an offsite fireproof data storage box (Sentry Safe makes a great line of these http://www.sentrysafe.com/products/dataProtectionSolutions.aspx ).

@Crus ... you've been here a month, if you dislike all of "us guys," who have been here for years and years, posting new threads feel free to use your leeto search skillz to separate the wheat from the chaff. I come here to attempt to help people, not criticize their methods of asking. Be helpful when you can, but don't jump on someone's case cause they didn't find exactly what they were looking for. Just my opinion.
 
THX1139 said:
Yes, EVERYTHING degrades over time. But DVDs will last longer than hard disk media because there are no moving parts.
Click to expand...

No moving parts that you can see. But the dye is made un-stable on purpose. If not for that unstabilty it could not change "color" when hit by the laser. Heat UV light and just time will cause some of the bits on the DVD to "flip".

If you have only one DVD the chances of a problem are small. With two DVDs your chances of a problem double. If you have 200 DVDs you can count on a problem.

But if you have multiple backup sets even with 100 DVDs per set the chances are slim the same file will be lost in each set. It's a numbers game.

The other problem with DVDs is that by today's standards they don't hold enough. One cake box filled with 100 DVDs is "only" about 400GB of data. I can buy a 1TB drive for $100. Measured per GB the hard drive is about the same price.

I suggest buying three 1TB drives and rotating them. Keep at least one off site.

Or buy a few 100 disc boxes and burd a backup set every few weeks and after you have 6 or 8 sets throw away the oldest set every week Keep the oldest 3 sets off site.
 
Abraxsis said:
To OP: FW800 drives are your best bet for what you are wanting. HOWEVER, If you get 1TB external drives ensure that they are, in fact, two 500MB drives. Larger single drives TEND to have a higher failure rate if they're being accessed over and over. My brother has been in IT for 10 years now and this is the only real opinion he has on the matter beyond preferring Seagate drives. But even those are beginning to garner a high failure rate in the larger sizes as well. Me personally, I prefer Drobos or Western Digital external drives. My original MyBook 320 is still going strong after 3 years of heavy access via the AppleTV.

For the cost of thousands of archival DVDs you could easily buy 4 external drives and copy everything 4 times over with 2 drives in house and 2 off site that gets switched out with one in-house. The statistical probability that all four drives would die on you simultaneously is so astronomical that you could count it as zero. I might also add that this is vastly quicker than burning gobs of DVDs and easier on the environment that using up 10,000+ DVDs over the years.

(Sentry Safe makes a great line of these http://www.sentrysafe.com/products/dataProtectionSolutions.aspx )
Click to expand...

Great suggestions. I purchased a Seagate 1TB a couple of days ago. It's FW800, but I'm not sure if it's multiple disks or not. I'll have to check the packaging.

The safe is a GREAT idea and one I haven't considered - I especially like the integrated USB connection. Very clever. The safe deposit box is smart too. I am illegible for a free safe deposit box at my bank - I should start taking advantage of it.
 
Wingnut330 said:
The safe is a GREAT idea and one I haven't considered - I especially like the integrated USB connection. Very clever. The safe deposit box is smart too. I am illegible for a free safe deposit box at my bank - I should start taking advantage of it.
Click to expand...

I use a combination of FW800 drives and online backup.

If you're using a safe, put the drive in a Pelican case - don't use a Ziploc bag in case it melts. Have you considered a Voyager Q with just bare hard drives that you can move offsite? 1TB drives are breaking the under $100 mark now.

Here is my setup.
 
Abraxsis said:
To OP: FW800 drives are your best bet for what you are wanting. HOWEVER, If you get 1TB external drives ensure that they are, in fact, two 500MB drives. Larger single drives TEND to have a higher failure rate if they're being accessed over and over. My brother has been in IT for 10 years now and this is the only real opinion he has on the matter beyond preferring Seagate drives. But even those are beginning to garner a high failure rate in the larger sizes as well. Me personally, I prefer Drobos or Western Digital external drives. My original MyBook 320 is still going strong after 3 years of heavy access via the AppleTV.
Click to expand...

I agree. Stick with 1TB drives using 3 platters rather than 4 platters.

I would have chosen Drobo if it weren't for the mixed reviews on the FW800 performance and the fact they use proprietary RAID format.
 
Running Iphoto off NAS

I am a Microsoft user who has had a mac thrust upon me and I am having difficulty adapting to the iLife. My computer died and currently the only working computer in the house is my husband's macbook.

Luckily all my photos were stored on my NAS so I was able to view them from the macbook easily; however, I am trying to get iPhoto to work off my NAS as the macbook does not have enough disk space for all my photos. I tried moving the library to the NAS and this worked, until my husband took the laptop from the house and then tried to open iPhoto. It completely crashed. In the meantime I have just been uploading my new photos directly onto my macbook hd using iPhoto and haven't really needed to access my old photos.

I was reading in the iPhoto thread that your photos are all stored in Pictures/iPhoto library and that if you touch them you will corrupt your library. I love how iPhoto organizes your photos into events and allows you to create albums, calenders, photo books etc but I have issues with the fact that it can't just auto detect you NAS and work with those photos when they are there, or ignore them if they aren't like Microsoft. Would Aperature handle this better?

Also I just went to put a few photos on a USB key to get them developed and I could not find the photos. I have since read that they are stored in folder I mentioned above but that you are not supposed to actually touch this folder. What is the correct iPhoto way of putting photos onto a USB drive? I currently download photos in RAW and read that iPhoto automatically creates a jpg copy for you. If I do an export will I get the raw or jpg?

Please forgive me if my question is not in the correct thread or is already answered somewhere else. In one thread somebody got blasted for hijacking a thread with a question similar but not exactly the same question as the topic. In this thread somebody gets blasted for starting a new thread that is similar but not exactly the same as another thread. Now I'm not really sure what the 'netiquette' is.
 
Welcome to Macs, even if unintended.....

A couple of things for you to try.

If you open iPhoto by holding down the option/alt key when you click on the program icon you should be able to manage iPhoto libraries, and choose which library to use.

There is a program called iPhoto Buddy that makes this (step above) more automatic and intuitive. www.iphotobuddy.com I'm not connected with iPhoto Buddy in anyway, except that I have used it in the past.

The warning to not muck about with the photos inside the iPhoto folder really just means that you shouldn't make any changes (don't edit, don't move, don't rename, etc) outside of the iPhoto application. However, making copies - and placing those copies outside of the iPhoto folder won't hurt anything. However.... you do run the risk of inadvertently making changes that may corrupt the database. That said, iPhoto will almost certainly have the tools you need built into it, so look for those tools. No risk of corruption, and lots easier.

I believe you are looking for the "export" function to move photos to the flash drive. You should see a dialogue that will let you set the options for the exported images.

Hope this helps....
 
Thanks

Thank you very much for your quick and helpful reply. I will try out your suggestions tonight. It has been a huge learning curve for me as I have been working with Windows for 20 years.
 
amorrissey said:
Thank you very much for your quick and helpful reply. I will try out your suggestions tonight. It has been a huge learning curve for me as I have been working with Windows for 20 years.
Click to expand...

My pleasure. We've all been in similar situations at some point. Also, the Apple website has a good community forum as well. Look for it under the Support tab. Those forums are heavily moderated to eliminate the "I don't like it" posts, which leaves just the technical problem/solution posts. Not as much fun as the MacRumours pages, but I usually head there first if I have a particularly knotty problem.
 
Thanks Again

iphoto buddy worked perfectly! You saved me hours of frustration. The export was also exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the tip about the Apple board as well. I will check it out.
 
Abraxsis said:
@Crus ... you've been here a month, if you dislike all of "us guys," who have been here for years and years, posting new threads feel free to use your leeto search skillz to separate the wheat from the chaff. I come here to attempt to help people, not criticize their methods of asking. Be helpful when you can, but don't jump on someone's case cause they didn't find exactly what they were looking for. Just my opinion.
Click to expand...


Very well put! ;)

----------
Wingnut330 said:
LOL - thanks for the catch. Our daughter was born a couple of days ago and I'm running on very little sleep. :p
Click to expand...



Sorry to go off topic, but I just want to say congrats on the newborn!
 
My setup is quite effective and simple. I have a iMac that I use to store all my photos. it has 2 HDD's a SSD for the OS and APPs and a 1TB drive that I use for music (less than 50 GB) and the rest is for photos. I have around 500GB of photos. Using Aperture i setup a vault that I backup to a NAS (network attached storage).

Its a bit slow but all the editing is done locally and then when I'm done i update the NAS & Vault (usually over night). The NAS has 3 HDDs all making exact copies of the other, so if one dies, No problem, theres a backup.

P.S I also have a portable HDD at a friends house which I update every month with new photos.
 
I have a Mac Pro loaded up with drives:

OSX is on SSD
User Folder (where my Aperture Library resides) is on HDD1 (1TB)
Aperture Vault is on HDD2 (1TB)
Time Machine is on HDD3 (1TB)

That's 3 locations where all of my photos reside. I am letting Aperture manage my pictures until I find the need to use Referenced.

I may upgrade all the HDDs to 3TB when I start to run out of space, but for now I'm fine.

Additionally, I do an online backup to Backblaze.
 
I'm totally anal about saving my images so my storage setup is as follows:

Raw dump: Everything I shoot I dump on a 3x3tb raid 5 NAS array (6 tb total space) on there I also run my Lightroom libraries.
Collection dump: Same kind of NAS (3x3tb in raid 5) hosts my assorted collections.

Every completed set also gets burned to DVD.

I once lost a lot of stuff (before I got into photography) and I have learned my lesson.
 
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