Storage Solutions

New to digital photography, I had this rather simplistic idea that I could store all my new stock of digital pictures on CD or DVD. I am now told these are not of archival permanence.

I have half a million trannies going back to the mid-eighties. They are securely stored in filing cabinets. How do you store digital images safely?

Hi John,

One of the most popular methods is on a hard drive array. If set up properly, this can provide redundancy, so that if one of the hard drives fails, there will still be another copy of your library.

Of course, this doesn't help you if your house floods or burns down, but then neither does having a locked file cabinet of slides.

That's why having one copy as an "offsite backup" is nice. It's something you can do for less than $100 (portable hard drive)- and that wasn't easy to do with slides.

HTH

James

I am likely to come back from a trip with 30gb of pics. I do 12 - 14 trips a year. Then there's bread'n butter stuff i Do in between.

See the problem?

I wish I had that problem

Karl

I am likely to come back from a trip with 30gb of pics. I do 12 - 14 trips a year. Then there's bread'n butter stuff i Do in between.

 

See the problem?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Its such a sad story, I'm starting to cry

I am likely to come back from a trip with 30gb of pics. I do 12 - 14 trips a year. Then there's bread'n butter stuff i Do in between.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

30 Gb x 14 trips = 420 Gb

Bread'n butter: Say another 110 GB

530 Gb/ year

You have an S2Pro (according to your profile)

That's 46,300 archived exposures/year

You have "half a million slides going back to the 80's"

So you kept 500,000/25 = 20,000 slides a year

I reckon a frame of slide film costs me about 36 US cents (when I bought in bulk and used A&I prepaid mailers). UK costs will vary, of course...

So you were keeping 20,000 x 0.36 = $7200/year's worth of slides.

You're now going to keep 46,300 x 0.36 = $16,000/year you are saving by not having to buy film and process. Not even considering those that you threw away...

So you are streets ahead if you buy a 5.6 Terabyte X-serve RAID array, in fact you can afford an X-serve headunit to drive it and still be ahead in your first year.

Isn't digital wonderful Just don't buy a D2X, or you'll need two of them!

<edited to fix some comma/bracket/apostrophe problems>

That was the sort of answer I was looking for.

PS Not just one S2 - several - because I work full-time at this.

Good answer Craig! Thanks for taking the time to spell that out. I knew the answer but am just too lazy to do the math...:-)

Cheers

James

Of course you could always delete some too. A little bit of time spent pruning your collection will not only help solve your storage solution but it will also make it easier to find what you need when you need it--meaning you can use the right phot when you need to rather than having the photo and not even being able to find it. Its too hard to do this all at once. You need to do it as you go.

All 46,000/year can't be keepers....

I know its tempting to just save everything. Long term I think you are creating a problem for yourself. The cost of storage is not the problem, it will keep getting cheaper and there is always compression. File management is the issue. If you can't get to the file there is no point in having it. You are better off with a better-organized smaller collection.

You might also consider archival tapes. If you don't need instant access to the data this solution is even cheaper. Craig's point about even instant access redundant HD based storage being cheaper than film is still valid, I just think that even this is overkill.

Strangely enough it is rarely my first choice of picture that gets sold. Art directors have their own ideas - especially non-diving art directors who seem to be in the majority.

It never ceases to amaze me, the odd pictures that get chosen. Many of them would have been discarded (easily done if digital) but because they are on film they get filed along with the other 36 pics on a sheet.

When I come back with 20 or 30 rolls of film from a trip, I usually choose my favourite 40 or so slides for submission but it's almost as if I give these pics the kiss of death! Art directors always want to discover their own pics and usually want tro crop into a frame to find something 'I never knew was there'!

(And I'm still selling use of a shot of a girl swimming with a whale shark that I took in Eilat with my first RS. It flooded after that first roll.)

I recently sold a picture of a five-year-old in a pool. What a cute kid! He's my son, he's 30 and looks like Hagrid now.)

Of course this assumes perfect exposure and sharpness - but I cracked that about 25 years ago!

So if I edit it would probably be a bit like throwing away the ones that earn.

So I want to store all the RAW files.

JB

(Technical Editor - Diver Mag and divernet.com)

I'd stick with the redundant HD's or CD/DVD before I went to tape. My experience with tape is that they have to be restored and rewritten to new media at least annually or you'll discover the tape you want has gone bad. Especially true with media that's "pushed" -- like DDS4 where they are getting more storage space by using thinner media and hardware compression and ... to "force" more data onto the same media.

Plus tape technology changes just like digital camera technology and a 3 year old tape drive is mostly useless and unrepairable if you have a problem. What do you do when you can't read a tape because you can't find a drive to read it?

I'd stick with redundant HD's and an internet based backup scheme. Check out www.livevault.com and some of their competition. You run a backup to their storage library across the internet. Works well for archival information (information that doesn't change very often). Data is encrypted on their storage and can be retrieved from anywhere as long as you remember the key. Small restores can be done "live." Larger restores they can ship you CDs, DVDs, tapes or a NAS device for appropriately sized fees.

Of course you could always delete some too. A little bit of time spent pruning your collection will not only help solve your storage solution but it will also make it easier to find what you need when you need it--meaning you can use the right phot when you need to rather than having the photo and not even being able to find it. Its too hard to do this all at once. You need to do it as you go.

 

John, I believe that you use a Mac, just like I do.

 

If you upgrade to OS 10.4 "Tiger", only just released, any "find" problems you may have will be resolved since the new search funtions in the OS, called Spotlight, are simply brilliant.

 

Christian

ex Nikon RS AF user still wondering about that new digital camera although the 350D looks good.

Another solution has been staring me in the face:

Shoot on negative film. Digitise the negs adjusting exposure colour temp. contrast etc. (I already have a high-end scanner that happily reverses neg to pos.) File film negatives as per transparency film for archival purposes (with cheap print as reference). File digital images on CD for convenient use at a cheap price. Disadvantage? Only 36 frames per load but these can be effectively 120mb each. How many 120mb files can you get on a 4Gb memory card? (rhetorical question)

Have I upset anyone?

I have just packed my digital kit for a trip to Mozambique and discovered how much more space/weight it takes than the equivalent film kit.!!!

I'm confused. John wrote "I had this rather simplistic idea that I could store all my new stock of digital pictures on CD or DVD. I am now told these are not of archival permanence"

I too have been saving backups to DVD, if kept untampered in my safe why would a DVD degrade?

That was what I have been told (on good authority). Evidently the dyes in the CD/DVD degrade. However, having investigated RAID systems and quantified the cost I have decided to store on CD in the mean time and hope that within five years a cheaper more permanent solution is developed.

On another forum, someone suggested I have all my digital pictures converted to film for storage. It is wafer-thin and stores a lot on information in a small space!

If you are using a mac then setting up a raid (its mostly automated with a mac OR SO I HAVE READ. not done though!! )with standard HDs should be quite simple and "cheap".

Simply have a cut off point with your stock - its going to be nigh impossible o dgitise huge numbers of slides without big bucks anyway. I just scanned 300 slides on my Nik 4000 and it took me about 3 months on and off (and was incredibly boring but I could not afford to have it don professionally)

i just own lots of external harddrives, loooottttsssss of em

In preparation for my D2x I just bought an additional 250gb internal SATA hard drive. I paid less then $150, it is amazing how prices on HDs and memory are going down.

DVD's do indeed deteriorate, and some seem to go quite fast. Much to my chagrin, the DVD that was holding my backup copies of some slides from Hawaii has died. I have an earlier CD with scans from a lower end scanner, but my scans from the Coolscan 5000 have died (and they were much nicer scans). Of course, I found this out after deleting the scans from my external HD to make space for an emergency backup of files from my laptop drive, that was dying. Oh well, back to the media resources cube for another couple of days...

I don't trust standard writable DVDs now. Apparently there are archival DVDs available, if expensive. Ritek claims a 30 year guarantee on their DVD-R media, and has some good feedback on the web. But 30 years is not all that long...

I am going to buy one of these things from Weibetech for the moment. I'm not keeping anywhere near 40K exposures/year, probably about 1500-2000 at the moment, so an 800 GB raid like this will keep me going for a while.

Just to get your apetites wetted...

Maxell is working on a new 3D "holographic" disk format that will be primarily used for "film" (as in movies) archiving. The early versions will hold 30 terrabytes if I remember correctly...

This will be a "square" disk that never spins, and the platter moves up and down to access 3D space on the disk.

Should see early versions late this year or early next year i think!