How are you storing your Digital Photos?

magicmonkey · Jun 27, 2006

I have a stupid amount of hard drives on my network, the 3 I use for photo's (and photos only) are an additional drive in my main PC where I use the files and edit them etc. A hard drive in a backup server which takes coppies from my main PC 3 times a day, again there is one hard drive for photos in there, and a portable hard drive which takes back ups once every other day or when I've got back from a shoot, whichever is more convenient at the time. The PC's are both on seperate mains curcuits and have curcuit breakers in there incase I get hit by lightning or something horrible and the portable hard drive is never plugged into the mains in the house. If my photo's hard drives gets full then I buy 2 new hard drives and the full ones become backups, it's cheaper (when you get into 250GB sizes etc.) and much more resiliant than burning a load of DVD's as they just don't stand the test of time...

I know that having a hard drive with pictures on sounds like hassle but I have a USB hard drive enclosure which means that I can just pop a hard drive in there, plug it into the PC and I have access to the whole drive in seconds. The enclosure only cost about £5 and was well worth it!

I'm afraid that as someone who has had a lot of backup material on DVD/CD and got it all wiped through a problem with ambient temperature (nothing very extreme, just sat in my office away from the radiator and out of the sun in England) I have to say that keeping DVD/CD only is a very simple way to loose all your work. It's very convenient but will always break. it's not bad as a backup for your hard drive backup but as I will already have 2 hard drives with backup on I don't bother myself with it

in case you can't tell, I have data paranoia!

JTHphoto · Jun 27, 2006

Something I have heard, and you may want to look into is that CDs and DVDs can go bad. I read that they may last 1 year, 2 years or maybe longer. Either way, i would only use this as a backup and you'd probably want to redo them often. Depending on the size and number of photos, this could be quite cumbersome.

I had 20Gb of photos on my harddrive and finally got scared enough, and just bought a 120Gb external HD this weekend. I highly recommend one, it's a lot more convenient/faster than cds/dvds. Eventually it would be nice to have a couple of HD backups, and keep one in a different location that you update every so often.

as for organization, i currently use a system of folders, first by year and then by events within that year, but that probably needs to change too. i have heard good things about the DAM book referenced above. Definitely keep the chronological number (assigned by the camera) of the original file, even on your edits. That way you will always know which file your edit came from, even years from now.

Tiberius · Jun 27, 2006

I keep a Linux RAID fileserver in my house for my media, and I throw my Pictures on the server as well for redundant backup (not a difficult solution per say, but the first-time cost of buying a terabyte or two in hard drives is a bit high). I also occasionally burn them to DVD.

castrol · Jun 27, 2006

My problems stem from burning all the files to a DVD... then remembering which
DVD a certain photo is on.

I keep everything by date, with a small description, but when it comes down to
having 15 different days on one DVD... it's hard to write all of that on the
face of said DVD.

hot shot · Jun 27, 2006

external hard drive (600gb)
on wireless with each day in a seperate folder

Aelfwyn · Jun 27, 2006

I use a photo-sharing site like photobucket, and store all my images on there. The good thing with photobucket is that you can easily create new albumbs and store images in albums within albums, if necessary. The downside to photobucket is that it automatically resizes your images. Imageshack's another one I'm looking into.

guitarkid · Jun 28, 2006

it is true that CD/DVD media can go bad, as with any media, but that depends on how you take care of them. It is a much safer means than HD's. Working as a PC Tech / Network Admin by day, I see countless drives fail. Some are 2 years old, some are 2 weeks brand new old! IF you save stuff to HD, you better mirror that drive in case. Storing the CD's / DVD's in a cool dry place where they cannot be scratched is the way to go. I'm not really sure how they can "go bad" if they are not scratched or mistreated. They have a life of 100+ years. It's data 0's and 1's burned to disk via laser. This is not analog tape. All the CDs in my music collection still work great and many of them i purchased back in 1990, as I'm sure yours work and sound just as great as well. Even if they last only 10 years for whatever reason, I highly doubt brides will return after that for more photos. If they do, and something happened to the discs, that is what clauses in contracts are for. I agree to keep all photos on file for a minimum of 5 years. I let them know that it will more than likely be longer than that but after 5 years......they could go bye bye.

magicmonkey · Jun 28, 2006

guitarkid said:
it is true that CD/DVD media can go bad, as with any media, but that depends on how you take care of them. It is a much safer means than HD's. Working as a PC Tech / Network Admin by day, I see countless drives fail. Some are 2 years old, some are 2 weeks brand new old! IF you save stuff to HD, you better mirror that drive in case. Storing the CD's / DVD's in a cool dry place where they cannot be scratched is the way to go. I'm not really sure how they can "go bad" if they are not scratched or mistreated. They have a life of 100+ years. It's data 0's and 1's burned to disk via laser. This is not analog tape. All the CDs in my music collection still work great and many of them i purchased back in 1990, as I'm sure yours work and sound just as great as well. Even if they last only 10 years for whatever reason, I highly doubt brides will return after that for more photos. If they do, and something happened to the discs, that is what clauses in contracts are for. I agree to keep all photos on file for a minimum of 5 years. I let them know that it will more than likely be longer than that but after 5 years......they could go bye bye.

Sorry mate but I'm going to have to pick you up on a few points here.

Firstly there are only 3 different types of dye used to create the surfaces that the laser burns a DVD on, all of them can deteriorate within 2 years in normal conditions although they usually quite a bit longer, not an issue for a bit of music or your holiday snaps but for something you might want to sell it's a real problem. CD's do last longer and have hundreds of different types of dye used on them, there are also 'archival' dyes that supposedly last even longer, personally I wouldn't trust them any more than the 'archival' dyes used on DVDs which are still produced from the exact same 3 dyes as there is no other way to manufacture them.

Agreed, hard drives go down sometimes, that's why I keep 2 backups. Have you ever seen a hard drive that went down whilst in storage though? Of course not, it's solid state storage with no deterioration of the materials (metal plates, more or less), the only way to damage a hard drive in storage is to do something really silly to it like drop it in the sink or throw it at a wall, even then you will most likely be able to recover the majority of the data using free software and a little bit of patience.

I know that in our lines of work it's simpler to do a rebuild and tell the users that there's nothing you can do to get their funny emails back for them but in a situation in which the data is really important you can get it back most of the time. If a DVD deteriorates (and it will) there's nothing you can do but if a hard drive fails then there is a world of possibilities to recover the data; that is assuming that a hard drive in storage has failed which is very unlikely. When in use a hard drive will sometimes fall over but if it's within 2 years of buying it then either someone has done something silly or there has been a manufacturing default with it, having said that, I wouldn’t feel safe without at least one mirror of any data I wanted to keep in case of my own idiocy (a frequent event!)

Sorry if that sounds a bit mean but I'd rather that than have someone lose all their data through bad information. A quick example here, at the moment I'm recovering a friends wedding photos from a hard drive that got burnt out when their house was struck by lightening, the rest of the machine is unsalvageable, it's completely fried and nothing works at all but we've still managed to get a lot of stuff off there besides the wedding photos and all I had to do was put it in my machine, press a couple of buttons and leave it well alone for about 24 hours...

Big Mike · Jun 28, 2006

Aelfwyn said:
I use a photo-sharing site like photobucket, and store all my images on there. The good thing with photobucket is that you can easily create new albumbs and store images in albums within albums, if necessary. The downside to photobucket is that it automatically resizes your images. Imageshack's another one I'm looking into.

I would not feel good about storing photos on a web site only. Especially one which you do not have complete control over. Anything could happen to them.

I do have a lot of photos on Photobucket...but they are "optimized for web" copies of images that I want to display. Photobucket resizes images for web viewing (if you have not resized & compressed them yourself). If you wanted to retrieve and edit or print those images...the quality will certainly not be as good as if you had saved your original file. If you must store images on-line, find a data storage sight and keep photobucket for displaying images.

Torus34 · Jun 28, 2006

No matter what method or system you use, back those puppies up on a CD or DVD just as soon as you can.

Computers spend most of their time laying in wait for a chance to delete or corrupt your files. Once on a separate disk, your pictures are safe from such nefarious mechinations. A little paranoia is not a bad thing here.

laxb0rder · Jun 28, 2006

i store on my computer and back them up on the drive on my ipod.

JonathanM · Jul 8, 2006

I save on an external hard drive, with the files from y camera then a CD doesn't jold enough images, and the hard drive allows me to store in folders & sub folders quite nicely. I can pretty much find any photo I've taken over the past 5 years without problem.

usayit · Jul 8, 2006

Two 250GB firewire drives each split into two partitions; one partition is mirrored and the other is striped. Photoshop temporary directory and work space is on the stripped volume and my storage is on the mirrored. I keep them under folders: category (personal, vacation etc.) -> date (072006) -> JPG/TIFF.

I then burn them onto archival CDR/DVDR for archival including contact sheet of all the photos. I make sure that I also note the date the CDR/DVDR was burned and keep a print of the contact sheets organized in a binder.

bigfatbadger · Jul 9, 2006

I should reccomend Carbonite backup, which is pretty cheap, and automatically backs up all of your stuff for you. It seems to do a trickle effect, so the initial backup takes ages, but then it syncs your hard drive with their offsite servers.

It claims to offer unlimited storage, but I think they think you're taking the michael at about 60gig. The downside to this ofcourse, is that you can't have different stuff on the server to on your harddrive.

Seems good though, and cheap!

markc · Jul 9, 2006

Off-site backup's are a good idea for mission critical data, but there's no way I'm giving a company access to my personal data, like Quicken, tax info, passwords, and the like. If I were to do off-site, it would be a portable drive stored in a safety deposit box and updated (swapped) once a week or month. Seems cool for images, though.