What To Use To Archive / Back Up / Store Images Long Term ?

dcsang

dcsang

Canadian & Not A Dentist
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Now, most of the folks here (I think) are still using Film but we (again a lot of us here) also have digital cameras that we're using.

We're scanning some film images (maybe the "keepers") and slowly amassing a larger and larger catalog if digital images both in RAW and JPG/TIFF formats.

What I want to know is, as you go on through your photographic "lifetime", what are you using to back up / archive or store your digital images?

I'm looking for a Backup/Archive solution that would back up my images (RAW, Scanned and JPG images - mostly because of my wedding coverage but there are a number of "WOW" images to me that I want to retain as well and not lose them) ; either an NAS or RAID type system but I'm unsure of what to snag for myself.

I'm currently using a Mac Pro (also have a Macbook) but wouldn't mind also allowing my girlfriend to access the images (read only) as well.

I've looked at DROBO 2.0 but I'm unsure whether I need something so robust (and the fact that it costs extra to have it network accessible per se).

So are you archiving any of your digitized images?
Are you archiving any digital shots from your M8/M8.2/R-D1(s)/DP1/GRD II/ LX 3 or otherwise?

I'm curious to hear what solutions the RFF community has come up with.

Cheers,
Dave
 
After having numerous Maxtor drives fail on me, I avoid them. The LaCie large network drives (I TB+) seem much better. So lately I have switched to that. I backup all my photos to the LaCie. I will shortly buy another, backup all my photos again, and remove that drive to somewhere safe - perhaps a bank storage vault. Oh, and I pray alot, too. I will probably rotate the off-site storage on an anual or semi-annual basis. That way, I will have off-site storage for all but 6 or 12 months of my digital photos. At least I won't lose them all in a catastrophe. I also upload photos I really want to keep to Google's Picasa Web albums. It's integrated with Picasa so one-click easy to use. I don't upload full size images, although one can. It just takes too long. That way I also have cloud storage of photos that I want to pass on through the generations.

/T
 
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Nothing is eternal. One does one's best and hopes for the best. Film would not be archival for me because I don't have the patience to go through hundereds of pages of negatives looking for the few I really want to remember. I have scores of boxes of slides in the basement from years ago that I will never look at and never scan. Are they archival? Not in a practical sense. It's much easier for me to click on Picasa links and look at photos from 10 years ago. Picasa currently manages 161,000 photos in 1745 folders for me. How could I do any thing close to that with film?

BTW, the last time this subject came up in a thread several people were banned from RFF. It's a contentious topic.

/T
 
The solution to photo backup (scanned negs/slides/photos as well as digital images) is to look at how banks store and protect their records. Banks have been in the digital domain longer than the photographic world has been digital, and they have a fiduciary as well as legal obligation to protect their data, so they've got things worked out rather well.

First, bear in mind that all electronic media degrades over time, and formats become obsolete. That means that burned CD's and DVD's as well as other types of optical or magnetic media will eventually fail. When is eventually? That's up for debate, but fail they will. Also, it becomes harder over time to find devices to read a given physical or electronic format, once it become obsolete. That means refreshing backups with new on a scheduled basis.

Second, single copies means single points of failure. When the terrorists took down the World Trade Center towers in NYC, the actual intent was to destroy the US financial system by destroying bank records. The terrorists did not know much about how bank records are kept - no one lost money, no financial records were irretrievably destroyed. They must have seen too many old Westerns, where the bank gets burned and the mortgages are lost, so everybody gets a free house and the bank goes bust. That doesn't happen anymore. Since one copy means a single point of failure, multiple copies are mandated.

And third, disasters that cannot be predicted or controlled for, such as natural disasters, tend to be localized. That means in addition to multiple copies of backups, multiple locations minimizes risk.

All this may be too much work for some, and if so, I quite understand. The solution is to approach it with an understanding of the risk versus the reward versus the cost versus the importance you place on the images yourself.

My photos aren't worth that much to anyone but me, but I do want to protect them, and being a computer professional, it's not hard for me to do so. So I do it. Others may decide differently.

First - I keep backups on external hard drives. They are cheap now, and my archive is in the area of 350 gigabytes, dating from scanned photos from the 1960's to my latest digital photos. I keep everything indiscriminately.

Second - I use more than one hard drive. I have found that over the years as I have upgraded computers and hard drives, I have a stack of older drives that are no longer useful (too slow or obsolete format) for my latest computer, but they make cheap external enclosures that turn them into external USB drives for very little money. I find three identical copies sufficient, but I actually have more than that.

Third, I have copies at my apartment in Michigan and in my home in North Carolina. I also upload selected photos to Flickr, where I maintain a paid account that gives me unlimited upload capability.

My backups are done automatically, nightly, via programs I wrote myself, so any new photos are made in triplicate within 24 hours of being stored on my PC. I update the physical differentiation when I go home, a couple times a year, by the simple expedient of taking a few updated hard drives with me and bringing a few back again to be reused.

I store my photos using a perl program I wrote myself, I am not happy with any commercial programs out there. I have my own system of organization, I tag and use metadata to organize and optimize searches, and I insert GPS data into the metadata as well where it is available. I am quite satisfied with the results.

I know that in the future, hard drives will fail, and a home could be destroyed or burglarized (hope not, of course), but using this methodology, I should not lose any valuable photos.

Not everyone will want to go to this extreme, but it's not a problem for me - not really any extra work, anyway, and I feel comfortable that my photos are protected. YMMV.
 
In the last few years I've lost a number of good friends and relatives, a few younger than myself. Heart attacks, motorcycle and auto accidents, medical screw-ups, drug overdoses, a couple of gun shot suicides. If my files get destroyed? Well, sh*t happens. I'd rather have my friends back.

Digital back-up may preseve the images but they'll never yield a gelatiin silver print that I make myself.
 
Al Kaplan said:
In the last few years I've lost a number of good friends and relatives, a few younger than myself. Heart attacks, motorcycle and auto accidents, medical screw-ups, drug overdoses, a couple of gun shot suicides. If my files get destroyed? Well, sh*t happens. I'd rather have my friends back.

Digital back-up may preseve the images but they'll never yield a gelatiin silver print that I make myself.
Click to expand...

True enough Al. I agree with you but in my case, I have no where to make a silver print, no space for a wet darkroom (although I can still go rent one - but that takes time to go downtown, get set up, do the printing, dry the prints, etc. etc. etc.) and I, instead, scan, retouch and then print.

For my digital work, I post process in Lightroom and convert to JPG and then print.

So for me, I need the backup to preserve the work I've done in my "darkroom" 😀

Cheers,
Dave
 
Another consideration is choosing WHAT to archive. How do you pick and choose? Or do you just go ahead and archive everything? What's deemed important in fifty years might be meaningless today and vice versa. With film it's not as easy to discard a frame here or there to conserve space, or even an entire take because there were no "great shots", but you keep it anyway because it's tangible.
 
If you are considering maybe a single solution, look at drobo.com. I have built essentially the same thing, twice over, but as full blown computers rather than standalone devices (which are connected to your computer anyway...).

My main computer is just for editing. I don't even have email or chat clients on it. Nightly, that machine copies over to two machines. The first is sitting right next to it, the other is at work. That's only 3 miles away but I don't have anywhere else to put it for now that would give me a static IP address.

Each has a 2TB RAID 5 array made up of 3 drives. That means that 1) one of those drives can die without the array going down and giving me time to swap out a drive and 2) I have room for at least 1 more drive, giving me potentially 3TB of storage (I'm not ready yet to switch to the 1.5 TB drives, but once they are solid enough I can go up to 4.5TB). They are also all in hot-swap bays so I just pull a drive out, put in a new one, slide it back in. The array automatically rebuilds itself.

I also currently have external drives that I use for backup that I carry back and forth with me and sometimes store at other peoples places, but I'm now at 800GB of data and fast approaching 1TB. That means I'm getting past what a single drive can handle for me. So unless I want to use a drobo just as an external drive...ugh.

I have to keep these files safe for my professional work, too, so it's important for me to have all of this. But for me, the keys are the redundant storage and the fault-tolerant storage. You need to have both.
 
Al Kaplan said:
Another consideration is choosing WHAT to archive. How do you pick and choose? Or do you just go ahead and archive everything?
Click to expand...

For me it is easy. I store everything. As long as my management system allows me to find things again easily, and storage space is cheap, it works for me.
 
I store everything too. The original tiff for each scan goes on an external drive. A second copy goes onto an off site drive whenever the at home drive gets full. So far, I've always been able to buy big enough drives that everything from before can fit on the new drive and still have enough space to allow me to store more. Five years of scanning 100 rolls a year has only gotten me to 500GB, so my storage needs are pretty modest.

FWIW, I pay the bills working as a sys admin, managing things like this for a living, and I wouldn't recomend a drobo to any of my clients. The value proposition for that thing is pretty weak. A couple of WD My Book World Editions would be a better bet if your storage needs aren't much more than a couple of terrabytes. Just use them in mirror (RAID1) mode.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.
 
well, the one nice thing about the drobo (which I wouldn't recommend either), is that it essentially does the raid 5 array for you, with hot swap, as far as I can tell. It then has to attach via a bus but mine does, too, intenerally, via a raid card. I can see where it has its place. It's nice, at the least, to see an external, raid-based array that lets you pull drives out. The LaCie drives that were just RAID 0 arrays where you couldn't get to the drives always worried me.
 
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