Digital Photo Storage

[Cuban]

As I am amassing in the region of 1500 images per tour and a similar amount on
race weekends, storage on the pc is being munched at an alarming rate.

While I have an external hard drive to back up to, I wondered what others who
have a similar turn over rate of images do for their storage?

I am looking at burning to discs as well, but does anyone have any other methods
or suggestions?

[Leithen]

Have a look at the ultra flexible drobo.

[4hero]

I have 2tb of external storage, and back up the most important photos to dvd (must get a blue ray burner).

I don't use any fancy backup system, but save everything manually to my external drive/s (don't trust my windows machine )

[Simpo Two]

Cuban said:

As I am amassing in the region of 1500 images per tour

Crikey, I thought you said 1500 images per hour!

[CVP]

That's a mass of images. Are you keeping everything or just the worthwhile ones? I'd imagine that takes a shed load of time to keyword and process. At your run rate you'll definitiely need at least 1TB if not more.

Working on the basis of my files, I get about 200 images to a 2GB card, so 1500 images is 7.5GB per weekend / tour. You'll easily eat masses of disc space. Maybe you could go through your originals and get rid of the ones that are definitely not going to be used.

By policing myself I managed to get my originals down to about 120GB and that's my entire back catalogue since late 2004, much cheaper than extra storage.

Chris

[tog]

Cuban said:

As I am amassing in the region of 1500 images per tour and a similar amount on
race weekends, storage on the pc is being munched at an alarming rate.

While I have an external hard drive to back up to, I wondered what others who
have a similar turn over rate of images do for their storage?

I am looking at burning to discs as well, but does anyone have any other methods
or suggestions?

I use Firewire hard drives - no point in burning to disc as it takes so long and there's no guarantee they won't degrade either. All HDs are duplicated, so every time I buy a new disc I get two and the second is mirrored and kept off site.

[Colin RedGriff]

I've just purchased one of these http://www.ebuyer.com/product/65399
and two 500Gb USB hard drives. I've got it set up as a primary and a backup with automatic backups every night.

Really pleased with it.

[crmcatee]

While we're on the topic of backups and hard drives..

Any suggestions for standalone Networked hard drives ?

[Don]

We use Buffalo Linkstations.

They appear to be big, fast and reliable.

[Colin RedGriff]

crmcatee said:

While we're on the topic of backups and hard drives..

Any suggestions for standalone Networked hard drives ?

Colin RedGriff said:

I've just purchased one of these http://www.ebuyer.com/product/65399
and two 500Gb USB hard drives. I've got it set up as a primary and a backup with automatic backups every night.

Really pleased with it.

What I bought (Linksys NSLU2) is a network storage server. Basically it's a Linux server on a chip ethernet (of course) and 2 USB ports to connect the drives.

For me it's perfect; it's small (smaller than a standard paperback book); quiet (no fans); relatively cheap (£60); the drives of course are extra but then you can buy to suit your needs/budget; it's easy to set up and manage (via web browser you don't need any Linux knowledge).

You can either have it set up as a storage drive and a backup drive or have two storage drives without backup.

[crmcatee]

Doh !!

Cheers for pointing out my lack of vision this morning..

Like the look of that - I could keep storage on the network and then when I make a backup I could easily disconnect one of the drives and take that offsite whilst leaving the other connected.

[Dr MAD]

Leithen said:

Have a look at the ultra flexible drobo.

[Cuban]

Leithen said:

Have a look at the ultra flexible drobo.

Thanks.
Looks great but a lot of wonga, maybe something for the future.

[Leithen]

Cuban said:

Leithen said:

Have a look at the ultra flexible drobo.

Thanks.
Looks great but a lot of wonga, maybe something for the future.

Certainly not the cheapest solution I'd admit, but you pay for the flexibility and ease of management of different size disks. If you have any spare 3.5 SATA Hard Disks lying around like I do, it starts to become very tempting.

[Fordo]

drobo is awesome - we use one at work to store video on.

It goes beyond raid protection, and you can even set the thing up to email you if a drive fails while your away!

[Tycho]

How much are blu ray disks? I know the drives are about £150.

[furtive]

I backup all mine to the online service www.mozy.com (as well as to an external 1Tb drive) for the belts and braces approach