How to Archive Files

J

Jokerswild

Well-known member
I have close to a hundred gigs of work from the past year to backup. I usually make the backups on DVD in duplicate and take one set home. This is getting tedious. I was thinking of buying a couple of large hardrives to backup onto and take one of those home. I asked LaCie if it was ok to store a hardrive wihout use for a year until my next backup session. They did NOT recommend this at all. They said I should excercise the drive at LEAST once a month. That pretty much surprised me. These large files are getting tougher and tougher to backup. I think what I may do is stick with my large hardrive plan but leave the drive hooked up to a computer at the studio and the other drive hooked up at home so at least they are both running. Seems it is not good to let a drive sit because the lubrication can puddle up and then when you start the drive it spews it all over the place.
 
Hopefully when blu-ray burners are cheaper, it will be easier to back up large files like this. But until then, I feel your pain. I would recommend continuing to back up to DVD's for long term storage, just because you know there's no chance of losing your data once it's burned into those. Even when you exercise hard drives, they can still fail. DVD's, as far as I know, can't. :happy:
 
Yeah Josh, you are echoing my thoughts....Hey, I can always read the DVX Forums while I am doing this boring task :)
 
I'm all over this thread, if there's any other tips be sure to keep it coming. I'm about to blow up over here, I've got two externals that are both packed. I thought I could just store them away, but now I'm nervous. The time it would take to download all this to DVD sounds pretty cumbersome.

Great thread, I know nothing about storage.
 
This is very interesting!...I've pondered the question of storage many times. I've had three very valuable DVD's go south on me in the past with no recovery possible, it is not a flawless technology. I've had hard drives die on a few occasions also. In the old days you had a negative ( thinking of image backup) and all you had to do was correctly store the neg and you could always print it again. Then your house burnt to the ground and...Well, I guess nothing is ever for sure for always. In my youth I had a 35mm Ricoh camera and I took some memorable shots but not one of them is viewable to me now as they were gobbled up by the circumstances of life. These images live only in my mind now and in the end some worm will gobble those up too. If I lost all my data tomorrow I'd be miffed but not royally as I'm yet to get serious with my picture taking, I'm still dabbling. When the day comes I will want to store my stuff with multiple redundancy ie DVD, hard drive X2 etc. Having all this stuff stored digitally really sets me on edge but somehow I see triple redundancy as the key to safe data storage.
 
What do you guys think about online storage? Anyone happy with a particular company? I hear there's some good one's out there, and affordable. How does it work? I assume it's a tfp process and you upload a zip file?
 
Funny, I was just going to edit my post and add that as an option or the third redundancy:)
 
I think one also has to think about the fact that media is going to change over time so you have to be prepared to transfer this collected data to the new formats when they arrive. Hard drives and DVD's are IN now but ten years out they'll be as valid as a floppy disk. We can collect terra bytes of info over time shooting RAW. Recently, I thought about filling up large hard drives with data and then placing them in storage after six months to a year (before they had a chance to die) but the cataloging of all the data and the expense gave me the heebie jeebies.
 
Jeez, I'm glad I started this thread. Seems it is indeed an issue. I just shot a job for Johnson & Johnson. It was almost 16 GIGS for a small size catalog. Now that is just one job..This is getting crazy. And as Mino said. What happens to DVDs and CDs in 10 years. Will we park them next to our zip drives and Syquest drive...Remember how unreliable they were.

The person that told me about many hardrive failures worked at Digital in Colorado. He should know. Also LaCie told me it is not good to let them sit idle.

Here is how I think I will proceed unless anyone talks me out of it. I am going to buy a couple of large external hardrives. One for the studio, one to take home. But instead of leaving them idle, I will hook up the one at the studio and home to a computer and keep them in the chain, using them in other words for my backups. Also if I have really creative or important shots, I will burn a DVD and take that home as well. I guess we need to place some trust somewhere. There is just no way I am going to back up 40 DVDs for what I need to backup presently.

I state in my studio literature that I only hold files for 10 days after the job is delivered and accepted. Now in reality I back up everything but I don't tell my clients that. Heck, I am not the public library. They have some responsibility too! But they still occasionally call for a shot I dd two years ago. In that cast I charge for the time taken to research the archives, pull the image and deliver it to them. So, I guess I am still making money from older shots now and then. Check out my site at www.sjbaraophoto.com. On the rotating images at the top is a shot I did for a beer company. Those two images alone were about a half a gig in high resolution so you can see how this is a growing problem.
 
I have been using HDDs for a while now to do all of my backup. I mostly shoot weddings and I always backup all of my DV content, edited files, stills and cover art. All told it comes to about 100-150G per wedding. That makes hard drives cost about $20-$25 a wedding to backup. That way if anyone comes back later and wants to get anything I have it available. I haven't had a problem to date. With HDDs vs DVD, at least I know that if the mechanical aspects of the drive stop working I could pay someone for data recovery from the platers (as expensive as it is). A DVD-R is just ink/dye, so when it is gone....it is gone. For the few things I have on DVD or CD, I do not go longer than 3 years w/out backing up that content again.
 
DivotDan said:
All told it comes to about 100-150G per wedding.
Click to expand...

You sure you meant 100GB for one wedding? My wedding was shot at 33 MP and that was 16gb for every 355 shots. at 8MP 2000 images is about 17GB

My workflow is CF cards---->on site laptop if I don't have enough CF cards---->dump photos to two seperate physical drive---->edit one set of photos------->Archive onto DVD and send client a DVD with JPEGS and a DVD with RAW

The reason i give the clients the Raw Files is for archival purposes. I don't make any claims in writting that I will archive the work further than 3 days after delivery. I don't see a problem with backing up to a professional quality DVD. It will last for 10 years at least if not scratched and by then you can transfer your backups to a new and more reliable system. Negitives truly are the best backups since they can last 200 years if kept in proper conditions (hard drives will fail or not be compatible and DVDs can go bad without even touching them.)
 
I meant it, I do videography...not photos. It is mostly DV footage. But I figured it would be applicable to the discussion.
 
My mistake I missed the DV Content part. Mini-DV tapes are more stable than HDs and are actually cheaper than HDs per MB (this isn't a solution for you since you keep the project files) I heard of people backing up data onto Mini-DV tapes in fact like an LTD, this is of course not recommended.
 
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True my friend....I had a client drop a DVD on the floor and it was toast. Good thing I had the backup. Oh and for data recovery, if it is a head crash on a hardrive, recovery is next to impossible. Rare occurance but it can indeed happen. Also, data recovery is very very expensive and time consuming. It is a dilemma for sure.
 
First thing I do is burn a disc of each 4gig I shoot. The only reason I don't shoot 8gig is because I know out of my x8 CF cards, I don't have to split them up into 2 parts.

I have 13 hard drives ranging from 120-750gig. I just recently bought a 750. In aperture, I daisy chained all my drives together and relocated all my masters from those separate drives into one big fat drive. Now I don't have to fish through all my drives to find projects.

I am going to buy anther 750 and then back up my original 750. As for my 120 drives, I will be slowly getting rid of them giving them to my family members who use computers just for general use. Probably by the end of 2009, I will be at least 500 gig drives or more only.

I do also have a numbers spreadsheet that I fill out to catalog everything. That way I know what is on what drive, and which DVD spindle has which images.

Archiving sucks.
 
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