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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Backing up images onsite
Sam Santilli, Photographer
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Philippi | WV | USA | Posted: 3:15 PM on 07.08.04 |
| ->> We have been burning cd's in the evenings after the day's games, then clearing the laptop for the memory space. We will be using a back up drive starting tomorrow. Someone also suggeted a tape drive. Any comments on the subject would be appreciated. Thanks, Sam |
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David Johnson, Photographer
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Alan Look, Photographer
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Bloomington | IL | United States | Posted: 4:43 PM on 07.08.04 |
->> Tape? What's that? I thought that went out with the inventions of diskettes. Tapes break, and can take forever to get you where you want to be.... Ever owned a Cassette and tried to find song # 6 when you are at #2. How about an 8 track with a sticky dirty head. It's a real mess to push back into the cartridge.
CD's - good solution, but can't get a lot on them if you shoot raw - or tons of images.
back up hard drive - too many moving parts, prone to failure
DVD's best solution I've seen - if properly stored
(just one man's opinion.) |
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Brian Jackson, Photographer, Photo Editor
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South San Francisco | CA | USA | Posted: 5:54 PM on 07.08.04 |
->> If you're going with tape, check out the latest SDLT drives. Should have an uncompressed capacity in the 120-300gb range, although the latest greatest is going to cost you some coin.
DLT VI tapes, will give you 40GB uncompressed storage.
DLT: Digital Linear Tape. This is the standard for enterprise backups. EVERY large company uses these to backup their data. Do a quick search in the message board for DLT and you'll find a few more references to people asking the same question.
Lot's of good DLT info: http://www.dlttape.com
Even 8mm tapes have 5GB capcity (more than a DVD, and you can use them over and over). Some even go to 120GB. And they make an internal model that will fit into a 5.25 drive bay, or an enternal firewire case.
The Exabyte EXB-8900 drive would be a good choice. 20GB native and is around $150 used.
They also make tape changers. You should probably be able to pick up one with an 4, 8 or 12 tape capacity fairly cheaply on eBay. Same thing with the DLT drives. The 4000, 7000 and 8000 models are the ones to look for.
And Alan- As far as speed...a good quality tape & backup system can actually be faster than trolling the filesystem.
Find your friendly local enterprise sysadmin and they should be able to help you out. That or a real computer store, not a big box computer store (Frys, Best Buy, Office Depot, CompUSA, etc, etc).
Good luck |
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Eric Hagen, Photographer
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Denver | CO | USA | Posted: 6:32 PM on 07.08.04 |
->> DVD burning is what I use... I've thought about using a firewire external harddrive... but never got around to it. I use my 20GB "wallet" drive that has USB2.0 for short-term storage, but I copy it to the hard drive as soon as possible, edit and then burn it off to multiple DVDs. *shrugs*
4.5GB isn't too bad per disk.. much better than 700MB per CD.
Eric |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 6:59 PM on 07.08.04 |
->> Today's tape systems are surprisingly fast. Though they're a linear device, they contain indexing so the software can jump at very high speed to the appropriate location on tape, then start retrieval. It's not as fast as the random-access of CD or DVD or hard-disk storage, but its fast, and a very cost effective solution.
And, reliability is good for tapes. Our datacenters use tape, because you can put more on them. And, anytime I've had to ask for data back it took a few minutes, well within my window-of-patience. |
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Sam Santilli, Photographer
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Philippi | WV | USA | Posted: 9:04 AM on 07.09.04 |
| ->> Thanks for all the info! Sam |
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Cory Murdock, Photographer
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Yuma | AZ | USA | Posted: 11:06 AM on 07.09.04 |
->> Sam...
I use DVD and have an external burner using USB 2.0. I am not saying that it is the best, but it is working for me and it isn’t too expensive. I can buy blank DVD’s for about $1.00 each. I also use a program for cataloging each DVD. It really helps me keep track of the images. You can go to this site for more info. Archive creator
http://www.pictureflow.com/products/archive_creator/index.html |
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Rick Burnham, Photographer
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Enfield | CT | USA | Posted: 11:42 AM on 07.09.04 |
->> The company I shoot for experienced a problem a month or so ago while shooting a baseball tournament. Everything from one day that we put onto the Lacie HD disappeared. We don't know if it was an operator error on our part, a computer malfunction (unlikely because the other two days were there still) or more likely someone in a viewing station dragged the days file to trash. One of things I have noticed when we have vewing stations set up is how few people, myself included, know how to use a Mac. Most of America is very PC oriented and we think this lead to someone mistakenly dragging off the files even though we have instructions with pictures at each viewing station on how to view your event and we always have people in the viewing area willing to help customers.
What we do now is take the images from the CF card and put them on the Lacie for instant viewing and also copy them to the HD of one of the G4 laptops, then while games are back in progress and the viewing stations are quiet the operations manager burns those images to CD's for additional back up. |
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Chris d'Aquin, Photographer
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Buena Vista | VA | USA | Posted: 2:39 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Rick -- OUCH. That had to hurt. At events, I try to leave the CF cards untouched after we have uploaded the images to make sure we have the shots. I also have the images backed up on a laptop and on my one viewing station.
Cory -- I have looked at one of the USB 2.0 external IDE bays as a solution. I have a 4x DVD burner in my tower at home, but am contemplating putting it in the USB external bay so I can move it around from home to the laptop to an event. Is USB 2.0 fast enough to burn a DVD at 4x? |
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Cory Murdock, Photographer
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Yuma | AZ | USA | Posted: 3:03 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Chris..
Yes the USB 2.0 will be 480 Mb/sec, 40 times faster than USB 1.1 about the same speed as IEEE 1394a (FireWire). You have to make sure that the computer you are hooking up to has the USB 2.0 interface in it already for it to work at that speed.
Cory |
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Rick Burnham, Photographer
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Enfield | CT | USA | Posted: 8:52 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Chris it did hurt as we really only lost half of the games shot that day as I, much to the dismay of the company owner, always take a few minutes to dump my card onto my laptop. So we had all of my images but none from the other shooters that day.
The problem with leaving the CF cards untouched after an upload is at some point you're probably out of cards with the type of tournament we were shooting. |
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Chris d'Aquin, Photographer
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Buena Vista | VA | USA | Posted: 10:58 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Rick -- Yeah, that happens to me too on the big all-weekend tournaments. But it works fine on the single and double-header games we cover on the weeknights.
Cory -- Good. I will probably go that route, then. I was just worried the 4x burner might need information faster than the USB 2.0 could deliver it. |
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Robert G. Stevens, Photographer
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Halifax | NS | Canada | Posted: 11:21 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Photo Mechanic's ingest disk option will allow you to copy the CF cards to two places at once and also apply any IPTC info that may be common to all the files such as the game info. I use this feature of Photo Mechanic and have it copy the files to the laptop and an external drive plugged into the laptop.
I never touch the files on the external drive but edit down using the files copied to the laptop. From there I copy the edited down shoot to a desktop with a raid drive. I will also burn a CD of important stuff, but I don't have a lot of faith in the CD's being readable in a few years time.
My little external drive paid for itself a few months back when USA Today called me looking for some pictures of 16 year old Major Junior hockey players. The 16 year olds don't tend to get a lot of ice time and typically they get edited out. The Editor was looking for a picture of Sidney Crosby with the other 16 year old on the team. I had to go to the the external drive with all the files in order to find what I needed. In the end they used two or three pictures, all which were deleted during the initial edit, but still on the external drive. |
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Michael J. Treola, Photographer
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Neptune | NJ | USA | Posted: 11:33 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> Chris
Cory has it party right about the speeds but you should remember one thing. USB 2.0 on paper has speed comparable to firewire but will never reach those speed because off bottlenecks in the architecture or the USB interface itself. USB 2.0 is only marginally better then the speeds of 1.1 when I did rough testing.
I had just bought a new Powerbook that has USB 2.0 & 1.1, fire 400 and fire 800 too. Firewire smoked the USB interface while coping exactly the same folder from main drive to the external. It's wasn't even close! A landslide victory for firewire. Keep that in mind.
Also the drive and the media you are using generally determine the write speed of your DVD burner. You might find that most 4x media only burns at 2x on your computer. That's because of the variation in the manufacturing process and not because of how your computer is moving the information. You burner will most likely have a buffer to balance how your computer supplies the information to the drive.
I honestly think hard drives and/or tape back up (believe it or not tape IS the most reliable form of back up!) is the way to go. DVD's are too slow and too easily damaged. Do more research!
Tree |
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Greg Ferguson, Photographer
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Scottsdale | Az | USA | Posted: 11:52 PM on 07.09.04 |
->> I cringe hearing the horror story of a client accidently trashing files. Ugh!
Never allow a customer to have write access to images. Imagine what'd happen if it was a competitor who wanted to screw you up and trashed the disk.
It's not hard to write (or find or have written) software that'd read through a disk and quickly build thumbnails and present them as webpages, allowing the users to view the photos using web-browsers.
Then, don't even allow access to the images at a file level. Use a browser and httpd server (such as Apache) and TCP/IP to browse the output.
Doing it this way you can have many client machines browsing, not limiting you to using Macs for the viewing stations. (Said by a long-time Mac user and administrator).
As for backup onsite, this is one of those times that using a high capacity hard drive shines. Move those images off the cards as fast as possible, then get the photographers shooting again. Protect that disk and its hosting computer because they contain your riches.
And back it up once you get home to something so you have duplicates. |
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Cory Murdock, Photographer
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Yuma | AZ | USA | Posted: 12:19 AM on 07.10.04 |
->> You guys are absolutely right. There is no doubt about it, using a hard drive to move images from your CF card is the best and fastest way to do it, and then making back ups on another medium such as a DVD or tape. I forgot to mention that I first transfer the images from the CF card to the hard in my laptop and then burn my images from my hard drive to the DVD for back up.
Cory |
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Michael Springfield, Photographer
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Smyrna (Atlanta) | GA | USA | Posted: 6:38 AM on 07.10.04 |
->> Sam, Burning CDs and DVD on site are both good ways to backup data but can be quite time consuming. Have you thought about using a RAID system? Two or more hard drives that run in tandem. When you copy data to one it is automatically mirrored on the other(s). It is a bit more expensive than the CD/DVD solution but it has several advantages. 1) Hard drive space is cheap. 2) The backup process is immediate and ongoing through out the shoot. 3) You don't have to spend your evenings doing backups.
Something like this may be the solution you are looking for:
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cooldrives/so13ideexras.html
Michael |
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