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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Fro All You Pack Rats
Dave Doonan, Photographer
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Kingston | TN | USA | Posted: 12:33 PM on 06.01.09 |
| ->> I am saving photos for my archive. They take a whole lot of space. I have jpeg originals, and psd corrected images. I am wondering , do you save everything, if not, what? I save onto a hard drive I keep at home, and a dvd back up. of that. Am i going in the right direction, or is there another way I am not thinking of? Remember, I am a newspaper photographer, so money is tight. Thanks. |
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Dave Doonan, Photographer
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Kingston | TN | USA | Posted: 12:35 PM on 06.01.09 |
| ->> my apologies that is supposed to be For, I am a terrible at my typing. |
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Mike Strasinger, Photographer
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Nashville | TN | USA | Posted: 1:00 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> David,
You need to also store the images at an off site location like PhotoShelter. Your DVD'S will wear out,your hard drive will fail,but off site servers should prevail.I save everything. Who knows?
Mike |
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William Maner, Photographer
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Biloxi | MS | USA | Posted: 1:04 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> Dave...
You're probably like me...not that up to date about storage options.. Like you, I have to be very budget conscious..
What I'm doing now is saving all my images to two large external hard drives.. In addition to saving my best images on HDs, I save them on DVDs..
I know there's been a lot of talk about failure and degradation of storage mediums, but I've not had any problems..
People talk about storing images to some sites online.. There's a cost involved, but I've never explored it.
Good luck with your choices... |
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Harrison Shull, Photographer
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Fayetteville, WV | Asheville, NC | | Posted: 1:26 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> DRR's off-site servers did not prevail...
Trust no single option. Cover your bases.
Me? I have triplicate HD's. Set #1 is stored onboard my office system. Set #2 is at home in a water and fireproof box, and then set #3 is across town at another location.
HD's cost little at the per-gigabyte level when you consider the "value" of what you store |
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Brian Westerholt, Photographer
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Kannapolis | NC | USA | Posted: 2:58 PM on 06.01.09 |
| ->> Harrison, I am very curious as to the success of storing hard drives as a means of backing up data. I was under the impression from having read other threads on this subject, that if a hard drive sits unused for a period of time that, for lack of a better term, will lock up and become unsable and unreadable. Do you routinely take these hard drives and connect them to a computer so they can "spin up" once in a while, and then return them to off site storage? |
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Harrison Shull, Photographer
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Fayetteville, WV | Asheville, NC | | Posted: 3:16 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> Brian-
Once a week - two weeks at the very outside - backups are the norm for me. Thus the HD's have relatively little time unused. They are stored in anti-static bags, in double ziplocks, and in temperature controlled situations.
So all three HD's would have to fail to make this system go belly up. I like those odds! My shooting pace dictates that I go up in 250-500GB increments every so often so any one HD stays in the system only a few years and then it rotates out.
My point was not to trust any online location as your only backup just as you would trust no single physcial backup solution. |
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George Bridges, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Washington | DC | USA | Posted: 4:28 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> I'm wondering about the logic of a hard drive sitting and "freezing up"
How long had the hard drive in your computer been sitting, not spinning at all before you purchased it?
How long was it sitting at the computer maker before being installed into the machine you have?
How long did it sit in storage at the manufacturer before being shipped?
How long has an external drive been sitting that you buy at Best Buy or Apple Store or anywhere?
I have an external on my desk that I've had for a month or two shy of six years. I fire it up every now and then to copy info to it or pull some old data off. I probably use it only 2-3 times per year. Never had a problem. |
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Dave Doonan, Photographer
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Kingston | TN | USA | Posted: 6:48 PM on 06.01.09 |
| ->> Multi hard drives is a good idea. but remember as valuable those images are, I am financially unable to go out and purchase $300 or more in hard drives. I have been told Matsui dvds are good because of their archival quality any others? |
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George Bridges, Photographer, Photo Editor
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Washington | DC | USA | Posted: 7:23 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> Dave,
Look at bare drives and a drive dock.
The dock will set you back $40 or so and you can then plug in a bare drive and make your backup, then return it to it's anti-static bag and box and then store in your office, in a fire safe or off site.
Sites like OWC (macsales.com), Fry's and zipzoomfly.com have bare drives.
For example, at zipzoomfly you can get a Samsung 1TB 3.5-inch drive for $83.
You can get one drive and do your backup now and as you get extra cash you can add more and larger drives.
Not bad. |
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Alex Menendez, Photographer
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Orlando | FL | USA | Posted: 8:08 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> I have had half a dozen hard drives die on me in the past 3 years.
Now I archive to a simple DVD and also batch archive images to a Blue-Ray DVD. I can get roughly 22 gigs of images onto one BlueRay DVD. I also back up my quicktime files from the 5DMarkII this way before I format the card.
Just a thought.
Alex |
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Mike Morelock, Photographer
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Greenwood | AR | USA | Posted: 10:50 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> I don't know about drives sitting and just locking up, especially in the short term. In the old days(10 years ago) you'd often see the bearing wear out on drives. You could freeze them and they would work again, or just to get your data off that one last time, crack it open and bump start the platters and it would work again for a while. I think now in the short term a drive is going to die because of a manufacturing defect.
It is true that a drive not being used is more likely to croak than one in use. Google has done a huge study of it's disk drives and it showed drives in heavy use failed less often.
A summary of results is here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm
The google research is here
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf
I'm in the bare drive and dock camp. Now that you can buy 1 terabyte drives for $75-90 it seems like the fastest and cheapest way to go. Burning DVD's is time consuming. I've also had dvd's fail. One of my backup hard drives croaked. I then had to copy about 100 dvd's to it's replacement. Even though I used good quality dvd's and burn at a slower speed, several of the dvd's had unreadable files on them. Not an entirely unreadable disc, but there would be a few files on the dvd that were corrupted. So you need multiple copies and that means more time and space. I had a couple of fires safes full of dvd's now replaced with a single hard drive. If a hard drive fails you lose a lot so buy an extra, heck buy 2 extra, store one offsite and sleep well. If you really want to play it safe buy different brands of hard drives. The recent Seagate fiasco made me start doing this. All brands of hard drives have a dud model from time to time, and you won't know it until it's been on the market for months. |
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William Maner, Photographer
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Biloxi | MS | USA | Posted: 11:38 PM on 06.01.09 |
->> Guys..after seeing this thread, any recommendation for docks??
I've got several old desktop computers that are obsolete system-wise or just don't work.. It would be a treat to pull the HDs out of them and be able to pull off old data or image files without having to buy an external case like I did for my largest HD... |
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Harrison Shull, Photographer
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Fayetteville, WV | Asheville, NC | | Posted: 8:10 AM on 06.02.09 |
->> William - I have been using this dock with great success for the past 2+ years. I am sure that there are others.
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?S=1268&ID=1642
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066&Tpk=thermal...
I am in agreement with what Mike M said about bare drives and backups - easy, quick, inexpensive, and redundant. I pop a bare drive in and start a backup via Retrospect before bed and wake up with a fully updated archive. Do that again so that there are alwasy three copies of the archive and I feel very safe.
Dave - $300 is not that much to protect your entire archive of work. Think of the "cost" were you not to protect that asset adequately. Or if you thought you were protecting it via CD/DVD and then discovered that 20% or maybe even more of your media will not open in 5-10 years. |
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Mike Morelock, Photographer
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Greenwood | AR | USA | Posted: 11:37 AM on 06.02.09 |
->> If the computers are very old they probably have IDE drives in them instead of SATA. I haven't seen an IDE dock, only SATA.
You can get something like this instead of a dock. It's not as perty but they are more versatile.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BEST...+sata+usb&x=0&y=0
Most of those will handle IDE and SATA drives in both desktop and laptop sizes. They usually come with a power supply to run the big drives, the notebook size drives normally run off the usb power. |
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Dave Doonan, Photographer
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Kingston | TN | USA | Posted: 1:30 PM on 06.02.09 |
| ->> the dock and bare drive sounds like a good idea. I am going to keep this in mind. I can set this up for under $200 dollars. thanks. |
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Rich Cruse, Photographer
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Laguna Niguel | CA | USA | Posted: 1:35 PM on 06.02.09 |
->> I have a Newer Technology Voyager- quad interface dock. It has Firewire 400 & 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA.
It accepts 2.5 and 3.5 SATA drives.
http://www.newertech.com/products/voyagerq.php |
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