Podcast suggestion - digital file preservation

[SlipJigPiper]

Marko-
Digital photographers face a media storage and preservation concern that grows daily. How do we ensure that those hard-earned pictures survive hard disk crashes and acts of nature? Backups are the obvious answer. I'd like to hear what professionals consider as "best practices" on media options as well as frequency and scope of the backups. Also information on the use of RAID systems in this context would be appreciated.
Thanks for a great podcast.
Mike

[Greg_Nuspel]

Most do not see RAID as a back-up, one good power spike and it can all be gone. I think this is a good but very controversial topic.

[Alex Wilson]

RAID is expensive, and I generally think of it not as for backup as much as it is for systems that need high-availability and can fail-over gracefully.

A better option might be a hard-drive toaster. Depends how much you shoot.

Personally, I backup all my RAW files to DVD, with a second copy stored at a different location. After 5 years you should be re-burning them.

I have another set of DVDs for edits (and yet another copy of the RAW files converted to DNG)... I only have one copy of these, so I'm living a little dangerously.

I use WhereIsIt to index everything so I can find files. Files and folders are all named by shoot date so I can find stuff easily. No point archiving stuff if you can't find it.

I just finished working on the last of my 2008 stuff.... 2TB of raw files, and 4TB of edits... $50 worth of blank DVDs for that is *way* cheaper than the thousands it would cost to RAID that much data.

That said, I spend a fair bit of time burning.

[edbayani11]

maybe an external/portable hard drive. they are nuch cheaper and convenient for archiving

[Greg_Nuspel]

If you run external drives use minimum 2 duplicates and you need a program to do a data check. I have heard of people backing up only to discover data errors when they go to recover data.

[Marko]

Hey thanks for the suggestion but backup/tech topics are not really my specialty and although they are part of digital photography I much prefer to focus on the art of creating photos...so I may get to this eventually, but it's way down on the list...sorry about that...

Personally....I use 2 external backup drives that are the same size as my computer's hard drive. 1 drive makes an exact image of my computer's HD so I can take that external and plug it in to any computer and work immediately.
The other backup drive compresses the data into chunks.
I use Acronis 11 to make both backups and so far so good! (I'm on windows btw)
Hope that helps
Marko

[kat]

I read an article on this in American Photo(graphy) magazine that I just got. It was pretty good..listed the different ways and products.

Also had an article on how to store your photos and good programs.

[Alex Wilson]

Hey thanks for the suggestion but backup/tech topics are not really my specialty and although they are part of digital photography I much prefer to focus on the art of creating photos...so I may get to this eventually, but it's way down on the list...sorry about that...

I would say that it's part of a good work-flow, and having a good work-flow means you get to spend more time making art, while also making sure you aren't leaving yourself open to horrible disaster.

One of the wonderful advantages of digital is you can make a perfect copy. With film, there's always the risk of damaging/losing a slide or negative and the image being gone. With digital, it doesn't take too much effort to have a second backup copy, and a whole lot more peace of mind

[Iguanasan]

Right now I have all my shots on my laptop and backup to a portable drive so I still have an issue if my house burns down. I'm in the process of upgrading. My plan is to use Hamachi to put a NAS device at my friend's house and backup my laptop to that and he's going to put one at my house.

I've thought about using online services, however, I don't quite have that much confidence in any of the services and I don't like the idea of a subscription model where I have to pay them for the rest of my life.

Managing this much data is a pain, to be sure!

[Greg_Nuspel]

Anyone use tape backup? I'm thinking of this option so I can keep several tapes at different locations.