I know I must have asked some of you this before, but do you guys save any of your image files on your hard drive, or do you keep them all on an external HD (along with a couple of back-ups)? I'm also curious about how long to trust my back-ups before I back them up.
Bill, timely question. I have been saving my work to my local hard drive and backing up to two external hard drives. I am close to running out of space on my internal drive (500gig), so I purchased a new external drive just for my pictures. It is a 1 terabyte drive and I got it at Best Buy for $275. I will probably add another internal 1 terabyte drive shortly, I hope that holds me for a while.
Posted by Tim Buchanan on June 23, 2008 at 1:33 AM
I can only save a month or so on my laptop before I need to move to external storage. My laptop along with two 500GB external drives (soon to get an additional 1TB drive) are what I consider my "working drives". They have all of my pictures dating back to 2003 (I'll soon need another). Every night an automated backup procedure synchronizes my working drives with a set of backups (a 4-bay JBOD array). Every month or so I switch out the JBOD with an identical array kept off-site - so if my house burns down I lose only a month or so.
Posted by Glenn Carter on June 23, 2008 at 7:04 AM
I use an external HD and DVD backups of that. I'm not sure how sound the DVD's are or how long they will last, but it adds a layer of protection.
Thanks Tom, Tim, and Glenn. Just to elaborate on my situation - I've always saved my files to my primary C: drive (2x 250 gb RAID 0 setup), and backed them up on 2 externals (one stored offsite). My C: drive is down to only 15% free disk space, so I suspect that may be why performance has been decreasing. Defragmenting and cleaning up my disk usually help to some degree, but disk cleaning has become too frequent. I knew the time would come when I would have to get rid of the image files on my C: drive to make room for more, so I'm afraid that time has come. There must be a medical term for this - maybe something like PDASD (post-deletion anxiety stress disorder). Anyway, since image files should be stored on a physically separate drive than what photoshop runs on (partitioning a single drive doesn't help) I'm thinking it might be better to just save my files to an external hard drive and back-ups and leave my C: drive alone so that I can avoid PDASD. I just don't trust those externals as much as the primary internal drives. If you've ever tried destroying the hard drive on an old computer, you know what I mean. Those things could easily survive a thermonuclear explosion...
Posted by Wayne Rhodus on June 23, 2008 at 8:34 AM
Interesting timing for this topic. I'm probably the worst one here for having a routine workflow for copying and saving my raw, master & print files on backup drives. I currently save my raw images to an external hd and after initial review, move the selected images to my partioned harddrive on my pc. After working the files I save the master files on my pc and also on a different external hd. My trouble is that they all sit within 1 foot of each other, I have no off site storage of any of my files.
My pc is ready for replacement and I'm just getting ready to look for a new one. Once I get a new one I plan to wipe out my current unit, reload the operating software and put it in my business office off site. I'm not very well versed at what the best method would be but I am envisioning having some type of ftp software resident on the old pc and uploading my image files via the internet from home.
The only saving grace for me right now is that I never seem to have time to take any new pictures anyway. Not adding much new image strain on my current setup.
Posted by Tim Buchanan on June 23, 2008 at 9:40 AM
Bill - eSATA connections are pretty fast and reliable, offering speeds equal to that of your internal drive. Upcoming FireWire 3200 and USB 3.0 will be even faster. I like your plan to get files off of your C drive - nice and neat!
Wayne - the usual problem with uploading files to an offsite server is the amount of time involved in the transfer. My best upload speed is about 5-6 megabytes per minute and at that speed it would take over 10 hours to upload a 4Gb card.
Posted by Wayne Rhodus on June 23, 2008 at 10:12 AM
Well there goes that idea ... thanks for letting me know about the pitfalls of plan A Tim. On to plan B.
Tim - I've always liked firewire speed, but have been OK with USB 2.0 so far. Any forecasts on when USB 3.0 will be out?
As an added note of precaution here, if anyone's running a RAID 0 setup, you have absolutely no fault protection whatsoever. If something happens to one of the drives, you're toast. Since the data for each file is striped (stored in blocks or chunks on 2 separate drives), there is no recovery if one of the drives fails. One solution might be to go to RAID 3 or higher, in which case parity could recover (or at least have a prayer of recovering) lost data. But then that would slow performance and you would probably need a new hardware controller...
Posted by Tim Buchanan on June 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM
It will probably be 2009 or 2010 before commercial products start arriving with USB 3.0 - maybe I can hold off on a new PC purchase until then. I'm also feeling the limits of my current system - and I'm still shooting 8MP files (which will nearly double by early next year)!
My slightly different approach is to keep the last 18 months or so of raw and psd files on my laptop. That gives me the ability to browse/pick/edit whether I'm at work or home without having to connect an external drive.
I have a complete set of all my photos on one external drive. And I back up both my laptop and my "photo drive" to another external drive.
Posted by Randy Wilson on June 25, 2008 at 4:05 PM
One thing to consider when you finally are forced to bite the bullet and get a new system is that if you've got room around the house you might want to keep the old system as a kind of a poor man's network accessible storage.
A cheap wireless router and wireless NIC is about all you need to enable you to set up network shares on the old system and mount them as virtual drives on the new one. So as soon as you unload your CF cards on the local hard drive, you can right away copy them via your network to the other PC. Then as you fill up the PCs' hard drives, you can age older image files onto pairs of external hard drives.
It's not as safe as having off-site storage, but at least it's better than having everything lined up wing tip to wing tip.
Discussion
11 repliesMy pc is ready for replacement and I'm just getting ready to look for a new one. Once I get a new one I plan to wipe out my current unit, reload the operating software and put it in my business office off site. I'm not very well versed at what the best method would be but I am envisioning having some type of ftp software resident on the old pc and uploading my image files via the internet from home.
The only saving grace for me right now is that I never seem to have time to take any new pictures anyway. Not adding much new image strain on my current setup.
Wayne - the usual problem with uploading files to an offsite server is the amount of time involved in the transfer. My best upload speed is about 5-6 megabytes per minute and at that speed it would take over 10 hours to upload a 4Gb card.
As an added note of precaution here, if anyone's running a RAID 0 setup, you have absolutely no fault protection whatsoever. If something happens to one of the drives, you're toast. Since the data for each file is striped (stored in blocks or chunks on 2 separate drives), there is no recovery if one of the drives fails. One solution might be to go to RAID 3 or higher, in which case parity could recover (or at least have a prayer of recovering) lost data. But then that would slow performance and you would probably need a new hardware controller...
I have a complete set of all my photos on one external drive. And I back up both my laptop and my "photo drive" to another external drive.
A cheap wireless router and wireless NIC is about all you need to enable you to set up network shares on the old system and mount them as virtual drives on the new one. So as soon as you unload your CF cards on the local hard drive, you can right away copy them via your network to the other PC. Then as you fill up the PCs' hard drives, you can age older image files onto pairs of external hard drives.
It's not as safe as having off-site storage, but at least it's better than having everything lined up wing tip to wing tip.