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A Storage Solution for Lots of Digital Photos?
Duizendstra asks: "I've been asked to explore the digital storage possibilities for a professional photographer. One of the characteristics is the rapid growth of the amount, and size of pictures. At the moment, one photo session produces about 2 GB of raw data. He has an Apple - Power Mac G5, and he currently uses DVD as his storage medium. However, he has lost quite a few photos because of DVDs that can't be read anymore. I would like to know if any Slashdot readers have any experience in creating a solution for such a problem? Any help/idea(s) would be greatly appreciated!"
Get an extra hard drive and use it. Hard drives take a lot to kill... at least for me they do. ANyway, do something like that. SHould work. Eventually you'll run out of room, but you can always swap out/add another one
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I'd consider setting up a file share (nfs, samba, etc.) that is on a machine with plenty of storage space. ReiserFS 4 offers a compression module that would be perfect for this. It would make sense to set the FS to compress heavily, since transfer speed is less critical. Your friend could probably get about 6:1 compression I'd guess, which with 400 GB of storage in an LVM array would hold over 1200 photo sessions. This should be enough to last him a few years. In all liklihood in 3 years he'll be able to buy a 1 TB drive for under $300, which he could add to the storage array quite easily.
Add in some software raid for automatic redundancy and you have a fast, cheap, high compression solution that is scalable into the foreseeable future.
Amazing magic tricks
Would be to buy a few external hard drives. With the storage capacity of hard drives these days you can't go wrong. I bought an enclosure for one of my internal drives and now I don't know how I could live without it. Having a portable drive like this is an amazing convience, especially with a capacity of 160GB.
Like one of these. I have a non-RAID LaCie and it's nice and fast, and you can physically move it around since it has it's own case and works over firewire.
I don't have RAID because I back it up to another computer once a week (a Linux box with massive RAID.. I do the backup with rsync patched to send resource forks correctly). I'm not a pro photographer so I can stand to lose a week's worth in the worst case. Your friend needs a backup strategy (maybe just buy a second drive and sync them up once a week or night.. there are several strategies here). You want both a backup for reliability (RAID takes care of that), and a backup for those occasional "OH SHIT I JUST DELETED THE ENTIRE SHOOT" moments (doing a regular backup to another disk will take care of that).
You can also get various utilities to manage the photos, while we're on the subject.
I definitely don't use DVDs or anything like that, I consider them very ephemeral. I just make sure my important files are in multiple places, and I buy new hard drives every couple of years and copy everything over.
One approach is to burn three copies and then you can recover the data by averaging the signal between them. This requires multiple drives but it is better than having to give up on archived data. Manufacturers suggest: "Store your recordable DVDs vertically, protected from sunlight, in a room that avoids wide variability in temperature and humidity."
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
He should get an Xserve RAID, of course.
It'll just work, it's well integrated with his G5, and it's cost effective.
Try one of these
If I were tasked with this same job this is the solution I would use:
http://coraid.com/
Basically, you add your own disks, and have up to several terabytes of RAID storage. The best part is that teh RAID and all the complicated stuff is ghandled by the drive unit, to the OS it just looks like one huge drive.
You can add a NAS (SAMBA/NFS) server (or roll your own), to make accessing the drive from Windows / Mac even easier.
I don't have one of these myself, but have been drooling for a while...
-Ms2k
2GB/session isn't really enough information to design a storage solution but I'll dump out some generic big, reliable and cheep storage suggestions.
S hareShow.asp?ID=1764600
For large scale reliable storage I dislike both optical and tape. They both quickly become more work to manage than it's worth and have serious reliability issues. Hard drive based is the way to go and since hard drives do fail and that is a bad thing, it's best to use RAID. It's especially a good idea since RAID is getting easier, since hard drives are getting cheaper per unit and since SerialATA is making it easy to hook them up right.
Heres a basic design that I'm actually working on for a home server for myself:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/WishList/Wish
It's a 3U rack mountable 2TB storage server. Put a Linux distro on it with some small RAID1 boot partitions and a software RAID5 storage partition, throw samba and some email-home config to notify of drive failures and you've got a decent place to store up to 1000 of those 2GB sessions. Zip up the old ones if needed for more space. If rack-mounting isn't desirable there are cheaper desktop cases that would probably be appropriate.
If this is overkill a 4 drive RAID5 array or even a 2 drive RAID1 array is much much easier to accomplish. Standard case, motherboard, power supply and drives with a Linux distro and you're done. Hardware RAID is also an option but since software RAID's high CPU usage wouldn't be an issue here I'd go that route.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
This is a system for a professional photographer, storing the digital photos that are the lifeblood of the business. (Note: most professional photographers charge a nominal fee for a session, but then make the real money by selling prints. No negatives or no files = no $.) This is most emphatically NOT the place to try to do things on the cheap. It's an absolutely necessary and tax deductible business expense.
I work for Apple, and while I'd prefer that this place purchases an Apple-based solution, I am not wedded to a particular OS or brand of hardware. However, you get what you pay for -- either through hiring a skilled professional building an open-source based storage system or by paying for a commercial solution (such as Apple's XServe RAID unit). Be sure to include the necessary system maintenance in the budget for such a complex setup, including off-site backups, on-call support, and making sure that it stays up and running during successive system updates and upgrades.
Given that the photographer is already using an Apple G5, I suspect an XServe RAID solution will suit the situation quite well. One unit can provide 7TB of storage, which at 2GB/session works out to about 3500 sessions at current resolutions (also allowing plenty of headroom for growth as resolutions increase). Apple offers professional services, on-call support, and training for server administrators. In addition, if you're looking for an Apple consultant with the necessary skills in your area, check the Apple Consultants Network.
--Paul
I shoot a lot of photos and I ended up buying a couple external harddrives. They're certainly more stable in the long run than DVDs and it's easier to organize and view the photos than if they were on hundreds of DVDs. Almost all external drives have USB 2.0 or Firewire connections, so moving them onto the drive isn't too painful.
If I did photography professionally I'd look at an external RAID solution. It's too expensive for a prosumer like me, but a pro should be willing to pay for something like that.
buy an external 300 GB firewire drive every couple months, label the drive by the time period. If you are really worried, have 2 every couple of months, they are pretty cheap. Drives don't fail sitting on a shelf, at least not like dvds do. The last thing you wan't is a raid system thats active every day, it only increases the likelyhood of failure. raid is great for data you must access now, but a waste if you are just using it to back up data you only need once every so often.
If it is really important, use tape backup, make redundant copies, and send one off to a data storage place. As others noted, a backup solution should be part of the cost of the job, and is not really that expensive when divided over the different projects.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Load up your computer with a few P2P file sharing programs, and your hard drive will be backed up across the Internet. (Make sure you use ole FTP as well to make sure that files with Eminem in the name get backed up.)
I've always been curious... any recommendations on how to browse that many pictures in a reasonable way?
I' more or less in the same situation. I'm not a professional photographer or anything like that, but I do like to take lots of photos when I go somewhere. And since I do not trust CDs or DVDs for long-term storage, I store them on magneto-optical disks. It's more expensive than DVDs, but *MUCH* more reliable. I use 1.3GB disks, and they cost 1000 yen each (around $8.5).
Since your friend has around 2GB of data on each session, he could get a 2.3GB MO drive and use 2.3GB disks. These cost around 2000 yen ($17). In my opinion they're better, specially for someone who's using them for work, even though they're expensive compared to DVDs.
I'm living in Japan and these disks are very popular here (and easy to find everywhere). I don't know about their availability on the USA.
My site
Not to mention it would consume a lot more power than is needed. Has the photographer been using Taiyo Yuden media? Or just whatever Maxell or Verbatim was on sale at Office Depot the week he was running low? Maybe he just needs better-quality media, and make sure the friend is burning no faster than at 4X.
WiebeTech makes a desktop RAID enclosure that looks interesting. It's actually two 5-bay RAIDs in a single unit. This is essentially a desktop equivalent to Apple's XServe RAID. WiebeTech has plenty of good high-capacity disk solutions.
Nobody proposed the "a gmail account per session" yet?
to add a few cents here..
i would definitely consider backing up to hard disk. avoid dvds like plague! i backup to two hard disks for redundancy but i do not do it in a raid set. raid is hardware AND software reliant in all forms and a hardware failure can leave you with a lot of lost data(raid controller failure, model not made anymore!) and software raid can fail via simple glitches and leave the data scrambled and data forensics cant pull usable data off the disk! so i suggest 2 firewire disks and take the time to backup to both disks.
Most everyone is recommending hard drives and I'm definitely part of that crowd. Most everyone says "RAID" as well. I'll tell you what I do at work, not for photographs necessarily, but for all our data. I have two servers for user data, one on each side of campus. One is the "active" server with RAID drives, the other is a backup. Each night (I have the luxury of a quiet network at night), I run a network backup to toss stuff over to the second server with RAIDed drives. This prevents the accidental "rm -rf" users that just 1 server with RAID wouldn't prevent against (of course other types of attacks WOULD kill two server solution, which is why important data goes to an external firewire drive from the backup storage server).
Granted, not everyone has the cash to blow on all this, but my stepfather, who is also a professional photographer, has finally taken that all important step toward moving to digital. He's been backing up to CD and he usually gets away with a session on one or two CDs, not counting any editing he does in Photoshop (he still prefers to touch up photos by hand). Anyway, he has been watching his bookshelf fill up with CDs, much like all his file cabinets that store all his old hard copy negatives and select prints. Any long time photographer probably deals with the same stuff, which was a problem before digital ever came around.
What I've been working with him on is what will most likely be a big storage server... even at 2GB a session, you could shoot every day of the year and only use 700GB, which will cost you about $300-400 in a non-RAID solution nowadays (based on me just purchasing 4x 300GB drives at $110 each and my friend buying a 400GB for $200). A small server with a few drives will be all the online backup one should need, plus to be extra safe, either that backup server, or just a few external drives.
If you backup to the external drive once a week or so, this should save anyone from the accidental rm -rf (my stepfather once deleted all the pictures on his laptop by accidentally dragging the wrong folder to the Recycle Bin -- naturally all his photos were too big for the trash and were instantly deleted, luckily he had all his CDs to restore from). Plus, as long as you're backing up regularly, it should be obviously that the hard drive is working or not working. If you start hearing clicking, or feel something funny -- get it replaced.
I guess my summary of all this is to have two backups. If one is your "online," primary storage, it should be obvious if it's failing or not failing, and assuming you're backing up to your second backup regularly, there shouldn't be any danger of you not realizing it's failing, because you are using it all the time. with DVDs and CDs and other media of that type, it's because you set it on a shelf and forget about it for years that is where the danger is caused.
Sorry this was long.
Sig!
Not sure which kind of photoghraphy your friend is doing, but don't sweat the details. That shouldn't be your job. Picture archiving is something magazines/agencies do professionally, and can throw serious amounts of money at a problem. Friend of mine is a picture editor, he's just organised a 10TB server, complete with backup, for the 17 photographers that work for his magazine. Agencies are even better in that respect, as they work for you and not the other way round, and are obliged to give you access to your archive whever you need it.
I propose 35mm film.
No, really. It has a really high information density.
We could take the image and write it to film in digital form using optical drive technology...
A latent existence
use DVD-RAMs. They are much better engineered, without needless backwards compatibility and designed for long term storage. They're also a bit more expensive. If it's important enough, always have at least two copies of your data. (I guess, some king of ECC over many DVDs would be possible, but I doubt that anyone has ever implemented something like that.)
Other than that, as others have already pointed out, you can always buy harddiscs. It's not what they're designed for, but still the easiest solution.
This guy is a photographer, not an administrator.
Buy and label pairs of drives. HDs are cheap these days. One is the original store and the other is the backup.
Name the first drive as driveA and driveAbkup, second set driveB and driveBbkup.
Keep a notbook for eack to note the customers/jobs in each drive. This way he does not have to attach the drive to know which customers jobs are on it.
When ever something on a drive is modified, use your favorite backup program to copy from driveA to driveAbkup.
I currently use Integro Personalbackup.
This give you 2 copies. If needed because of leaving town or what ever reason, one set of drives can be kept offsite if needed.
This is something simple you can teach.
Also keep in mind most photographers only keep the "negatives" for a specific period of time. 5-10 years.
Using this method will guarentee tha the data on the drives are read and written which helps keep the data fresh. HD's can loose data of not read once in a while.
Youo will need to teach your friend to run health checks on the drives twice a year to make sure it is not failing. This is important even for drives that site for 2 or more years. You do not want a HD to sit for 5 years without spinning up.
If the imperative is protecting his data, then he should do what professionals do with any other kind of critical data: put it on tape. Sure, you probably could put together an optical solution, but the tape technology is compact, proven, convenient, stable and scalable. I'd avoid anything proprietary aimed at the consumer level (if anybody still IS aiming tape technology at consumers), and look at technologies such as DLT which are popular for critical applications among professionals. Support for technologies adopted this way is measured in decades.
Given that this is his life work, he really should invest a few thousand dollars and put together a strategy that will protect him from media and system failure, localized disasters such as fires, and possibly even regional disasters. With a little thought, while it is not going to be cheap, it will be a bargain.
Supposing he's willing to put four or five thousand dollars into this. He can get a SDLT tape drive with a 160GB native capacity (don't count on compression for photos), and 16Mb/s native transfer rate. That day's photo session takes two minutes to back up. am deacj tape stores possibly up to half a year of work. He'll have enough money to buy a good number of tapes, so with a a little thought he'll have a good system for archiving his old stuff, one that is not vulnerable to single tape failures and has an offsite (important!!!) component too. And he may have enough money left over to buy a fire resistant media safe that could buy his data at least a couple of hours of time. Depending on the economic value of his work, he could also send backups to an offiste media storage facility that provides a very high degree of security against regional disasters as well.
I'll tell you a story I tell all my clients when the cost and inconvenience of a well designed backup program comes up.
Years ago I had a client who drove up with what looked like a huge piece of burnt toast in the back of his nice Mercedes sedan. He was was a CPA, and this was three weeks before tax day; the burnt toast was a minicomputer that had all his client's tax work on it. He'd been doing backups daily to tape, but contrary to our advice he had stopped bothering to take them off site. Under the circumstances, if he'd had an offsite backup, we'd have lent him everything he needed, even the office space if necessary. He'd have been back on track with maybe two days down time on the outside. When tax season was over he could have moved to a new office, bought new equipment from the insurance settlement, and his biggest worry would be decorating. But all this depended on the offsite backup he didn't have.
There's a small chance that some of his data mightbe retrieved nowadays, by firms specializing in this sort of thing. But they didn't exist in the early 80s, an in any case I wouldn't want to bet on it. The computer had obviously taken major heat; the interior wiring and connectors weren't just smoke damaged, they were brittle from cooking. We did the best we could, removing the drives, stripping and swapping the electronics on them, cleaning all the connectors on the drive with tetracholoride and so forth. After a few hours of work it was clearly futile, but we spent another day on it trying pointless and hopeless things, just to make him feel like we'd done everything possible. None of this would have been necessary, but for want of a simple step he was fully equipped to take, but seemed like a bit too much bother at the time.
The lesson is that while people comprehend small disasters like misplacing a file, large disasters are sometimes so horrible to contemplate that they discount them altogether. If your client is lucky, he'll be irritated with being saddled with having to swap tapes every morning and perhaps rotate them offsite every few days. Maybe labelling the tapes will be a chore. If he's unlucky, you'll be a hero.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As a general backup solution, I still have files from 1984 that are readable. These go back to my junior high school files from an Apple ][e. Obviously this method has been refined over time, but it works. It takes some work, but I'm paranoid about losing old data.
I also keep all digital pictures online. Large hard drives make this so much easier.
Aww, and here I thought we'd managed to find the only Slashdot story in the last 5 years that had absolutely nothing to do with Google.
Since I am making the assumption that you are a professional photographer, you can easily write this stuff off as a business expense, depreciate it appropriately, etc. What I would not do is follow anyone's advice on a "homebrew/homebuilt" solution. I am sure that there are plenty of people out there that *could* build something reliable as the solution I suggest, but personally, having worked at several LARGE companies in the I.T. department in various capacities, we would NEVER EVER build our own solution. Vendor support, etc. becomes increasingly important when data is critical to the business and downtime results in monetary losses
No one does, because, frankly, digital photography hasn't been around that long--so there are no solutions that were around in the 70s, that are now still working, to demonstrate that they are reliable over that kind of time period.
I'm unsure if you think this is a digital photography problem, or if you just believe digital photography is the only possible reason someone would need massive, long-term, reliable storage.
Either way, it's an "ask slashdot" at least twice a year, for all sorts of reasons. It's a general computing problem.
The only possible solution as I see it, is to quit sissying around with firewire drives... they're nice when you need a little extra storage, and don't want to dick around with opening the case. Get a real fibre channel card for $50. Get a fibre channel enclosure for $500. And another $5000 or so will get you decent, lowspeed FC drives, with a few spares. Over the course of 20 to 30 years, you'd have to constantly rebuild it... a 140gig drive from today won't be replaceable in 16 years unless you have a spare (even if you did, would it be reliable itself?). It could easily cost alot, but then, maybe you're already spending quite a bit?
Also, if I hear SATA one more time, I think I'll puke. This guy is asking about 50-ton dump trucks, and people are talking about riced out Honda Civics.
You are talking out of your ass. I'm seeing your butt cheeks move in sync with the words.
Big ass SATA RAID
SATA? Do you also act like you're on the same level as F1 race mechanics, because you checked the oil in your Ford Pinto?
using a mix of software and hardware RAIDs
Yes, that's a strategy! In something very nuanced, complicated, and with potentially disasterous consequences, let's mix the two together for even more complexity. Maybe this is worth considering in some cases, but without an expert there to come to that conclusion, and certainly without any stated reasons for this, THIS IS A BAD IDEA. If this is what you eventually decide to use, do not hire parent poster to do the job. Oh, and since you'll want someone who knows what they're talking about to do it, it's going to cost more than his estimate.
A cheap, sane alternative would be to compress your photos. JPEG really is good enough
Just when I thought you couldn't be any dumber. "Yes, for long term storage of your incredibly hi-res pics meant for professional photography and graphics, where every single lost bit seems to count, why not print them out on acid-saturated paper with my crusty inkjet printer that's out of yellow?" I mean, my god. It's an ask slashdot, people are supposed to be stupid. It can't be helped, but damn. There are sea urchins with more advanced cognition.
Real Easy, Secure, and safe.. The Buffalo Terrastion, I just got on for this very purpose: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail .php?productid=97&categoryid=19
This system'll get you out of trouble for about a full year, given ten photo sessions a day. You'll get free on-site support and you can store a full session in cache!
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http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process
Looky hear for something interesting
http://www.clerks2.com/movies/whit560.mov
It shows a Deva 2 sound recorder with a 'Floppy' Dvd!
It is 24 bit (not shabby), Poly-Phonic with 4 tracks.
Now why didn't you think of that! ;)
--The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste. Arrest Bill Gates and shut down Microsoft immediately.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
It works. Reliably. In my previous job, we pretty much depended on it. A single faulty tape could cost us from $50k and up. And we didn't do backups of data on it... The tape drives were used continuosly 24/7.
If you can afford it, is an entirely different question. I think it's about $30k...
I'm noting similar responses to a recent article - A question of stability of optical media was answered by some backup techniques. To repost: I really like parchive2, but I wonder if dvdisaster is faster & allows finer-grained recovery, though.
Someone else already posted about having offline hard drives...
I had some problems with DVD storage storing scanned family photos I can't replace. I found out it was the el-cheapo DVDs I was getting by the spool from CompUSA. Now, I use Verbatim MediDisc DVD-Rs. Not as good as the Hard Drive solution, perhaps, but much cheaper. These are used to store medical records and imagery, and I've been told that they are manufactured to much higher quality standards than the average DVDs. Not too much more expensive, either, especially in spools of 100.
On a side note, for those of you who have not been to a hospital cancer ward lately, in some hospitals, they give you a DVD of your loved ones' MRI imagery, complete with annotations showing where the inoperable brain tumor is, so you can check it out at home on your home PC (requires custom software to view, so no *NIX). Geek-creepy in a big way, IMHO.
Its NMR. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Some people figured "nuclear" is a bad word so they are trying to rename it. This is discrimination for no good reasons at all.
Ah yes. These are nice tape drives. I'm in the market for one!
If anyone has a 3590 kicking around please send me an email with details. I like the 256 track units. They are fast and realiable.
As for $50K per tape - that is cheap.
In the 128 track models the Fujitsu drives were more relaible than the IBM drives.
BTW - if anyone needs some 10 tape autoloaders for the Fujitsu's I have several available plus main boards in both differential and single ended SCSI as well as some model H.
Tape RULES!!!
I'll never trust my precious data to a drive and media system as cheap as a DVD or CD. We are still reading tapes recorded in the 60's and 70's. I doubt a DVD or a CD will even last 10 years even if you have a special environment to keep it in. At least Magneto optical has an expected life span of 50 years.
In all likelihood a hard disk drive has a longer life than CD's and DVD's.
Get a very large server case with plenty of cooling, get a raid 5 card and make a raid array. Add more as needed. If you are going to store to a CD/DVD medium in addition to that, make parity files with something ala par2 as well, and get one of those food saver bags to chuck the jewel case in and store it in a vacuum in a dark area.
Tape will last longer then a DVD-R if taken care of.
Actually, if the data is important id do both. 2 DVDs and keep the copies onsite, then a tape that is moved offsite to be stored *properly*.
Sure, its a slow process to get your data back, but if you really, really, dont want to lose it..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
RAID server
5 disk RAID-5 would be good, lots of storage capacity with only 20% overhead for redundancy. should be doable for under $1000 and store a great deal of images
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Ehm one might also consider that one should take time to take a good picture. Instead of take time to make hundreds of photo's in the same time. 2 Gig (if it's done by one photographer, instead of a foto studio), is a lot.
I know lot's of photographers only use RAW pictures, which require a lot of MB's (as i myself have an EOS350D, i know this). However when i got my light correction done, the quality of the jpg is as good as the raw image. Try use raw images if your sure that you need to process them afterwards because of difficult light conditions. Or when you you're verry afraid and it has to be good, and don't want to risk bad light, and have only that single shot moment. I cann't belief that when one produces 2 gig of photo's on a daily basis, that he cann't take some risk, is he so afraid for light ?, a proffesional photographer shouldnt be.
Also one can switch between those formats and detail sizes, not all photo's require high defenition, as they wouldn't all be printed to an A3 format. Think about the resulotion of your end product and of your media resolution. Try to tackle the problems at their cause.
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
ImageMagick understands the image format used for most CT and MRI photographs, so most run-of-the-mill Linux distros can display images from medical imaging CDs. (The Windows applets usually provided on the disc do make navigation a bit easier, though).
Please tell me more about that.
...and saying "use a reliable brand," but no two people have the same opinions of what's reliable... ("Mitsui Gold or nothing..." "Just use the cheapest you can find..." "The Staples house brand is OK..." "No, no, it has to be a brand name like Sony or Verbatim, but which brand doesn't matter...) ...and every one was saying that because the DVD data layer is sandwiched between two thick pieces of polycarbonate instead of underneath a fragile lacquer coat, DVDs will be far MORE long-lived than CD-R's.
I am sick unto death of cheerful articles that assert that [optical storage medium o' the month] has been proven in accelerated-life testing to last for umpteen aeons, and then discovering that my three-year-old disks can't be read...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I agree that RAID is not a full backup solution, but for a photographer it's the most important component of one (well, alongside an offsite backup or ten).
The reason is that the data a photographer is storing is non-reproducable in a way that very little data is. If I spend a month programming and then loose all that code in a crash - a terrible annoyance, but because the idea of what to do is in my head I can re-create it with some work.
But a photo gone is lost forever. Additionally the work that can go into retouching photos can be very time intenstive in a way that you can't really compress a second time through in the same way you can reproducing lost documents or code.
So RAID is very useful in that it is a constant backup solution to ensure failure of a single physical media will not kill you.
That said, I've heard about multiple drives in RAID arrays dying at the same time so I'd do something like RAID 0 (mirror) for everyday use combined with a weekly backup to another HD which goes offsite. Perhaps you rotate the backup drive between five or so differnt units so you have some history as well in case you delete something by accident, then have monthy DVD backups that you can't remove stuff from by accident.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aftre trips I have between 2-10GB of photos to work with - that's before postprocessing which can add quite a bit of space as well. I also have a G5.
What I have done is bought an external SATA enclosure for two drives, and a four-port SATA card. I have two 400GB drives set up using the software RAID in Disk Manager, configured to be Raid 0 (mirroring).
The idea here is that I want enough space to hold all the photos I have ever taken and the work I have done on them. I only use two of the four ports for the SATA enclosure but I got a four port card to provide for another enclosure later on (which wil be sooner rather than later)
The external box is for photos only - I have my home drive mounted on an internal drive, and I use Carbon Copy Cloner once a week to back that up to a second drive in the same computer. Thus all photo work has instant backup in the secondary drive, while less important things in my home directory can be backed up according to the frequency or work.
Lastly of course is that these all need to be backed up as well. Currently I am using external Firwire drives for occasional dumps to save off the home drive and the photos - it's tricky though as I have to span a number of external drives. What I'm moving to do is regularily swap out one of the drives in the external SATA enclosure (it has trays you can just pull) and store that offsite with a new drive in place to be mirrored to. I've not tried that yet though. Later on when Blu-Ray burners become affordable that will be my last line of backup where I can make ten backups once a month and just mail them offsite.
This is a pretty reasonable solution costwise, though it does add an extra box besides the G5 and it makes a little more noise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have two 300GB external USB2 hard drives that I sync my data to.
I use rsync with the -E option (gets mac attributes should they exist) and is fast, copying only what has changed. I use two drives because I sync the two backups immediately after syncing my data with the first drive.
Easily automated, no RAID to get in the way in the future, and cheap. New drives can be bought for next to nothing. My suggestion is to buy them in pairs and as one set fills, replace it with the second set. You can easily create new data directories and leave stuff online all the time with this method.
Avoid RAID for long-term backup/archival purposes. Ignore those that tell you otherwise.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
Its funny how we sit here in this great dilemma. Now, realizing that you can't take it with you. Our own mortality looms and our life's work can dangle from a thread no more reliable than decaying plastics and magnetic drives. Oh sure, all that stuff survived in New Orleans, right?
I spent the 90's recording everything I could on DAT and Cassette. Silly mortal, its all gonna die before I do...
Results speak for themselves: Clearly the most lasting approach is to carve the data into a massive pyramid in the desert. So far, that outlasts Maxell by about 5,000 years, for what its worth.
I mean, really, this is how nature keeps us from getting too uppity about being permanently imprinted everywhere. When we figure out how to make it last forever, then we'll just have accumulated way, way, too much to even care. The good stuff will be retained, somehow, in the culture, perhaps. Maybe the Navajo can memorize it in oral tradition.
In the meantime, be a good consumer if you think it will assure that your tomb will be adorned with your art.
As for me, I'm getting more DVD's just to keep them old DATs and Cassetes company. I might as well get busy before they bury me! Anyone got a viagra?