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!"

Comments

Re:perhaps the problem is with the DVDs?

[Calmiche]

My problem is that I'm finally starting to see decaying CD's. I've got some backup CD's from 1998 or 1999. (I can't access the media anymore to check dates, but somewhere in there.) I put them in the other day to look for some old data and they wouldn't read. When I pulled them out of the drive, the silver media was peeling away from the disk. I've run across about 6 of my backup cd's so far this year that are doing the same thing.

No, I think a good harddrive array is going to be your best bet. Get several harddrives and mirror the data. The cost of gigabytes is dropping on a daily basis. You should find that when you need more room, it will be easly upgradable and cheaper as the years go on.

don't over complicate it

[tolldog]

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.