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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!"
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.
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
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
Your friend could probably get about 6:1 compression I'd guess
I *highly* doubt that. It's unlikely he'd get any significant compression, and very possible that compressing the files would actually increase their size.
We're talking about photos here, which are already compressed. Even RAW photos are compressed heavily (though losslessly). For example, a Canon EOS-1Ds Mk II takes RAW photos at a resolution of 4992 x 3328 with 36 bit per pixel. An uncompressed image would be 4992 x 3328 x 36 / 8 bytes, which is about 71MiB. The image files produced by the camera, however, are 14.6MiB, a compression ratio of nearly 5:1. The file system compression isn't going to get much more. On RAW files from my camera, bzip2 -9 only averages about 0.1% reduction in file size, and bzip2 -9 is very good -- and very slow -- compression.
Disk drives are the best way to safely store large volumes of data, especially when you add some redundancy, but don't expect to get any help from compression of already-compressed data.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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?
Nobody proposed the "a gmail account per session" yet?
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.