Tiff files are eating me out of house and hard drive

[jay sturdevant]

My computer's hard drives are filling up with those 50Mb Tiff files that are the fruit of many hours of

labor. I back them and their parent RAW files on DVD, but I don't have a lot of faith in optical media as

permanent solution. What do you do with files this big, even a 160 GB portable HD isn't looking so big

anymore but it seems like the only answer. Does anyone have a good archiving strategy and any advice on

portable HD models, and if you don't mind my asking, how big and how many?

[martin_howard1]

External HD's are available in 500Gb flavours, a couple of these and a consistent backup strategy should keep you going for a while. Firewire is generally better than USB 2 for shifting large amounts of data.

 

Long term you might consider a tape drive for back up, they offer good archival qualities and good sustained transfer rates, you will probably need a SCSI controller if you do not already have one. A downside is that most are aimed at the commercial sector and are priced accordingly.

[hjoseph7]

"My computer's hard drives are filling up with those 50Mb Tiff files that are the fruit of many hours of labor."

 

You are right about that and they can fill up pretty quickly. I decided to get an external hardrive after noticing that only a few weeks more of dowloading RAW files and saving large JPEGs as Tiffs would eat up my 80Gig hardrive in no time. I still download my digital images directly to my C: drive if I'm in a hurry, but once every three weeks or so, I check to see how much space I have left by going to MyComputer and doing a right-click/properties on the hardrive. If the the free space available has dropped to less than 45%(which is the limit I have set) I begin performing 'Maintenance' on my computer that is deleting unwanted photos and transfering the good ones to my external drive. It's a little time-consuming sitting behind a computers screen performming Maintenance when it's nice and sunny outside and you could be out shooting, but that's life these days. Although technology has made things allot simpler, you still have to pay for it in one way or the other.

[William Kahn]

I use three external HDs - one for storing finished files, one as a backup for the storage file, and one as a scratch/cache disk for PS. The only images I keep on the internal HD are the ones I'm actually working on (allegedly working, anyway). They get backed up on the external drives, too. Also, about once every six months, I download all my files to DVDs for archiving. It's a little work, but worth the effort. I had a major computer crash at the end of February and the backup files saved my butt......

[ronald_moravec1]

Hard drives, even my external one, so I back up with DVD. Consider on line commercial storage.

 

Do you need to save as TIFF? I save an original, sometimes a layered PSD and usually a flat PSD. The flat one is used to make JPEG of various sizes.

[Ed_Ingold]

You only need to save the original file and one post-editing master file in uncompressed format. For working files, JPEG is sufficient.

 

Nonetheless, you will still run out of disk space regardless of how large or numerous. The solution is to back up to DVDs - the most reliable durable medium at present besides archival prints. Always do a file-compare following the burning process.

[mendel_leisk]

"parent RAW files"???

 

Are you starting with raw files from a digital camera. If so, I'd say there's no reason to be saving tiffs. Just document your settings for raw conversion and ouput jpeg.

 

BTW, I'm dealing with tiffs greater than 200meg: film scanner output. I get 20 on a DVD ;D

[sravan]

Buy a raid solution. The best for the money is Infrant. It is a bit of money but can give you 2.25 TB of space for around 3000 $

But you can start small and upgrade your space as you use it.

I would go with the base with 2 750 GB drives to get effective 750 GB space (X Raid setup gives you only 750 GB). Each additional 750GB disk you buy will give you 750 GB of space in the future.

This is think is the easiest way to grow your collectionwithout going to DVD backups.

[steven_clark]

I say get a USB-ATA adapter and just buy commodity OEM hard drives from places like Newegg.

[dmphoto]

Mendel,

what do you find is the most efficient way to document these changes?

 

I'm pretty new to this and as of yet, I have only used DPP (Canon bundled) as my software. It appears after making changes to a RAW file I can save it with another name in the same format (e.g., RAW_editted). That way, at least my altered files are only approx 10MB each making 20MB for both digital photos. That is significantly less than a 50MB TIFF + 10MB RAW, or heaven forbid, 200MB!

[mendel_leisk]

You can't edit Canon's raw files. Certain software can record what settings you used when creating an image based on that raw file. Adobe Camera Raw, for example, can save that info in a single database, or in very tiny xmp format files. And/or, you can just document your settings.

 

I use ACR, and typically run a batch with all the "auto" functions on, adjusting color balance, exposure, brightness, contrast, shadow detail, and contrast. All I ouput is jpeg. I'll look them over, if I'm happy, I'm done. I can always come back later and finetune. If some are obviously suffering from the auto settings, I'll override. I'll let ACR remember what I've done, *and* I'll note how I varied from the auto settings, in a simple text file log.

 

When reviewing images produced with ACR's auto settings, I'm usually satisfied with the majority. For regular daylight images, it usually works fine. What tends to backfire is night shots, shots where there is unimportant bright sky and important detail in the shadow, that sort of thing. ACR tries to balance the shot for daylight, and mucks it up in the process. So I intervene, untick (say) auto exposure, and either leave on 0, or adjust it manually. I've also experimented with including grey card in tungsten lit shots, and setting custom balance based on that grey card. Very handy.

 

If I do extensive editing on a particular file, I might save a tiff. Even for stuff like blended exposures, I usually don't bother. If you can recreate the image from a bit of saved info any time you want to, there's really no point in saving massive tiffs.

 

BTW, I would look into ACR, I've used DPP a bit, and found it very awkward. I am a duffer and do not use ACR in depth by any means, but do find it easy. For a few tips on ACR watch Russell Browns tutorials, I found them very helpful. Just to realize that you *don't* have to fire up Photoshop everytime you want to process a raw, for example.

[dmphoto]

Is ACR a standalone program or is it an add-on to Photoshop? (I do not own Photoshop).

[fourfa]

it's Adobe's RAW conversion module, which can run from Photoshop or Bridge. it's not standalone though there's no real reason it couldn't be.

[dave_nelson___atlanta__ga]

I second or third the recomendation of getting a SAN (Storage Area Network) box. The less than $800 Buffalo Terrastation is a great deal with 750GB of RAID 5 protected space. It uses 4 250GB hard drives and if one of them fails you do not loose any data, just insert a new drive and it will rebuild itself.