What's Your Wedding Archive System?

[kristine_foley1]

<p>Hi Photo.net,<br>

I know this has been asked previously, but I couldn't find any recent responses to my question. Previously, I have archived my wedding work (Jpegs only; I don't archive my RAW files after I process them) on DVDs and external hard drives. I've had multiple drives fail on me, and I'm finding hard drive storage to be unreliable and expensive. It seems like I have to buy a new hard drive every year because of drive failure. I have about 1 TB of images to archive. I'm thinking about purchasing online back-up space for my wedding jobs, but I have a couple questions: <br>

1) Which company are you using? How long does it take to upload images? Have you found it to be reliable in retrieving images?<br>

2) For those wedding photographers using online back-up, do you backup again just on DVDs or do you have a 3rd back-up location? <br>

3) I've been looking at Mozy and Carbonite? Any experience with them?<br>

Thanks in advance!<br>

Kristine</p>

[simon_crofts]

<p>I have several backups:</p>

<p>1. RAW files are kept on their own separate disc (copy 1). Until they've been converted to TIFFs, they're backed up on another disc (copy 2). Copy 2 is later deleted.</p>

<p>2. Once converted to TIFFs, they're moved to the separate TIFFs disc (copy 3).</p>

<p>3. They are then backed up on a separate TIFFs backup disc (copy 4).</p>

<p>4. All weddings from past years are backed up onto a third 1.5TB backup disc kept at a different address (copy 5).</p>

<p>5. Weddings from the current year are also backed up onto a small portable disc that is never left alone in the house (in case of fire or theft wiping the four copies kept in the house). From time to time this portable backup disc is copied onto the (copy 5) backup disc kept at the separate address. I only start to relax a bit after this copy at the separate address has been safely made.</p>

<p>6. I have separate and similar backup systems for non-wedding photos.</p>

<p>The total is around 14 TB at the moment. Instead of the small portable backup disc a sensible alternative would be to back up recent weddings online until I've had the chance to back them up on the offsite backup disc. That would at least limit the online charges.</p>

<p>I think it's a reasonably secure system, though not perfect (then again, I don't think any system is). Having once had original disc + backup disc destroyed simultaneously (luckily it wasn't wedding pics and ultimately one of the discs was recovered - after some heavy work by an electronics whizz, some cutters and a soldering iron), I don't really trust less than at least three back ups held at different locations.</p>

[peter_cohen]

<p>Kristine:</p>

<p>You're finding hard drive storage to be unreliable and expensive? Are you buying brand-name drives from WD or Seagate? Newegg.com offers a 1TB WD Caviar Black (arguably one of the best of its breed) for $95.</p>

<p>My archive comprises one set of images (pristine, unedited, unprocessed) on DVD; one set on my photos-only hard drive as the working set; one set on an external hard drive that gets backed up daily at 5PM; and one set on Mozy Home.</p>

<p>My experience with Mozy has been nothing but positive since Day One, and in one instance, it was a game-saver. Restoring images has been 100% reliable. Your initial upload to Mozy will take forever, but once you have that behind you, daily updates are without notice. You can control when and how Mozy runs your backups, so be sure to check out all the options to best match your workflow. I have 236 GB in my online archive and it probably took about a week to get them up there. I just left the computer on all night, shut off the monitor, and let Mozy run without interruption.</p>

[john_deerfield]

<p>Where to start.... hard drives <em>will</em> fail. No doubt about it. It is just a matter of <em>when. </em>That said, hard drives are still the most economical way of archiving data. Arguably the <em>best</em> way of archiving data is a tape back up system with one tape kept off-site. However, this is not very cost effective for most photographers, myself included. How you archive your files has a lot to do with how you manage your files. For instance, I use Aperture which as a built in copy function called the Vault (although I am sure Lightroom has something similar). So for me:</p>

<p>> I import the Raw and the JPEG images into the client's folder. I have a dedicated hard drive each year for Client Files. <br>

> I import the Raw files into Aperture. I have a hard drive(s) for each wedding year/Aperture. This year's starting Aperture library was a 1.5 TB drive with 19 weddings so far and it's about half full. I will probably start another Aperture Library and Vault soon (2 different drives)<br>

> I back up Aperture's Vault (yet another hard drive).<br>

> I back up the Client hard drive. <br>

> As the post-processing progresses, I have the files within Aperture and exported files for printing/albums in the client folder. As example, we design an album. Aperture has my original design files (PSD). The Vault is the back up. The finished files are exported to the client hard drive, which has it's own back up. </p>

<p>In a nutshell, this gives me 4 hard drives of the images in some format. And three hard drives with the original Raw files. I never get rid of the Raw files or PSD's (I would rather get rid of the JPEGs). This is the first year that I dropped doing optical disc archives. Too time consuming and too expensive. Redundant hard drives are cheaper and faster. On top of that, I can go back 5-years to properly stored optical media and have at least a 20% fail rate. So what's the point of spending that kind of money and time for those kind of results? If you are wondering how I connect so many hard drives, I use Mac Gurus 5-bay Burly Towers. I have three towers so at any one time I can have 15 hard drives connected (we also do video). One note about NewEgg hard drives, they are typically OEM, which in general isn't recommended (although I have purchased drives from NewEgg). Fry's usually has special's on hard drives all the time: the retail versions which have updated firmware and better warranties. CDW is a good place as well.</p>

[simon_crofts]

<blockquote>

<p>I have three towers so at any one time I can have 15 hard drives connected</p>

</blockquote>

<p>On a side note, having learnt the hard way, I wouldn't have backup and original connected to the power at the same time (when you're in the middle of backing up, you have to of course, but that is one reason for having at least two if not three backups, so that you don't have to plug them all in at the same time).</p>

<p>As I discovered, a single spike in current can fry original and backups simultaneously. In my case, it was a fault in a transformer in a supply cable. But a lighting strike somewhere on the grid could achieve a peak too.</p>

<p>Don't trust these voltage spike protectors/power supplies either. My sister had a top end one, and a lightning strike fried her computer and the voltage supply/spike protector (and, I think, her backup) at the same time.</p>

<p>So never have original and backups all connected to the grid at the same time. Obviously, burglary and fire can also wipe out your archive at any time. So work out a system that guards against each of these. They can all happen easily at any time.</p>

<p>Having a fried disc (I've had four) doesn't tend to be very dramatic - you just plug it in to your computer one day and the computer doesn't recognise the disc. Then you plug in your backup and the computer doesn't recognise that disc either. The rather dull start to a long, sweaty-browed saga.</p>

[john_deerfield]

<p>I wouldn't have backup and original connected to the power at the same </p>

<p>Agreed. Better yet is to keep back ups off site. On another side note, concerning power supply, brownouts are actually far more insidious than power spikes. Most people will get surge protectors and/or battery back ups in case power goes out, but getting a battery back up that protects against brown outs (dips in power) can save you a LOT of headaches! Of course, these units aren't cheap!</p>

[neilambrose]

Simon, excellent advice.

 

Problems can happen at any time, and it doesn't have to be as dramatic as a lightning bolt. I lost the catalog of a lot of my

personal work when my cat trod on the off button of the power block and killed everything that was plugged in, right in the

middle of a backup. I had other copies of the original files but it cost me some time.

[mauricio_pardo1]

<p>After a wedding, we back up to internal hard drive AND external hard drive. After images have been processed and edited, we burn to DVDs and save to external hard drive with extension that lets us know they are edited files. Finally, we upload to Zenfolio at full resolution. Not only do they store our images on their servers, but we do our print sales by using our Zenfolio site.</p>

[fuccisphotos]

<p>I pretty much do the same as Mauricio. As soon as I get home I upload the RAW files to my Mac. Then I copy it to two separate external terabyte hard drives. Got them from amazon, iomega, for a little over $100 each. I'm always astounded at the speed with which it copies 16gigabytes over to the terabyte in just a few minutes. I edit the images and upload them at full resolution to Zenfolio. Then create a DVD of the JPEG files quality 12 at full resolution for the client and a DVD copy of the files for myself, which then goes into the client's folder which is in a steel file cabinet. Eventually I want to move to using USB flashdrives instead of DVDs, but until I have enough business to buy these in bulk it is too expensive. Both terabyte hard drives are on site. I would like to have a external mechanism at some point. And as I'm reading this thread, I'm thinking I need to get on that sooner rather than later. Now I'm thinking that as soon as I get the files on the external drives I should just do an export of all the files to jpg on Zenfolio, and then these originals can be deleted after I've uploaded the edited versions. That way if something catastrophic happened at my office I'd at least have the high res jpegs on Zenfolio.<br>

Once my Mac's internal hard drive gets within about 50gigs of capacity I then delete the original RAW files.</p>

[marcsaint]

<p>It is also my understanding that you can decrease the chances of an external hard drive going bad by only turning it on to do your backup, then turning it off when it's not being used. The less amount of time the drive spins, the less wear on the parts and the less likely it will break down. </p>

<p>Unless your cat gets to it first :-)</p>

[jose_chang]

<p>hmmm, if you setup like a RAID 1 system which it is a mirror so if one hard drive fail, the other one take over without loose of data, all you need to do is to buy a replacement hard drive of the same size or bigger and let the system rebuild the fail drive in the RAID system. <br /> The only downside is as an example, buying 2 1tb hard drive, won't give you 2tb, rather 1tb total mirror.</p>

[ianivey]

<p>Carbonite works for people with less than 200 GB of data; however, they <a href="http://carbonite.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1440/related/1">severely throttle your upload speed above 200 GB of total backup (down to 100kbps).</a> This, unfortunately, makes Carbonite unsuitable for most wedding- or other high-volume photographers, who will quickly exceed that threshold and thereafter have unacceptably slow uploads. I wrote to them to inquire about this, and received no response at all, which suggested to me that they immediately recognized their service was not right for me.</p>

<p>I do not believe Mozy has this kind of restriction on upload bandwidth. All of their documentation seems to indicate upload speed is dependent solely on the client's bandwidth limits and usage.</p>

<p>I use SmugMug for galleries and online backup of jpeg files (my SmugMug Promo Code, ouU4NiDpEKkpI, will get us both a discount if you sign up for their service). SmugMug doesn't take RAW files, but they do allow unlimited upload of JPEG files, so my first step before editing is to run a batch conversion in Lightroom of the entire collection of images from a wedding, and then upload the full set to a hidden gallery for use solely as a backup. I delete the gallery once I've got the images culled and edited and posted to the gallery I share with the clients. This isn't a perfect solution, because if I lose my RAW data, I'm stuck working with just the jpeg files, but it's a useful safety net. Uploading 2000 full-res jpeg images takes around 24 hours.</p>