Throwing away my negatives

Well, not really. I'm drowning in data -- my photos directory for this year alone is 105gig for 32,000 plus photos. I shoot raw, and the process to jpg. This includes the 6 or 7 weddings I shot this year.

Of the 105gig -- 70+ gig are raw files. I'm mulling over deleting my raw files. I have two sets of archives on dvd, but I've always considered my dvd's "house fire, flood" insurance. All my photos are on two separate hard drives -- and backed up onto two separate sets of dvd's.

Right now this year's photos alone are occupying 210gig of storage (for both copies), and I can cut 140gig by deleting the raw files.

Decisions, decisions. I already have 800gigs of storage space on several drives on my computer, but I couldn't go another year at this pace without filling them up.

Lee

Sounds like it is time to archive.

It sounds like you have adequate backups. If you are worried about it burn one more set of dvd's for the originals then burn em' off the hard drive.

As an alternate there are internet sites that offer backup storage as well. You pay a minimal yearly archival fee, they keep the backups.

Just a thought.

I have 1 set of backup CD's and DVD's in a fire proof safe. I only keep the current stuff on the HD.

--
CityLights
http://www.pbase.com/citylights/favorites
.

What would you recommend for a fireproof safe?

--
http://www.pbase.com/arshutterbug/

If it were me, I'd bite the bullet and do some editing. Of all those photos, surely not all of them are keepers? I've taken around 9,000 shots in the 18 months since I started shooting RAW - I've got 1,889 of those still on my computer in both edited and RAW form, plus another thousand or so that I haven't got around to editing, but are still worth keeping. In my view if a shot's worth keeping it's worth keeping the RAW file. My ability to post process has improved over the year and the RAW converters have improved dramatically too - I've reprocessed some low light shots and got much better results than I did with the RAW converters and my knowledge of a year ago.

So my suggestion is to go through all your images and rank them. Sort out maybe the top couple of thousand, the important ones and archive those in every format you can think of (I keep RAW, unprocessed tif and jpeg and processed jpeg - that way hopefully at least one format wil be able to be read in the future). If you are shooting weddings professionally then, in my view, you either have to archive the negatives yourself or give them to the clients and let them worry about it. Keep multiple copies of DVDs, CDS, hard drive, with the critical ones separately copied with copies offsite (I have a couple of best of CDs in my husband's office).
--
Some of the least worse of my photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/susans/

Just buy another hard drive - 400gb now is less than $200...

Alex

LeeBase said:

Well, not really. I'm drowning in data -- my photos directory for
this year alone is 105gig for 32,000 plus photos. I shoot raw, and
the process to jpg. This includes the 6 or 7 weddings I shot this
year.

Of the 105gig -- 70+ gig are raw files. I'm mulling over deleting
my raw files. I have two sets of archives on dvd, but I've always
considered my dvd's "house fire, flood" insurance. All my photos
are on two separate hard drives -- and backed up onto two separate
sets of dvd's.

Right now this year's photos alone are occupying 210gig of storage
(for both copies), and I can cut 140gig by deleting the raw files.

Decisions, decisions. I already have 800gigs of storage space on
several drives on my computer, but I couldn't go another year at
this pace without filling them up.

Lee

Click to expand...

--
http://www.pbase.com/alekas

I tend to agree... my biggest concern with using DVD / CD as the defacto archive is deterioration over a number of years. There really isn't a definitive answer as to how long current discs will last, though speculation is at least 5 - 10 years. So I suppose if you go and re-archive all of that data every 5 years you'd be safe, though I'm much more trusting of good ol' magnetic media. (several to be sure).

--
Guy

alekas said:

Alex

LeeBase said:

Well, not really. I'm drowning in data -- my photos directory for
this year alone is 105gig for 32,000 plus photos. I shoot raw, and
the process to jpg. This includes the 6 or 7 weddings I shot this
year.

Of the 105gig -- 70+ gig are raw files. I'm mulling over deleting
my raw files. I have two sets of archives on dvd, but I've always
considered my dvd's "house fire, flood" insurance. All my photos
are on two separate hard drives -- and backed up onto two separate
sets of dvd's.

Right now this year's photos alone are occupying 210gig of storage
(for both copies), and I can cut 140gig by deleting the raw files.

Decisions, decisions. I already have 800gigs of storage space on
several drives on my computer, but I couldn't go another year at
this pace without filling them up.

Lee

Click to expand...

--
http://www.pbase.com/alekas

Click to expand...

--
Guy

Use your final (hopefully sub 1MP sized) jpegs as a computer-resident contact sheet; keep them sitting there so the full lot is easy to browse. Delete the RAWs (probably in batches "or weddings" or something easy enough to remember). If you need to go back to an individual image, you have the DVDRs stored. 2 burned copies is still not all that safe (I have had to replace a couple "B's" with new copies from my "A's" and got the shivers...), but it will free up the computer for work, instead of needless longterm archiving.

--
-CW

250 gig WD external HDD at Sam's Club - $129.

Just back everything up onto one of those and set it aside.

Think of the time you'll save by not needing to go through the files to choose what stays and what goes?

External USB 2.0 drives are cheap these days and they are fast and easy to use. They make it likely that you'll be diligent about backing up because it's so easy.

I love having at least two backups of everything. With external drives being so inexpensive, it's easy, fast, and cheap.

--
Jim H.

Don't backup in harddrives !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They fail !!!

Backup to good dvd media make more than one copy...

If your budget alllow buy a small tape device like this :

HP StorageWorks DAT 72 USB Internal Tape Drive

OR

Quantum_DLT_VS80_tape_drive

And send a copy of the tapes to another place....

NEVER CONSIDER HARDISKS AS BACKUP !!!!!

they are more reliable than burned DVDs or CDs in the long run.

I know folks who believed they had good burns on both and later found them to be corrupt after a year or so of very careful storage.

I've had pretty good luck personally, but I don't trust any burned CD or DVD media.

Not that it isn't a good way to have another backup, but never as the primary.

For me, one copy on the main HDD, another copy on a removeable HDD, and then DVD as well is the way to go.

I've had HDDs fail. But that's why you've got a backup. To have two or three HDDs all fail at the same time is very unlikely and an external HDD is so fast and easy to use that you'll be much more likely to use it than if you've got to burn DVDs or CDs of everything.

I'm not sure what the statistics would show, but an external HDD, unplugged and turned off is probably much more reliable as long-term storage than is any burned optical media. The idea is that you turn on the external HDD, make the backups, then turn it off. Not perfect, but pretty darn close.

Just my experience here. YMMV.

Certainly, one copy on one HDD is asking for trouble But then we're talking about backup here, so obviously we mean at least two copies on two separate HDDs.

But if you can do that and also make DVD or CD backups when you have time, then you're really covered

--
Jim H.

If your concerned about HD life expectancy vs. DVD, consider this. The MTBF specs on a typical "low end" harddrive are:

Western Digital Caviar; published MTBF: 300,000 Power On Hours

Other drives range from 500,000 to over a million hours.

Remember that these values represent powered-on time. Presuming a MTBF of 300,000 hours, if I use my backup drive for 2 hours a month (I only turn mine external drive on when making backups), that's 24 hours in a year. That's 12,500 years, right! I realize the wires and heads would likely decay by then, but the point is that a HD used infrequently as a backup device is going to tend to outlast a DVD by massive amounts on average over time. (As a side note, I have a TiVo with a HD that has been turned on and spinning for over three years without a hitch).

Another point to make is that you also tend to know immediately when a HD fails. How do you know when disk 16-of-40 in your DVD collection has started to decay. It might be corrupted for years without you noticing it.

Obviously, even with HD backup it is still important to have data in two locations, but hard drives make life so much easier.

If space is an issue, consider Norton Ghost. This software makes a highly compressed image of all of your data. You can make incremental backups every day if you wish (it knows to only backup whatever was added since the last backup). If your primary drives fail, you can boot from and fully restore the 'image' on the backup Ghost drive. I backup once a week on my Ghost-ed drive. This is in addition to full DVD's and a RAID 1 mirror.

Would you throw away your film negatives?

One DVD disc holds 4.7GB. You could burn to a stack of them. Or, even better, you can go into Best Buy (or whatever retailer is near you) and buy a 200GB hard drive for less than $100. A pretty cheap investment, I'd say.
--
When I ask which Canon lenses are best,
people tell me to 'go to L.'

I agree. You need to be more contentious about maintaining and editing your collection. The key here is to devote regular time to trimming your collection whenever you offload from your camera. Digital photographers tend to take way more photos than they need to--simply because they can. That doesn't mean they should, and it certainly doesn't mean they should keep them all.

Let's look at it this way. You say you have 32,000 photos for the year. Let's suppose that translates into 16,000 RAWs and 16,000 JPGs. Most pros seem to say that out of every 100 shots, about 1 to 3 percent, maybe 5 percent in extreme cases, are true keepers. If you were keeping 5 percent of 16,000 photos, that would mean that you would have had to have started with 320,000 photos this year, which I seriously doubt--especially since that would be 1 photo every 1.6 minutes for the entire year. Now I understand that you also have weddings and probably snapshots for which you would tend to keep more than 5%, but 6 or 7 weddings...even if you were keeping 1000 pictures from each--which is still way too many--that's 7000 pictures, so where did the other 9,000 come from? It sounds like you're a digital image pack-rat. That's not a criticism, just an observation; lots of us are guilty of this.

If your concerned about storage, think of it this way. You can get two 500GB drives and a dual drive enclosure unit like this one which I have

http://www.cooldrives.com/dudrusb20ald.html

for about $900. That would set you up with 1TB or about 10 years of storage at your rate, even if you didn't reduce your output. By contrast, taking and developing 16,000 photos x 10 years = 160,000 photos would have cost something like $8000 in the film age. That's assuming $20 per 36 exposure roll (film+processing) and assuming you kept every picture.

So, given this, my solution would be to invest in two such dual drive units (so you have a means of redundant storage) and trim your collection by 10 to 20 percent. This should easily give you storage for ten years or more at your current level of output, full redundancy, and ease of use. If you have any concerns about the reliability of HD storage, see my other post in this thread.

Dave

Let's put this in perspective. What do 200GB hard disks go for these days? Around $125 or so? So, if you just buy a 200GB disk and archive an entire year to it, the total investment is $125. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

I would just buy a hard disk, copy the files to it, and store it in a safe place (not in the same place as your DVD backups).
--
Regards,
Paul
http://www.bangbangphoto.com

I would hesitate in recommending Ghost. Ghost is great for creating an image of a drive --especially a boot drive with an OS, but it is not the optimal way of backing up files . For example, while Ghost can backup an entire drive, I don't think you can see or extract individual backed-up files on the image. Also, while Ghost compresses, RAW are generally already compressed, as well as JPGs, so the compression doesn't buy you much. Also, you are putting another proprietary layer between you and your pictures by using Ghost (or most other backup systems).

Blue Liquid said:

If space is an issue, consider Norton Ghost. This software makes a
highly compressed image of all of your data. You can make
incremental backups every day if you wish (it knows to only backup
whatever was added since the last backup).

Click to expand...

I was thinking of suggesting Ghost yesterday, but the problem with Ghost is that it's good for backup but not good for archiving. Because Ghost is a proprietary format, if in 5 or 10 years Ghost doesn't exist or if the version at that time doesn't read the current version, you're hosed.

Also, I don't know if it would compress raw photos that much since it's already compressed.

LeeBase said:

Well, not really. I'm drowning in data -- my photos directory for
this year alone is 105gig for 32,000 plus photos. I shoot raw, and
the process to jpg. This includes the 6 or 7 weddings I shot this
year.

Of the 105gig -- 70+ gig are raw files. I'm mulling over deleting
my raw files. I have two sets of archives on dvd, but I've always
considered my dvd's "house fire, flood" insurance. All my photos
are on two separate hard drives -- and backed up onto two separate
sets of dvd's.

Right now this year's photos alone are occupying 210gig of storage
(for both copies), and I can cut 140gig by deleting the raw files.

Click to expand...

First to deal with the 70 GB of raw files, I would break them up into directories of under 4.7GB (whatever will fit on a DVD) and then each day, archive one directory onto 2 DVDs. In about 15 days, you'll finish archiving your raws.

Second, for on going maintenance, move your raw files into a directory after processing and when you fill up 4.7GB, archive to 2 DVDs.

Third, the standard verbage of using high quality media...

I think Buffalo makes a TeraStation. One Terabite of storage in either a full 1TB of data or a RAID configuration. I think it costs like 900 bucks though. Yeesh!

newer format (for drives that support it) can hold 8.5 GB on dual-layer disks. Just an FYI.