picture storage(to delete or not to delete)

Barto

Barto

Alleged Lounge Moron
Since I bought my XT a few months ago, I've had a ton of fun shooting with it.
However I have come to realize that I have in excess of 10gigs of pictures stored on my hard drive
admittedly, upwards of 80% could be deleted, but when I sort thru shots I always told myself, I've got plenty of harddrive, why do I care if I save everything, not just the cream of the crop. I might want one of these some day for something
(I think that is the pack-rats mantra)

so, my question is:
how do others deal with storage issues?

1) do you sort, pick the keepers & delete everything else
2) keep everything, and have a huge hard drive
3) save everything to:
a)external hard drive
b)disks cd or dvd

potential lack of storage has never been a consideration for me until now and I was wondering how other folks deal with it

thanks
 
I picked up a 500GB Western Digital external HD for $120. Cant beat the price per GB and ease of use. Storing stuff on CDs/DVDs can be tiresome.
 
:D Depends what my shots are of, if they're of family or pets - I keep all but the ones that are obviously complete junk and I'll never do any with them. Those could have sentimental value to me some point down the line.

If its something like rodeos or fairs, or still life or scenery I'll keep much fewer of them.

As far as backup, I use an external hard drive that is only plugged in when I'm moving pictures to it. And I keep a copy of the picture on my computer too. Unfortunately my computer is filling up so my plan is to get more external hard drives along with a bunch of archival quality DVDs. Backup to the external hard drives and also backup to DVDs (DVDs will have a backup made of them too). 1 set of DVDs will stay here with me, other set will either go to an off-site location or go in a fire-proof safe. :)
 
CD/DVD storage is risky if you ask me- I recommend against it. From personal experience-- I transferred all my archive [cd/dvd] discs to hd this year and out of about 80 disks there were a half dozen that were completely bad and a few others that had bad files amongst the good ones. Very depressing. Hard drives are cheap and soooo much faster than a cd/dvd, aside from the failure rate issue. Usb 2.0 external drives are what I have been using for the last few years and I've had good luck with them.
I save everything, and the "keepers" go into seperate folders, by date/subject to make them easier to catalogue.
 
thanks for the input everyone.
I was thinking that a big external drive was the ticket for this issue, I was wondering how other "trigger happy" camera junkies dealt with it.
I have my answer.
Thanks!

d4a2n0k, that sounds like a heckuva deal on that WD HD, where did you find that?
 
CD DVDs are bad over the long run. Hard drives are risky because you can always copy some viruses... Worst case senario is dropping the hard drive while it's spinning. Happened to me twice. First time I had no backup and lost lots of files. second time happened a few days ago but I har my tripple backup system and was able to recover most the data that was still to be backed up. This last incident made me change my backup plan so now it's like this. 2 hard drives were everything gets downloaded to both (before the last HD drop I was only working on 1 initial HD)Pictures are kept on memory cards as long s usage permits. pictures get processed on the first drive then get backed up up on a third drive weekly. Every 3 months everything gets backed up to a 4th Drive. Every 6 months all data gets backed up to new DVDs. Call it crazy but you can't imagine the stress of loosing your data with data recovery of a drive (if you're lucky and it's still recoverable) would cost you in the thousands of USD.
 
As for what to keep. There are some that are obvious throwaways. Extremely out of focus, pictures with the lens cap on, a big white blur that your not sure what it was supposed to be etc. As for the rest. Since you are trying to learn CS3, for now I would keep everything else. Slight motion blur, slight out of focus, bad color, even bad subject or composure. They are all stock practice photos.

Mike
 
If your data is THAT important to you...

Then you should be backing up to several duplicate media sets. At least one of them should be stored off site.

You can get a 300GB LTO2 tape backup and a pile of tapes for less then $2k. Magnetic tape media is still the prevered method for storing data.

A mirrored RAID array can be used to add a bit of fault tolerance, but should NOT EVER be considered a backup solution. (no RAID setup should ever be considered as an alternative to backup). A RAID 5 array can add a LOT of fault tolerance.

Instead of the $150 USB hard drive... look into using some of the lower cost NAS systems with built in RAID.

Folks, one key thing is to purchase at least (2) extra HDDs for you raid array. You don't want to go looking for a replacment drive 3 years from now when the array needs one.
 
Re: picture storage(to delete or not to delete)

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10575071#post10575071 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by BigSkyBart


so, my question is:
how do others deal with storage issues?

1) do you sort, pick the keepers & delete everything else
2) keep everything, and have a huge hard drive
3) save everything to:
a)external hard drive
b)disks cd or dvd

potential lack of storage has never been a consideration for me until now and I was wondering how other folks deal with it

thanks
Click to expand...

Being a pack rat with your images is a good thing. Being able to locate the images in a few years will be a different story unless your adding keywords/metatags too the images.

My workflow:
1. Download images into Lightroom and associate some keywords with every file downloaded. This is simple and normally the photographs are of a similar topic if not the exact same thing.
2. Go through the images deleting any that are not in focus, people have their eyes shut, or I just find generally unimpressive. I also will mark any shots that really stand out as having 2 or 3 stars allowing me to look at those in a group later.
3. back up to external hard drive
4. process the images
5. share the images/print for sale/put on web
6. back up final images too DVD
7. after a given amount of time, I will go through and delete all images that did not meet a certain 'rating' criteria grouping the best of several sessions or dates together and burn 'the best of' DVD's for additional backup. I also have folders for similar kinds of files for additional back up.

So, external hard drives are pretty cheap and keep dropping in price every month. For me, we are talking about moving into terabytes for you picking up a 250g hard drive may suffice for a year. DVD's are also cheap and having dual backups is better than only one source in case of failure.
 
My photos are never going to be published by national geographic and I doubt anyone will dredge up my archives a thousand years from now for posterity. So for me DVD or CD makes a nice backup for my RAW files only. I have a 500 gb disk just for photoshop. You can also, very cheaply, store files off site on the internet or like mentioned above a tape drive is reliable and cheap and the tapes can be taken to work, realtives or friends house and protected in case of fire or flood. This method will work for a few years until they develop a way to store files in the unused portion of your brain.

Mike
 
Depends on how often you shoot and how big the files you end up with. If they're small enough, you can easily fit them on archival DVDs or shove them over to HDs (cheaper per GB than archival DVDs). Set up an array and just keep on swapping HDs.

DVDs don't work for me. This last set of pictures that I processed came out at 28GB. It'd take a Blue Ray just to fit them on, which isn't really cost effective.
 
I hope you all take to heart my warning about storing images on cds and dvds. Don't say I didn't warn ya :p
 
I hope you all take to heart my little rant about storage in general. Don't say I didn't warn ya :D

I spend a LOT of timing with clients crying on my shoulder because they lost needed data that they THOUGHT they had backed up.
 
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