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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#51

Post by Terretta »

famousactress wrote: post #13

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this: - 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow. - Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress - Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need acce…

> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today

I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up to 32 TB).

Interestingly, because these are all direct attached, BackBlaze will happily back them up offsite at ridiculously low cost if that's your thing. Initial backup of several terabytes will take several months, though.

For fast cheap offsite backups, partner with a colleague with similar storage needs who uses the same ISP via the same head end. Just backup to each other. You can enjoy near LAN latencies at maxed out link speeds. This trick will save you both time and headaches.

Finally consider a product like the CyberPower OR2220PFCRT2U (this one also blends nicely in an AV cabinet) to keep an Airport Extreme and Mac Mini along with all that storage running for about 80 minutes of power outage.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#52

Post by xxpor »

famousactress wrote: post #13

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this: - 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow. - Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress - Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need acce…

Would http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ work?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#54

Post by famousactress »

Terretta wrote: post #51
famousactress wrote: post #13

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this: - 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow. - Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress - Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need acce…

> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up t…

The idea of partnering w/ someone using the same ISP is interesting. It's really offsite that's the whole challenge. If it takes three days to get 60g uploaded (setting aside the nuisance of saturating our bandwidth for doing things like making Skype calls), then I effectively have close to no solution.. because during a busy season I have at least one job exposed for half of most weeks. House burns down, and I lose recent work.. which is the most important work since it hasn't been delivered.

Really, I need something that gets a copy of the images away from my home within a day to have something I'd be comfortable with.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#55

Post by beat »

callmeed wrote: post #41

My company serves thousands of professional photographers (wedding, commercial, fashion, etc.). What you're describing is definitely an issue for photographers but I think getting them to use a tool like you've described would be an uphill battle. Right now, most of them use Drobos or similar devices. You'd be asking them to add steps to their workflow which is always tough to do. Also, I think your estimate of 18 mi…

As a photographer with a couple of terabytes of old raws (I back up to Time Machine locally, and offsite at a friend's house occasionally), I'm very curious as to what Adobe will offer in this regard with LR5.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#56

Post by joevandyk »

hnriot wrote: post #47

"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III" Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane. What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5

The point of the mark III isn't megapixels. It's image quality, less noise, higher iso, better highlights/shadows, more images per second, better autofocusing, movies, etc.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#57

Post by joevandyk »

rfnslyr wrote: post #50
hnriot wrote: post #47

"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III" Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane. What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5

Because cloud this and cloud that ! I feel like I'm the only person firmly against cloud storage. I'd constantly feel paranoid about my data randomly disappearing at the hands of a company I don't know run by people I don't know on hardware I don't trust. I want everything local.

What happens when there's an earthquake? Or theft? Or fire?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#58

Post by hamburglar »

Hovertruck wrote: post #31

I'm actually working on this idea right now! https://plover.co/ We want to take backing up, sharing, and monetizing and make them very simple and enjoyable to do. We've started rolling out slowly already, our goal is to be open to the public within a month or so.

I hope your business model doesn't rely too heavily on the "monetizing" aspect. I know there are lots of photo hosting services with a "sell prints" option, but I get the impression not very many people actually use those in enough volume to cover the hosting costs. I'm imagining a non-pro track that's targeted at the enthusiast who just wants backup and sharing, but won't actually sell any prints. I'll be watching.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#59

Post by rfnslyr »

joevandyk wrote: post #57
rfnslyr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because cloud this and cloud that ! I feel like I'm the only person firmly against cloud storage. I'd constantly feel paranoid about my data randomly disappearing at the hands of a company I don't know run by people I don't know on hardware I don't trust. I want everything local.

What happens when there's an earthquake? Or theft? Or fire?

My own cloud? It's not really hard to get your own service up and running. All my shits auto backed up to my dedicated which has terabytes and terabytes of storage.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#60

Post by wmf »

jychang wrote: post #45
_delirium wrote: post #39

I've been looking into Glacier, but the pricing in the case where I might want to retrieve a substantial portion of my data is quite complex. As far as I can tell, the headline $0.01/GB rate for overages they quote is misleading. They don't, as you might expect from that language, calculate ([GB retrieved] - [5% of GB stored]) x $0.01 and bill you that. Rather, they charge you on a monthly basis, according to your hi…

This should be mitigated if you're running a service, though. It averages out.

Glacier retrieval pricing has a strange and un-Amazony economy of scale. If you're just backing up your own data you'll be charged a ZOMG huge amount to ever download it. But if you're backing up 100 people you pay nothing to get data back.
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