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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#131

Post by xanderstrike »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #81
famousactress wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would it be feasible to simply dupe the drive and find a secure off-site place within driving distance to store it or a storage machine, and then mail drives to glacier (Amazon will import a HDD via mail for around 100USD) as the storage machine fills?

I worked at a wedding photography/videography place a few years ago and we did a lower tech version of this. The owner had a storage array at the office and at home, and he'd cart an external back and forth daily. This way there were two copies of all work, and three of the most recent: one at the office, one at his home, and the most recent work (that which hasn't been delivered) on the portable drive.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#132

Post by xanderstrike »

mgkimsal wrote: post #101
tghw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, once we started getting into the market, we found that most do not know they need to do regular, offsite backups. Consider the some examples: * An older photographer who grew up in the days of film who has just transitioned over to digital. * A homemaker who is trying to add some much needed income for her family, with a passion but no formal training. * A well-off software developer who moonlights as a pho…

None of your examples contradict "Professional photographers know they need to backup their photos." A homemaker or techie moonlighting for extra income aren't really 'professional photographers'. They may take photographs that look professional, but it's not the same thing. One might say that professional developers use version control, then have counter examples of "well, this web design student doesn't ever uer ve…

> doesn't ever use version control, but she's the only person working on the code, so it doesn't matter

As a web developer who works on a lot of solo projects, this sentence hurts me.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#133

Post by tghw »

mgkimsal wrote: post #124
tghw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition is not what defines the market.

Does a homemaker moonlighting as a photographer really pass herself off as a 'professional'?

Absolutely. The advances in digital photography has opened it up to almost everyone. They're not doing Disney's next add campaign, but they are doing several family sessions per week, and they are bringing in money.

A friend of mine had her wedding photographer lose 6 months of data in a hard drive crash. She should have known better, and may have, but she didn't do proper backups.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#134

Post by saidajigumi »

I have a serious problem with the proposal offered in TFA and most variants in this thread: it encourages bad backup policy. Critical data needs three (or more) backups. In my experience, one cloud provider can only ever be considered as being one backup no matter their technical architecture.

For example, you can't (and in the broad "you", aren't even qualified to) audit the provider for data-loss or SLA-impacting SPOFs. You just have to assume that they're there. You also take on non-technical failure modes: the provider can go out of business, get bought by an uninterested owner (think Delicious), change focus (Google Reader), or experience myriad other problems.

FWIW, the best success I've had with helping others switch to good backup policy happened once it became economically feasible to buy a new laptop and two bus-powered external drives as big as the laptop's internal storage. The externals become bootable backups, one of which can be preiodically rotated to an offsite location. This has prevented severe dataloss events for myself and others far more times than I care to count now.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#135

Post by theflyingkiwi42 »

hnriot wrote: post #92
PStamatiou wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go troll somewhere else. "Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera? Easy: when set to the same resolution, a higher-resolution camera set to a lower resolution always looks better than a camera with that native resolution. This is because digital cameras cheat and use Bayer Interpolation. They don't really have that many color pixels on their CCDs. CCDs are actually black-and-white and use c…

except the sensor isn't a CCD, and your argument is complete nonsense. Of course a 5D mkIII is a better camera, of course it will produce better results, but my point was that if you're going to down sample, why not save yourself a boat load of cash and just use a Rebel. I guarantee you'd never see or know the difference. It's not until you make a large print that the difference would be apparent, and since you've st…

Actually, faster focusing, better lenses (and thus better bokeh) do make a difference.

I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes.

I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. You don't need more than 200PPI for larger prints and thus can save a lot.

In fact, considering most people order prints 11x14 and smaller, having the larger megapixels actually hurt quality because the printers (Fuji, Durst, etc.) downsample the files and you lose sharpness if you send them the large file (which most photographers do).

For my wedding shooting, I never need a larger file than 12 megapixels as that's large enough for a 30x40 at 300 dpi. I prefer to save the hard drive space.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#136

Post by peteforde »

I'd use this. 100% for sure.

In fact, "a plugin for Aperture/Lightroom that backs up to Amazon Glacier" is on my idea list. Great minds think alike, fools seldom differ.

One thing I'd like to point out is that photographers are unlikely to be as cost conscious as other consumers. We put a lot of effort into taking these damn photos, and it'd be nice if I could be confident that they'd outlive me. I'm willing to pay a premium for that.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#137

Post by famousactress »

saidajigumi wrote: post #134

I have a serious problem with the proposal offered in TFA and most variants in this thread: it encourages bad backup policy. Critical data needs three (or more) backups. In my experience, one cloud provider can only ever be considered as being one backup no matter their technical architecture. For example, you can't (and in the broad "you", aren't even qualified to) audit the provider for data-loss or SLA-impacting S…

FWIW, I'm more technical than a typical user might be but I'd be very intrigued by a provider that used multiple cloud service and gave me the keys to the underlying S3 buckets (or whatever) so I could independently verify. That's probly a more valuable idea to a company selling backup to nerds though, I guess.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#138

Post by peteforde »

famousactress wrote: post #128
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…

[Too late to edit] EXTRA CREDIT: Anyone who considers tackling this and finds themselves interested in the niche of wedding/event photographer should look at combining this service with shopping-cart/gallery solutions that currently exist. The marketplace for those is fucking awful . Feel free to email me, but googling will get you the big players. I just don't wanna bash them by name in a public forum. All well mean…

I appreciate the spirit of your suggestion, but might I suggest that this would be the exact wrong move for someone trying to build the ultimate long-term cold storage for photos?

Simply, they are two radically different businesses with entirely different feature sets. You might very well need both.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#139

Post by sreitshamer »

_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…

Right, you definitely shouldn't request all 200GB at the same time, because it'd be expensive and also because you probably can't download all 200GB immediately either.

Arq (a backup app I wrote) takes a transfer rate from you (guesses your max transfer rate as a default) and then requests enough to be downloaded in 4 hours at that rate. 4 hours later, it requests another 4 hours' worth while it downloads the first 4 hours' worth, and so on. This mitigates the peak-transfer fee.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#140

Post by sreitshamer »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #78

Smugmug's SmugVault "SmugVault is an added service to your SmugMug account that lets you store almost anything for next to nothing. Including files not normally supported by SmugMug." http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84562-more-...

Although Smugmug is awesome, the issue I'd have with them is the lack of control. If my objects are in my AWS account, that feels more permanent long-term. It's just a gut feeling.
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