Storage for Photographers • Hacker News Board

Re: Storage for Photographers

#151

Post by dublinben » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:08 AM UTC

tsycho wrote: post #64

tghw wrote: post #34

We applied to YC with exactly this idea. We made it to the interview, but were turned down. I wrote about that experience: http://tghw.com/blog/pull-hard We pulled our bootstraps hard and tried to get it going, but soon realized that there's a pretty big flaw with the idea: most photographers have no idea that they should backup their photos. They know hard drives crash, but they never expect it to happen to them. Th…

Would you be willing to open source your code? I am running out of hard disk space as well for my photos and have been thinking of writing coding up something very similar to this idea _when I get time_. But I would be willing to contribute to an open source project that does this for self-hosting my photos etc. Contact me if interested, email's in my profile.

If you're looking for a more immediate solution, I've been pretty satisfied with FastGlacier, as an Amazon Glacier client.

http://fastglacier.com/

Re: Storage for Photographers

#152

Post by xur17 » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:17 AM UTC

tyng wrote: post #145

Terretta wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a P2P backup solution is interesting, more so if you can hook up strangers into a massive backup network. Of course, the challenge is to make sure the peers are online when you need the files, and for this reason the network may need 5-10gb of storage for 1gb of data to duplicate the content across multiple users.

Wuala tried to do that, but I think they have since switched to a centralized solution.

The difficulty is ensuring enough clients have a copy of the file that it won't disappear, especially with people connecting and disconnecting a lot.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#153

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:22 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Storage for Photographers

#154

Post by adelmand » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:24 AM UTC

We (cintrexav.com - a small video conversion service provider) are building something very much like this right now. Will post here when we get to MVP in a month or so!

Re: Storage for Photographers

#155

Post by Veratyr » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:34 AM UTC

rfnslyr wrote: post #49

PStamatiou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is becoming great customer research for people to build this app. :)

You can all go home. I've already started.

Seriously? Got a repo we can watch? Or a blog we can follow?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#156

Post by madao » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 1:45 AM UTC

I did some on the side admin work for a Photographer once, a real big name. He was in the middle of making up exactly what this was, however he came up against the same issues everyone has. Firstly space costs money, Hardware costs alot too, not to mention bandwidth, this guy would easily do 100-200gb of photos in a couple shoots. all very high res shots (talking about for big company ads) his idea is to sell a server with a software suit that people can dump into a datacenter or at home and upload photos to it, personally I liked the idea but local storage and hardware failure + the ability to grow the storage was a real killer for his idea.. (not to mention that your playing with peoples businesses and lives if you lose those photos)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#157

Post by joelhooks » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC

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'?

Yes, my wife's done this for almost a decade. She gets paid well, provides professional service, and works under an LLC

What else would you call it, if not professional?

That said, I have to harass her about backups.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#158

Post by cowpewter » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 2:07 AM UTC

xanderstrike wrote: post #132

mgkimsal wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you use version control? If you do, that sentence doesn't even apply to you.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#159

Post by dublinben » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 3:07 AM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #24

petercooper wrote: post #5

If you want to avoid having any backup devices yourself, would you need to upload to two or more Glacier-like services? I also trust Amazon to stay in business but mistakes can always happen (not just hardware but ID theft, card expiry while you're on a 6 month hike, etc) and unless you're prepared to say "losing these is OK" using one service would be risky.

This is true, but what other Glacier-like services are there that have $0.01/GB/mon storage + retrieval?

Offsite tape backup can approach that price, but I don't know of any exact alternatives. It would certainly fulfill the requirement of having two different media types and providers.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

Re: Storage for Photographers

#160

Post by dublinben » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 3:09 AM UTC

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.

A local backup isn't much of a backup. A single fire, flood, theft, storm, earthquake, etc. shouldn't be able to destroy every copy of your data. You must have at least one offsite copy of anything valuable.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview