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Storage for Photographers

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Storage for Photographers

#161

Post by calinet6 »

peteforde wrote: post #138
famousactress wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

It would be great to build the backend and API that supports the ultimate long-term cold storage, and then use it to make the ultimate wedding photography business application.

They're not radically different—one just uses the other. You could easily do both and continue to expand the use of the backend to enable useful applications. It's ridiculous to shun this specific consumer model just because it happens to be only one way you might use the original idea.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#162

Post by nchuhoai »

gerardmurphy wrote: post #113

I am the CEO/Co-Founder of Mosaic. We are a company that helps serious photographers backup their photographers. I am happy to share what we have learned in the past 2 years. www.mosaicarchive.com As a background, we now have thousands of users and customers. We also finished raising a series A in February. (Not that raising money proves anything) http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2013/02/mo... We are…

The question OP would also have is whether you can do the whole backup-RAW-and-delete-locally thing instead of "simple" RAW sync-backup

Re: Storage for Photographers

#163

Post by famousactress »

calinet6 wrote: post #161
peteforde wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be great to build the backend and API that supports the ultimate long-term cold storage, and then use it to make the ultimate wedding photography business application. They're not radically different—one just uses the other. You could easily do both and continue to expand the use of the backend to enable useful applications. It's ridiculous to shun this specific consumer model just because it happens to be o…

Yes, this. Makes crazy amounts of sense. Can be two vendors, I don't care.. but whoever does cold-storage exposing an API and having a business model that supports enough margin for the other business is great, and seems totally feasible.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#164

Post by espinchi »

I'm helping build Photofeed, a platform that stores and organizes your private photos from your different devices in the cloud.

Photographers with the problem described in the article are within the target audience, even if we didn't implement some of the key features for them yet (e.g. storage of images in RAW format).

We'd love having some early feedback from you guys! (Didn't officially launch yet.)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#165

Post by aarondf »

sreitshamer wrote: post #139
_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…

just downloaded arq. looks amazing, can't believe I didn't know about this before.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#166

Post by icebraining »

gohrt wrote: post #142
icebraining wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A DVD holds 4.7GB. Box.net offers 5GB for free. Besides, how do you verify that those backups can be restored when you need them, if they're offline in some remote location? That seems rather untrustworthy to me. I run checks against parity files regularly to verify their integrity.

10 DVDS hold 47GB. How much does that cost on Box? And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?

Storing 47GB would cost you 47 cents/month on Glacier.

And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?

Probably, though I'm not quite sure about the speed of S3. I use a cheap VPS instead (much more expensive than Glacier, but also much, much more useful), from which I can easily get 3MB/s, so that would definitively be yes.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#167

Post by jasondenizac »

sreitshamer wrote: post #139
_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…

Does Arq fit the OP's use case of backing up files to AWS without keeping them on your local machine?

Re: Storage for Photographers

#168

Post by bambax »

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…

My Lightroom catalog is backed up to a folder in Dropbox, and this works really well.

You can't really have the current catalog in Dropbox because then each action and edit become really slow.

But if you set up Lightroom to do a backup every time you quit the program, and that backup is in Dropbox, you get the best of both worlds (strong backups + snappy edits).

Lightroom backups are really "backups", as they are named by date+time, so in Dropbox I have a history of everything I ever did in Lightroom, not just the current (last) version.

It's also fast because I suspect Dropbox is able to do some rsync magic and only re-upload new packets; my Lightroom catalog is around 150 MB and the upload to Dropbox is almost instantaneous (on a pretty lousy upstream bandwidth).

Of course this doesn't address the problem of backing up RAWs, but as far as Lightroom is concerned I feel pretty safe.

Re: Storage for Photographers

#169

Post by bambax »

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…

Most (serious) safes are capable of withstanding a fire or a flood.

I don't have near the volume of pictures that you have (around 1.5 TB) but here's my setup: - one disk attached to the Lightroom computer, with all images on it; it's local, so it's fast - one NAS (NAS1) with a 4-disk RAID that backs up this drive (3 TB capacity) - another NAS (NAS2) with just one 3 TB disk that backs up the other NAS

On NAS2 I rotate disks; disk A is in the safe when disk B is in the NAS.

I think my setup is quite similar to yours, except driving is replaced by "going to the safe in the basement".

If a disaster happen I should have at least the disk in the safe intact, which holds the data since the last rotation; and since backups from NAS1 to NAS2 are quite fast I try to have both disks pretty much in sync (after an important shoot I back up to disk A AND disk B).

Of course I won't know if this setup is good until my house does burn down (I hope I'll never know!) but it does give me peace of mind, which is at least something ;-)

Re: Storage for Photographers

#170

Post by hvidgaard »

esonderegger wrote: post #117

I really wish we as a developer community would better differentiate between "backup" and "preservation". They are both related to storage, but are fundamentally different problems. The article touches on the desire to have photos safe for decades, but doesn't really get into the strategy necessary to make that happen. If we care about decades, storing the raw NEF or CR2 file is almost certainly the wrong approach. T…

One of the only ways to do this, is having everything stored in a fully documented format. For photos, I don't think much exist except the most naive raw format (think bitmap files, just in same colour space as NEF or the like), accompanied with an XML/JSON file with the metadata and a document describing this. Once it is needed, you have to convert it. Sounds about right you could build a business on that idea - first step is to find someone willing to pay for it though.
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