Anyone here use any particular software to backup their photos to DVD? I've decided to make a New Year's resolution to archive everything properly, as my drives are a couple years old, and data failure would suck. My RAW files are about 10MB each, so a DVD would only hold 470 shots or thereabouts. I'd like to find something that not only archives, but compresses... It would also be nice if HDDVD or BluRay comes down in price, so there would be larger solid state storage to choose from.
Backups
Damian
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Anyone here use any particular software to backup their photos to DVD? I've decided to make a New Year's resolution to archive everything properly, as my drives are a couple years old, and data failure would suck. My RAW files are about 10MB each, so a DVD would only hold 470 shots or thereabouts. I'd like to find something that not only archives, but compresses... It would also be nice if HDDVD or BluRay comes down in price, so there would be larger solid state storage to choose from.
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I've done away with DVD's and just started using multiple hard drives. 80Gb is just too many DVD's to worry about. I have my photos stored on a separate drive on my desktop at home as well as an external USB drive. once it hits the market I'm going to buy an HP server with trhe windows home server installed which wil have mirroed 750Gb drives. then I will still have my 320Gb external drive and the 750Gb drive in my desktop. the external drive I keep at work and I will either bring it home once in a while to back up or I will use the web access built into the home server software to back images up to it. that's 4 drives so I'm pretty sure I will never lose everything.
oh, and i've also started converting all my RAW photos to DNGs as well. saves you a TINY amount of space but also assures that I will be able to open them in the future.
oh, and i've also started converting all my RAW photos to DNGs as well. saves you a TINY amount of space but also assures that I will be able to open them in the future.
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I keep an index on my HD of the DVD's that I DO have. Basically, I make a thumbnail page with all the shots on one DVD. I categorize them by location or genre, and give them a number. It's fairly simple. If I lose that HD, it isn't the end of the world.
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Why not just burn them to disc. Simple drag and drop normally does the trick
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I have well over 100 gigs of photos. As I said in my post, I'm looking for something that archives and compresses. There's more to archival than just burning files to a disc.
RAW isn't a very compressible format, so compression is not going to save you much space. The other alternative is to get an external RAID array that you can plug into your system. There's a lot of 4 drive eSATA arrays out there that you can use. Not the cheapest, but if will give you full redundancy. Either in RAID10 (mirrored stripe) or RAID5 (parity). I would recommend a 3 disk RAID5 + 1 disk spare if you know you won't have spare drives lying around for when a disk goes bad. RAID 10 will give you the best speed performance though.
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I have about a terrabyte and a half of storage space, but only 500 gigs or so is actually hooked up and used. Currently have 4 copies of all my critical files. One in the desktop, one on an external, and two full copies on hard drives in a fireproof safe in a closet.
As cheap as storage is nowadays you can buy a couple of hard drives, fill them, then store them in a nice cool dark, dry place in your house, or somewhere away from your house in case of the unthinkable.
As cheap as storage is nowadays you can buy a couple of hard drives, fill them, then store them in a nice cool dark, dry place in your house, or somewhere away from your house in case of the unthinkable.
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Holy shit, I have about 16 gigs, just looked. 100 + = wow.
Anyhow I also do the dual hard drive thing. One in the PC, and an external that spends most of it's life in the basement. I drag it up once a month or so and make a backup onto it. I just plug it in, copy & paste, then unplug it.
It's separated to keep it safer in case of theft, fire, etc. I trust the two drives. Hard drives may not be perfect but they are effective, cheap, and odds are nil that they'd both die at the same time.
I'd be curious about other ways but I don't see how it gets much better than that. Maybe keeping the drive off site like in my desk at work or something but that's really stretching it.
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