Storage Workflow

[ray5]

Hi,
I was wondering if you could share your workflow with storage of your images. So far what I have been doing is downloading images to two laptops and one desktop for redundancy. Every month I do physical backup to an external portable drive of all images. As I start my journey into playing with RAW images this laborious process is eating up a lot of space. I have thought about removing all images into a standalone external drive, thereby freeing up space on the laptop but then I loose the accessibility of looking at the images when I want and from whichever event I want. Or to even just process some images on the fly. The second issue is of security and so I am looking at some online storages like iCloud etc. How do you all work on these 2 issues? Thanks for your time.
Ray

 

[BL]

I have a portable drive I dump to at home, a duplicate network drive at work, and then my cloud backup.

I also tend to keep way more photos (RAW/JPG) locally on my laptop than I should, but it's handy to have access to them. I don't consider this local storage as a level of legitimate backup however.

Unless you are shooting 36mp RAW files and savings as TIFFs or PSDs, storage hasn't been a problem for me - but that's probably because I'm shooting at a piddly 12-18mp ;D

 

[Orangutan]

Hi,
I was wondering if you could share your workflow with storage of your images. So far what I have been doing is downloading images to two laptops and one desktop for redundancy. Every month I do physical backup to an external portable drive of all images. As I start my journey into playing with RAW images this laborious process is eating up a lot of space. I have thought about removing all images into a standalone external drive, thereby freeing up space on the laptop but then I loose the accessibility of looking at the images when I want and from whichever event I want. Or to even just process some images on the fly. The second issue is of security and so I am looking at some online storages like iCloud etc. How do you all work on these 2 issues? Thanks for your time.
Ray

There have been some other threads discussing this, you may benefit by reading those. I suggest you have 2 or more external drives for backups, rotating one off-site (e.g. safe deposit box) on a regular basis. External storage is ridiculously cheap these days. I have not tried online storage, but others have had good experiences.

 

[helpful]

On the job:

* Dual cards used at all times (at least five times this has saved my bacon)

When processing photos:

* Pictures are copied to a Synology DS1813+ with eight drives and RAID 6 with one extra hot spare drive (5 total drives actually used for storage, two for redundancy, and one for a hot spare).
* Photos are imported to Lightroom
* Usable photos are flagged and exceptional photos are rated

After processing photos:

* All Photos and Lightroom catalog are backed up to one of two external drives, alternating with each backup. The other external drive is stored off-site.

Nightly:

* All flagged and/or rated photos are synced to Google Drive.

Directory structure for copied files, e.g.,:

2014/
2014/Aug/
2014/Aug/8-2
2014/Aug/8-2/Folder

where Folder is a name from within the DCIM folder created by the DSLR.

I do not use automatic import nor folder naming from Lightroom because I have found it necessary to organize my folders not just by the camera date (which is automatically stored by Lightroom regardless), but also by import date (which is the folder name I create for copying my files into, like 2014/Aug/8-2), as well as by the camera folder itself (which I have set on each of my cameras appropriately).

By the way, Lightroom still has a bug in it where it does not sort nor export photos correctly if they are viewed chronologically and multiple pictures were taken within a single second. If multiple photos are taken with the same camera within the same second, then it should fall back on sorting by the file name, but it does not do so, and the photographs end up being in a random order, which is extremely disorienting when trying to go through finish line photos of a race, for example.

Finally, as someone who uses multiple cameras in rapid succession, it is absolutely essential to regularly synchronize each body with the official U.S. Atomic Time. I use this widget to do so:

http://www.time.gov/widget/index.html

One of my biggest wishes as a DSLR feature would be an atomic time synchronization menu button, a capability which all cell phones and tablets have, but is even more critical for a professional's camera

(The other biggest wish would be a built-in AF microadjustment algorithm, just aim at a target at a given distance, push a button, and then let the DSLR calibrate for optimal phase detection focusing for objects at that exact distance without even needing to permanently store any images. Using Newton's Method with some extra least squares measurements added in for numerical stability, it would be easy to lock in an incredibly accurate AFMA adjustment in under two seconds, but only from in-camera without needing to store the entire images and send them back and forth through external software and focusing APIs, etc.)