Archiving your images, what do YOU do.

zeugma

zeugma

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Colin
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Hi Folks.
I'm not sure this is in the best place so (MODS) if it would be better elsewhere - please move.

As subject.
I currently have all my RAW images stored on an external hard drive. All of them are also duplicated on good quality removable media (DVD RW).
I store them in the Canon native RAW format (CR2).

Having just been reading through a couple of pages on this subject here:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/archival-photo-backup.htm

I notice concerns raised about the long term compatibility of the CR2 format.
Looking through the suggestions regarding archival integrity, it would seem that TIFF scores highest for long term storage, however....
If I convert a RAW file to TIFF, the output filesize is huge, this together with the fact that a TIFF (so far as I know) strips much of the original data.

Any thoughts?
 
I just back-up to three seperate hard drives and skip the CD/DVD bit after i lost three years' worth of archive (a 1tb hard drive was knocked off a desk and the back-up disks proved to be corrupted).

As to long-term compatibility - well who knows?
 
www.dpbestflow.org has some indepth info regarding long term file practice.

When I shoot raw, I convert to DNG on ingest.
I use a NAS for current storage, and 2 drives rotated weekly for offsite, of all original files. Once full, these will be my archive files, and kept in 2 separate locations, and chkdsk and an md5 hash of the data stored generated once a year. If this deviates from the previous value, that drive will be retired, the data will be copied from the other drive onto a new archive drive.

All of my exported photos (ie anything that sees the the otherside of lightroom) are copied to the NAS (so also enter the archive process), an external portable hard drive, and are backed up indefinitely to backblaze storage service ($5 a month unlimited storage)
 
I backup to three separate hard drives -that's two different PCs and a standalone USB drive. I lost faith in the reliabilty of CDs a long time ago.
 
All my images are backed up onto two independent external hard drives, with one of them being kept at my place of work.
 
off site hard drives and (plan to) copy on blu-ray, blu-ray is more hardy than dvd.. doesnt suffer from delaminating etc.

as for the future compatibility of CR2.. like rob said who knows, but my mk3 still uses it, at a guess that means the mk4 still uses it.. cant see them dropping it?
 
I have my current library stored on two internal hard drives and one external. I am thinking of doing a DVD burn at the end of the year to keep off-site instead of the HDD.

I use DNG so compatiblity isn't an issue.
 
CR2 and TIFF saved to external Hard Drive and the whole lot backed up to Carbonite.
 
Your first mistake is backing up to RW discs. In CD form they never had the longevity or reliability of R types and I don't see that it has changed with the DVD format. You would do well to start replacing them now. Blu Ray is looking like a reliable option - at a price.

Although I personally have never sourced what is advertised as "archive" quality media, it's a suggestion to consider. Verbatim usually get recommended. In any case, make two copies on to two different brands. If one batch/brand fails after time, you will hopefully still have the other. Personal experience here.

Then obviously keep them on hard drives. Two of them at least. One of them kept outside your residence e.g relative, friend, outside garage etc in case of fire or theft.
 
everythings DNG on desktop external, house server and workshop server and anything on the go is on the internal drive
 
Dng has the same issues as CR2 for long term storage, it's not got huge support outside of adobe products and theres rumoured to be a newer version due out sometime soon, if adobe were to got belly up it wouldn't be long before they would become difficult to find software compatable. Best bet is to simply store your older PC/mac with all the software on it somewhere safe, then in 10 years time (or whatever) you'll still be able to convert your CR2 to tiff or whatervers is flavor of the month then.
 
Thanks for your thoughts people.
In respect of archival storage, I think I'll end up duplicating to two external drives. To be honest, I've never had a DVD RW go down on me, I've always used TDK and had no failures. That said, I've had more than one write-once disc go down, CD and DVD.
As an amateur, I don't feel the need for paid-for web server storage.
As regards format for archiving, I see where you're coming from about CR2 and DNG.
Truthfully, I have concerns that storing on an old PC might result in hardware failure problems later on. That said, if you have a copy of the OS and APP you used, it shouldn't be a major problem to resurrect the environment - provided the original files aren't corrupt.
 
zeugma said:
Thanks for your thoughts people.
In respect of archival storage, I think I'll end up duplicating to two external drives. To be honest, I've never had a DVD RW go down on me, I've always used TDK and had no failures. That said, I've had more than one write-once disc go down, CD and DVD.
As an amateur, I don't feel the need for paid-for web server storage.
As regards format for archiving, I see where you're coming from about CR2 and DNG.
Truthfully, I have concerns that storing on an old PC might result in hardware failure problems later on. That said, if you have a copy of the OS and APP you used, it shouldn't be a major problem to resurrect the environment - provided the original files aren't corrupt.
Click to expand...

I back up EVERYTHING to Carbonite, not just pictures. For $24 a year it's worth it.
 
Backup to DVD every month, external hard drive and a Dropbox account :)
 
External RAID5 at home and copy everything to an old tower PC I keep at work with just two big hard drives in as a RAID0 - both 1.5Tb

Problem is that I only have 260Gb free on each.
 
RAW + JPEG to DVD twice and then keep them on an external hard-drive. I know I shouldn't use JPEG but in my opinion if you compress it as little as possible you can't tell the difference anyway. I rarely revisit shoots after I've edited them and besides, I reckon converters for old RAW types will still be around somewhere so long as we need them.
 
I really do need to get on the ball with this and some form of off site backup, I currently have a lot of my stuff on one 400gig drive and a pile of stuff on DVD's and CD's, I've just been going through some of those disc and there are a few that are unreadable now. I do upload hi res jpeg to my Flickr account most of the time so that has to be better than nothing I guess.
 
The negatives and slides are in archive quality holders, filed with a "contact sheet" type index print, and held in good quality sleeved ring-binders. The digital stuff is held on the network raid 5 fileserver, backed up to 2 alternating external hard drives overnight, with a third copy taken weekly (further external HD) and held offsite.
 
I understand the long-term concern over CR2 raw files, but I can't imagine that if Canon do ever decide to stop support for it that here won't be some easy way to convert them into whatever is the file type of choice at that time (DNG or otherwise).

Or am I missing something from the argument?

And for back up - 1 duplicate HDD, about to become 2 so I can store a copy off site. The second will be a duplicate download of raw files unedited and then untouched unless I have a problem. I had an issue where my files became corrupted on my main drive and this corruption just got copied over to the back-up, so having a set of unaltered files to go back to would have been good.

I'd also like to add blu-ray at some point.
 
I archive to Blu-ray and two ext HD's (one onsite and one off).

As neil-g said, Blu-ray has a longer archival life than DVD and is not badly priced (per Mb) now. Can fit whole shoots on one disc too which is a bonus!
 
I store them all on a separate hard drive from the computer and back-up to to another drive and DVD discs.

I have zero, nil, no concerns what ever about long term compatible over cr2 files. I have DPP on the disc that came with my computer so will always be able to load that on any new computer and then convert to what ever file type I need.

Now I would have HUGE concerns if I'd used Adobe .dng and then deleted my original raws. I just don't trust Adobe with long term support, just look at photoshop.

You paid £500 for CS4 but now upgraded your camera to a 60D and need to get the ACR 6.2 update for adobe camera raw, well I'm sorry you can't use the update unless you buy the lasted version of photoshop. How long before the do that with .dng
 
itsdavedotnet said:
www.dpbestflow.org has some indepth info regarding long term file practice.

When I shoot raw, I convert to DNG on ingest.
I use a NAS for current storage, and 2 drives rotated weekly for offsite, of all original files. Once full, these will be my archive files, and kept in 2 separate locations, and chkdsk and an md5 hash of the data stored generated once a year. If this deviates from the previous value, that drive will be retired, the data will be copied from the other drive onto a new archive drive.

All of my exported photos (ie anything that sees the the otherside of lightroom) are copied to the NAS (so also enter the archive process), an external portable hard drive, and are backed up indefinitely to backblaze storage service ($5 a month unlimited storage)
Click to expand...

What are you using to generate and validate the MD5 hashes? Is it a per-file MD5 or per-disk? Exactfile seems like a good utility for Windows but I've not used it in anger.

Also, when you've worked on a file (And presumably generated a PSD) where do you store the PSD? Does it sit next to the original in the same folder?


@TheBigYin - What software do you use for your alternating external backups? I'm struggling to find a decent solution on Win7.


As for my own method, currently it's a live-sync to a second HDD, live-sync to a RAID Mirror NAS, burn to DVD after each shoot. I don't bother with DNG yet as I haven't verified whether or not DNG ruins the HDR information in fuji RAW files. DNG is an open standard, unlike most RAW files which are propriatory. That means if Adobe went belly up, someone could easily take the standards documents and make new software. The same cannot be said for vendor specific files, so there is some weight to the longevity arguement for DNG.
 
Last edited:
Denyerec said:
@TheBigYin - What software do you use for your alternating external backups? I'm struggling to find a decent solution on Win7.
Click to expand...

The backups are taken from the network fileserver, which runs Linux, and are simple zipped tarballs triggered by cron. Not much help for you i'm afraid...
 
@TheBigYin - no, that's fine! If the NAS is running Linux then presumably the cron task rsyncs or cp's the files to a mounted target, and you simply mount a new disk to the same target manually ?

My archive is a "live" one, so is mounted to an iSCSI share on an OpenE Storage Server. The downside here is performing the backups, as there can be only one connection to the iSCSI target at any one time. Hence I either need to use a windows backup tool, or think of something else... I thought about putting my archive on a Samba NAS share, but the performance is terrible in comparison (110MB/sec on iSCSI, 45MB/sec on Samba). Admittedly for backup speed isn't that critical, but as I use the system as a "live" archive I can dig back into easily, the extra speed is a plus.

Ponder ponder.
Cobian Backup seemed a bit flaky the last time I tried it. Anyone got any windows recommendations? I love idlebackup, but it's not quite configurable enough.
 
CR2 has issues because it is closed source, and the files from different models actually use different format. However I would still keep them as CR2 for as long as you have the software to convert them to something else (i.e TIFF or PSD which are similar). It makes sense because when new software is released, you can do more with them. One great example was LR2 to LR3 transition. Noise, lens correction and perspective controls are revolutionary. It is best to have native RAW file to take a full advantage.

When 'the time comes', just do a batch job to convert them.
 
Flashman said:
I archive to Blu-ray and two ext HD's (one onsite and one off).

As neil-g said, Blu-ray has a longer archival life than DVD and is not badly priced (per Mb) now. Can fit whole shoots on one disc too which is a bonus!
Click to expand...

I'm just doing it to an external hard-drive at the mo (although the best pictures which are being sold, a small percentage are on another one too). Looking at Blu-Ray though...the problem is with the longevity of the format. But it seems a better solution than DAT, which is the only real alternative.
 
Surely there will always be support for CR2 and the Nikon equivalent due to the sheer number of files in existence around the world.

If the demand is there to be able to read the files in years to come, then someone will produce software to do it.

A.
 
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