for Those Who Care About Their Images
canada goose uk outlet There are few things sadder than getting an email from someone who has just lost all their photos because of a hard drive crash, lost laptop, fire, or even the proverbial lightning strike. By then it usually too late to do much about it. The time to deal with how you store canada goose outlet toronto factory and protect your digital media and memories is before something bad happens. Those of us who photograph professionally also have a business canada goose outlet need for both accessible photo storage and reliable backups. Best practices change with the technology, and are affected by canada goose outlet store uk the size of your image library and your budget, but there are a number of basic principles and techniques that are well worth canada goose outlet nyc sharing. canada goose uk outlet
canada goose black friday sale Think of Your Image Library as a Multi level WaterfallEvery image library has certain common elements. First, there is working storage the hard drive or drives where you keep the images and videos you official canada goose outlet currently working on. Second, there should be at least one level of reliable local backups. Third, for disaster protection you need an offsite copy of your library. We walk through each of those, and some tools for managing them, in turn. canada goose black friday sale
canada goose clearance sale Waterfall Level 1: Your Local StorageIn the simplest case, your working storage is the hard drive in your computer. Ideally canada goose outlet store you want to canada goose outlet use an SSD for performance. However, as your image library grows, an SSD may be too expensive to house canada goose outlet online all your images. That leaves you with some options. You can live with the performance of a traditional hard drive, or manually pull over images to your local SSD and put them back onto a larger drive when you finished. canada goose clearance sale
canada goose clearance Recently, though, a third option has become available. With the advent of high speed RAID solutions, you can actually get near SSD speeds from a network attached server (NAS) or directly attached equivalent. If you going over the network, you need to get a NAS that supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet. I able to get impressive performance with a Synology DS1517+. Qnap new entry level 10 Gigabit units are another option. canada goose clearance
Canada Goose online If you connecting locally, you want a high speed Thunderbolt connection or something equivalent. This works because your NAS isn tying up your CPU doing disk access, canada goose factory outlet and is able to read data from several disks at once, speeding up transfers. You can configure a RAID locally to get a similar effect, but it will put additional workload on the same CPU you using to catalog and edit your images. Note that dual Gigabit LAN ports don really help here. Even if they are bonded, a single client server connection only runs up to 1Gbps. Since 10 Gigabit switches are still fairly expensive, I got my high speed NAS hooked up point to point over a private network to my main workstation, with the NAS using a separate Gigabit link to connect to everything else. Canada Goose online
Canada Goose Coats On Sale Waterfall Level 2: A Reliable Copy of Your ImagesIf you have a limited size image library you may be perfectly happy simply adding it to your normal system backup routine (and you do have a system backup routine, don you?!). However, as libraries get larger, the overhead of backup software packaging all the files and storing them in its own format is painful. Instead, it is usually more practical to simply clone the library file by file to another location. That has the big additional advantage that you can easily browse the backup or restore individual files without having to crack open proprietary backup files. Canada Goose Coats On Sale
buy canada goose jacket There are a number of tools to help you do this. Two that I canada goose outlet sale use on Windows are Allway Sync and GoodSync. Both are reasonably priced, well maintained, and offer plenty of options. You will need to make some decisions, though. First is whether you want the cloning canada goose outlet new york city to be automated. If it is, you don have to canada goose black friday sale worry about forgetting. But you also risk having the system propagate your mistake if you accidentally mess up a file canada goose outlet shop or folder. Second, you can either do a living clone, so deletions are propagated, or you canada goose outlet black friday can just let everything pile up on the backup system, so canada goose outlet in usa you can always find even images you since deleted. buy canada goose jacket
uk canada goose If you are using canada goose outlet uk a NAS, like ones from Synology or QNAP for example, they also offer Sync utilities that work with a variety of client systems. Because my image library is quite important to me, I actually use two NAS units for my local backup copies. The first one is automatically synced with my working NAS, so I have additional redundancy. The second is only synced manually, which I do only canada goose outlet uk sale when I fairly sure the library is in good shape. Essentially that gives me a Waterfall 2a and 2b. The good news for your budget is performance isn important for these units, so you can go with a low cost NAS and inexpensive hard drives. uk canada goose
canada goose coats on sale A Quick Note About RAID ArraysAny place you have a hard drive with valuable information, it worth considering making it part of a RAID array. However, not all RAID levels offer protection from a drive failure. RAID 0, for example, simply spreads data across multiple disks for performance. So make sure whichever type of RAID you use provides the level of fault tolerance you looking for. NAS vendors have also developed their own RAID versions that often offer additional capabilities like dynamic expansion of an https://www.getcanadagooseoutlet.com existing array, and are usually more user friendly than the traditional RAID levels. canada goose coats on sale
cheap Canada Goose There is also a new filesystem, btrfs, that enhances the more traditional ext4 file system with better error detection and even repair. It isn available on all NAS models, but is something to look for. I just started to work with it, but it appears to offer help with the canada goose outlet parka rot problem that plagues large image libraries. cheap Canada Goose
Canada Goose Outlet Waterfall Level 3: Offsite StorageThe simplest kind of offsite storage is hand carrying a drive or drives with all your images to a friend house every once in a while. Keep in mind that RAID drive sets (other than mirrored drives) are canada goose jacket outlet proprietary to a particular vendor and model, so you probably don want to rely on a set of them being readable long term. Drobo promises its drives can be used in different models, so I used a set of Drobo drives when my image library wouldn fit on a single drive. These days you can get 10TB hard drives, so for almost everyone a single drive is plenty. Canada Goose Outlet
canada goose coats Using the Cloud for Offsite StorageThere are a number of cloud vendors canada goose outlet online uk who will be canada goose outlet jackets happy to take your money to store your images. Most recently Adobe has gotten into the game by emphasizing Adobe Cloud in the new version of Lightroom. Figure on spending about canada goose outlet canada $100 per terabyte per year. That adds up. But there are some ways to work around it. One I been experimenting with is Amazon Drive. For $60 per year you get not just 1TB of storage, but unlimited photo storage (including RAW files). That pretty cool. We see how long it lasts though, as one problem with the cloud is the plans keep changing. Microsoft and Google have both offered generous storage plans in the past, only to discontinue them later. canada goose coats
Canada Goose Jackets Of course you need to get your images to the cloud to take advantage of one of these systems. You want to do the math about how long it will take you to upload all your images. You should also check whether your ISP has a data cap. I learned the hard way that Comcast has put a 1TB per month cap on most of goose outlet canada its users. There are some hefty charges if you go over that. My workaround is to use the CloudSync utility that Synology provides for my NAS, but set it to a low enough bandwidth limit to stay under 1TB per month. The bad news is that means it will take nearly a year for all my images to be uploaded. I hope they don change their rate plan by then! In the meantime, I simply keep a set of drives offsite. Some cloud vendors may allow you to send them a drive to seed your storage, but that often comes with its own price tag Canada Goose Jackets.