On 10/2/07, Steve Parrott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well said... I think this is probably one of the FIRST things anyone > new to digital needs to seriously think through. Most people now a days > seem to favor external hard drives for storage, which is probably a > good idea. I have all my photos on CD, mainly because when I got > started in digital in the late 90's, cheap external hard drives did not > exist. DO NOT begin piling up huge photo libraries on your computer > hard drive. All these photo storage / cataloging software programs are > worthless if you still have it all on your computer. You will fill up > your hard drive, plus Murphy's Law being what it is, you are assured of > a hard drive crash if you have all your photos on it. The better
I don't come close to 6,000,000 photos yet; I don't even have half a million! I got my first digital camera in January of 2000. I've taken almost 40,000 pictures with my 1D mkIII since I got it in May. In the beginning I stuck all my pictures in a single directory. Once it had about 60,000 pictures in it I realized I had a problem with how I was organizing them. These days they are stored in a tree by YYYY/MM/DD and indexed via a web server that organizes them into summarized months (which is a collection of summarized days), whole days, partial days, and a one-by-one browser. Pictures are indexed as tiny thumbnails, small images (less than 800x800), and full sized images. [EMAIL PROTECTED]<~/images>$ find index/ -type f -print | wc -l 469218 [EMAIL PROTECTED]<~/images>$ du -Lhs dp 767G dp [EMAIL PROTECTED]<~/images>$ I also still have 513GB of disk free. Plenty of room to play. Either I'm doing everything wrong or I have to disagree with you on all points. CDs are scary, and small. DVDs are just as scary, and almost as small. I would never trust either of them to be a sole copy. I'd trust two CDs or two DVDs to be a backup for as much as three months, but not much longer. If you are spending the $5-$10 a pop for archival quality media, then I'd extend their lifetime, but not the need for two copies. That is two copies assuming that you also have them on a spinning hard drive. External hard drives seem too frail, too ephemeral, and too easy to misplace. My pictures are on software mirrored hard drives. I've seen too many spectacular failures in proprietary raid hardware to risk my data to one. I can't afford a real backup system (off site tape and robot) so I live with the risk of catastrophic loss from theft or fire. The likelihood of any pair of mirrored drives failing simultaneously seems small enough that I'm not worried. By keeping the mirror in software I'm not very worried about a hardware failure toasting all the drives. My current set up isn't ideal, since I have mirrored pairs sharing a drive controller, though. I should fix that someday and make sure both sides are always on separate controllers. My photo storage and software programs work great with my 767GB of pictures. It is fast, efficient, user-friendly, bug-free*, and has 24-hour wait-free tech support. In other words, I wrote the software myself with my specific needs in mind. But is my advice for you any better than the advice I'm contradicting? Probably not. We all have different problems. You definitely need to think about these problems though. The more pictures you take the more problems you have. *) Ok, almost bug free. One of the buttons is misaligned when you are viewing the first picture of any set. -- -- Schlake This is my gmail account, I can also be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED], if the TCC is working. * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************