On Apr 27, 2006, at 9:53 AM, Jostein wrote:
The option to propagate the original without quality loss is indeed
one of the major advantages of digital over film. My point,
though, was how to establish a good practice. :-)
I wrote about this in a post earlier this year ... I spent a good
deal of time thinking about the workflow from card storage to working
disk to archive, developing a strategy and implementing it. There are
several different ways to do it, depending both on what resources you
can depend upon and on how much work you do.
My system is based on my usual habits of 100-400 new exposures per
week and a library of digital images stretching back to 1984. I use
dual, external high-capacity hard drives and the internal drive in my
computer to achieve workflow and backup security; the likelihood of
two drives failing at the same time is infinitesimally small and hard
drives in sufficient capacity are 1) cheap and 2) much much easier to
maintain and verify than many smaller, slow volumes.
Conceptually, this is how it goes:
- Files from card go to a download area on the local hard drive.
- DNG Converter writes the RAW files to a working directory,
organized under
~/Pictures/<year>/<ready to work>/<date and (opt) name tagged
folder>
All files are tagged with copyright and keywords on download, as
practicable
- Catalog archiving software creates searchable catalog of RAW files
- backup automation synchronizes working drive to external drive 1
- backup automation synchronizes working drive to external drive 2
- Selections for projects move to a working project directory
~/Pictures/<year>/<worked>/name and (opt) date tagged folder>
- As projects are developed, backup automation runs at appropriate times
to keep External1 and External2 synchronized.
- When a project is completed, a DVD backup set is created, cataloged
and archived offline from the external hard drives as well.
The catalog software I'm using currently (iView Media Pro) allows
browsing and searching for images, using dates, key words and other
metadata information, includes thumbnails even with off-line volumes.
Every couple of months as maintenance, I run a disk verify and ensure
that the file system and files are in good condition. Correction can
be as drastic as wiping one of the twin external drives and recopying
to it from the other. Since the drives are fast, I can find anything
and access it, copy it to working storage speedily.
When the next generation of computers and storage media appear, the
first task is to migrate the archives from the present system to the
new one, before decommissioning the present system, and making sure
that appropriate software tools to do the same job exist.
Godfrey
