[Leica] World of pain

[afirkin at afirkin.com (afirkin at afirkin.com)]

Hi Bob, thanks for the thoughts

> What an awful ordeal. I hope you didn't loose any images and just the LR
> catalogue (I couldn't really tell from the post).
> I think having multiple catalogues is a great idea; one that I'll
> implement now
> that I've read your post.

Yes, I'm working towards having a huge single file of all my images on one
catelog and several smaller catelogs of "special" interest groups. I'm
going to keep files in special folders rather than just by dates, so I can
quickly add them to a catelog, so for example after Cuba, there would be a
Cuba folder with all 6000 images. The ones of Helen an me will appear in
the "photographic travels catelog" and also in the "home/personal" cat.
I'm much better sorted out and its a plan I have been planning for some
time. The "cat amongst the pidgeons" was the failure of the RAID drive. If
it had copied "cleanly" it would still have been a slow process, but
manageable. BUT yes I did lose about 1000 images. Luckily, mainly "snaps"
and only one trip to Bali, where relaxation, not photography was really
the theme. I was really pretty lucky.


> I did a lot of thinking about data storage too. What is currently working
> for me
> (and I knock on wood?daily) is having directories for each year of
> photo's.?At
> the end of each year, I make a copy of that year's photos onto a hard
> drive (not
> WD as it seems to have some kind of proprietary code; I use G-Drives) and
> store
> it off site.

I will have a similar system if and when the copying and re sorting of hte
images is finished.

> For current year images, before I copy them at the end of the year, I work
> on
> them locally; on?an external HDD via FW attached to my?Macbook Pro. Weekly
> I
> backup these files to another HDD kept off site. My prior year files are
> moved
> to a RAID storage device so that I can access them currently (remember the
> backups are kept off site). I also, at the end?of the year backup what's
> on the
> raid to a large HDD and keep off site.
>
> So basically I end up with:
> - Current year's files: on local HDD and on off site HDD backed up every
> few
> weeks.
> - Prior year files: on local RAID, orignal HDD and cumulative HDD kept off
> site.
>
> I'm hoping this is enough. Some day moving to the "cloud" may offer an
> additional form of redundancy, but for now it is too slow and too
> expensive for
> large quantities of RAW files. It would also help if I went through
> and?deleted
> a bunch of "loosers", but I never did that with negatives and am reticent
> to do
> that with files.

I will end up with one huge catelog of all my scanned and digital images
as an overview. Search this and find "everything". This will be stored on
an ethernet 4TB "stack". The smaller cats will be stored on 1TB mirrored
RAIDS. These will be backed up onto a single 1TB drive, which when full
will be removed and stored on the shelf (remote).

All images will be converted to jpegs big enough to make a 10 x 8 image
and stored on the "cloud" as well.

Sounds good ;-)

Cheers

Alastair