This post is mostly geared at other photographers, but it’s available for anyone who wants an insight in some of the backend solutions here.

As all of our clients know, we store digital negatives indefinitely. We can run off prints of images from 2005 (our switchover to digital) and hope to be able to say that for many years go come.

As cameras have gotten more advanced it’s gone from approximately 1GB per shooting hour to 4-8GB per hour currently. This means that I abandoned DVDs and DVD-DLs some time ago as a back up solution except in specific circumstances. All storage is currently done using magnetic hard drives. (I don’t feel that flash-based SSDs are, as of early 2010, ready for general use).

The current workflow is as follows:

1. CF cards out of the camera are stored during a portrait session, or backed up on site to an Epson Photo Viewer with a 100GB hard drive.
2. After the shoot CF cards are read into the photo processing workstation (currently a 15″ Macbook Pro for portability).
3. All CR2 (Canon RAW) files are backed up to a network share and stored indefinitely.
4. CR2 files are converted to Adobe DNG (Digital NeGative). DNG is an open format suitable for long-term archiving and suggested by the library of congress.
5. DNG files are imported into an Apple Aperture library where shoot metadata is added, shoot metadata is added and basic editing is done.
6. The workstation is backed up hourly using Time Machine and Aperture libraries are regularly backed up to the network share.
7. Photo delivery to clients is done by uploading shoot picks to Photoshelter for the client’s web gallery. I upload full-resolution jpeg images so that even in a worst case scenario printable images are stored on by Photoshelter on both the east and west coasts.
8. After delivery the digital negatives are exported out of the Aperture library as referenced masters on the network share. I keep the thumbnail (1024px) images so that I can look images up as needed and I can work on the images any time I am on the network.
9. The network store is backed up to the off-site storage using rsync on a regular basis. For very large updates the specific new files are transported by hand on other media. (Hard drives, DVDs, etc).

Why is my backup workflow this complex? I worked in computers for years while photography was a hobby. In that time I saw a lot of hard drives and other media fail. It is not a question of IF it will fail, but when. While doing photography and other tasks I’ve had hard drives fail all around the world and I feel that the current system lets me keep as much data intact as possible. I also believe that the structure I have set up makes for a simple and relatively inexpensive upgrade path where my data follows along.

Why am I posting this now? Well… hit the part after the break to find out the trials and tribulations of last week’s series, yes, series, of hard drive failures and the specific pieces of hardware I am using right now. Read the rest of this entry »