DigitalPro Shooter Volume 2, Issue 10, August 10th, 2003
Welcome to DPS 2-10, a special issue on digital storage. Nothing piles up faster than digital images. Sure we can't see them the way we could our shoeboxes of negatives or carefully filed drawers full of slide hangers but they're there. Billions or even trillions of bytes of data overwhelming the largest cards and drives we can throw at the problem. And when one of those drives fail? I get dozens of horror story emails about images that were lost or almost lost. In this issue we'll give you an overview of digital image storage options and strategies to help you create a system that works well for you and will help you prevent a catastrophe. --David Cardinal
The first link in a long chain of storage devices is normally your flash card or "digital film". There are many formats and brands, but since they are all getting fairly inexpensive I make sure any card I buy has three simple attributes:
I also personally prefer Type I (thinner) cards, since they are slightly smaller and fit particularly nicely into my DigitalPro card wallet, but if your camera supports them you can get larger Type II cards if you are willing to pay for them. Out of habit I personally buy Lexar as they have served me well and it keeps things consistent, but there are worthwhile competitors out there now as well. Tune in to our Hardware Forum for the latest in user experiences.
Depending on how crucial the shots are, how paranoid you are, and whether you prefer to invest in a small handful of cards or a larger portable storage solution, you may then want to back up your images to a small portable storage device. I own one of the original Digital Wallets (no longer available) for this purpose, but don't wind up using it anymore. I'm content to rely on my flash cards until I can get back to my laptop. For extended or rugged trips I carry an ultra-light laptop. I do that for one simple reason that I've written about before. I've been burned by not being able to review my images in the evening on a true computer screen and not seeing problems I could have caught with during that review.
If you do want to make a backup of your images while you are in the field without a laptop, or don't have the option to carry a laptop of some kind, Nixvue now offers a fairly complete line of devices which will transfer your images directly from your card to a hard drive or even burn them directly to CD (their new Vizor product). The devices are available with small LCDs (their Vista product) that let you sort of review your images. If you shoot raw make sure the device you choose will properly transfer and preview your camera's raw file format. There are some competitors, but Nixvue are the only ones I've had a chance to work with personally.
Okay, so now you're back in your motel room or huddled in your tent or RV hunched over your laptop computer. If you're lucky enough to have a current model the 30-60GB built-in 2.5" hard drive is probably plenty to store your images. I use DigitalPro to transfer my images to my Windows laptop, adding an ICC profile and appropriate IPTC copyright and caption information automatically at the same time. But then what? Particularly on extended trips, you may have thousands of images on your computer drive, all at risk of disaster if your drive fails. Since my laptop drive failed on me last month I've become particularly nervous about this issue and have come up with some strategies for those who either don't have large enough laptop drives or want the safety of an additional backup.
The first and most obvious solution to image backup is simply to get a laptop with CD burner (internal or external) and burn CDs each day of all your images or at least your most important images. As DVD burners become smaller and cheaper they will also be an option. This is a sound strategy as long as you are willing to stick with it and carry a small stack of CDs.
Being lazy (or more charitably, busy teaching participants or doing something else while I'm on the road and not shooting) I've tried to make my life a little easier while still having a backup. I purchased (by searching the web) a fairly inexpensive replacement drive for my laptop. For under $200 ($149 for my 40GB Toshiba drive) you should be able to find a replacement for whatever your laptop hard drive is. I then spent $45 on a very slick little Firewire enclosure from ADS that pulls power from a separate USB connector cable. The whole thing is smaller and lighter than a notebook battery and easily fits in my briefcase. Once you've got this device installed, you can use it in one of four ways, depending on your workflow:
Now, my tiny enclosure is not either rugged or large. The advantage of the 2.5" drive size is that it is small and light and can fit in your laptop in a pinch, but the disadvantage is that you can't get monster sized drives for it (yet, at least!). If you need either shock-resistant storage or larger drives you'll need to use a larger (3.5" drive-based) enclosure. Moose and Vincent Versace swear by their Fortress backup drives, if you are willing to pay the extra dollars for their extremely well-designed and rugged construction. Otherwise you can certainly build your own Firewire hard drive enclosure, as explained in more detail under PC storage options later in this article. Just watch the power requirements for whatever you construct. Laptop Firewire connectors often won't power external devices so you'll need to make sure you have an alternate solution for power that works on the road.
We've been blessed this year with plummeting disk drive prices. As of this writing you can get bare ATA hard drives for under $1/GB made by either Maxtor or Western Digital. Personally I prefer the WD drives when I can find them. Fry's in particular often has very aggressive rebates on these drives, and best yet will price protect you for 30 days after you buy them. That makes it less painful when you wake up the the lower price a week later:-).
To use those drives you'll either need to rip apart your PC (yuch!) or buy an external enclosure. For those with USB2.0 or Firewire on their PC, the ADS Firewire/USB2 enclosure is excellent and worth the $80 it costs. If you only have USB1.1, forget it. Your drive will never perform well. Find a way to add USB2.0 or Firewire or think of another plan.
You can daisy chain these drives, making it fairly cost effective to either use one as a hot spare or a daily backup drive. The basic options for backup are the same as we talked about earlier for backing up images on the road.
The only downside to this cornucopia of hard drive space is that these drives are not necessarily real speed daemons. They are typically 7200RPM, faster than your laptop drive (which is probably 4200RPM), but slower than the 10,000RPM drives found in many performance desktops. For those used to high-performance SCSI drives or RAID arrays, image retrieval will be slower. You can of course use these drives in RAID arrays, but that requires more work. In my case, I have 4 removable drive sleds in my main image server that house 4 ATA drives configured as a RAID array for redundancy and performance, and then use another pair of ATA drives in Firewire enclosures for image backup. That gives me over a Terabyte of online storage for under $1000! Of course reasonably priced 10,000RPM bare drives are also starting to become available along with faster interconnects such as serial ATA (the upcoming switch to the higher performance serial ATA interconnect is one reason the existing ATA drives are all so inexpensive), and soon there should be enclosures to support the new drives as well.
As you may have already noticed, the biggest headache with more storage is backing it up. Backup solutions are way behind storage solutions, at least in terms of price. For thousands of dollars you can get high capacity tape systems with optional auto-loaders, but they are outside the budget of most photographers. Quality digital tape backup drives like the Seagate Scorpion I use are hardly any less expensive than they were 3 years ago. And the tapes, like the Seagate DDS-4 tapes I use are around $1/GB--more than the hard drives they are backing up!
I've been reluctant to go to the cheaper tape based backup options as I've had poor experiences with reliability when I've gone to recover files on those systems, but I'd love to hear about products that provide inexpensive backup that have proven reliable over years and years. In the meantime I do "disaster" backups to my SCSI DDS-4 tape drive(Seagate Scorpion, which has proven much more reliable than my equally expensive Sony DDS drive--now a boat anchor), store them offsite, and then update them incrementally. For "casual" backups I use the external Firewire drives.
If you don't have quite so many images or are more patient than I am, DVD is a very compelling new option for backup. DVD-RAM is one way to go if you want to re-use the media, but with the plummeting prices of true DVD-R burners and media DVD-R is a much more likely long term winner.
All this is great for now, but we all still miss the comfort of having those seemingly permanent drawers full of slides. Until this year there wasn't a great answer for digital shooters. CDs were too small and DVD formats were a mess. Fortunately, that has all changed. I am a huge fan of the Sony multi-format DVD burner (DRU510A internal, available for around $300, and DRX510UL external, available for under $400). It is intelligently designed, performs well, comes with reasonable software and so far seems to work flawlessly for everyone I know who has purchased one.
Shopping around will also get you DVD-R media for under $1, from vendors like SuperMediaStore, for example. This gives you backup or archiving for around $.20/GB, a fraction of the cost for using tapes and much more convenient than the 6-8 CDs you'd need to replace each DVD.
Once archived I use DigitalPro2 to catalog my images so that I know which DVD I need to grab from the shelf to get one back, but I don't go to the extra work of creating index prints or thumbnails on the DVDs, however that seems like a nice touch.
As far as permanence, I'm optimistic that DVD-R, because of its close ties to the commercial DVD distribution formats, will be here with us for quite awhile. However, for any media that you truly view as archival, I'd suggest taking the further precaution of making two copies (possibly in different formats), and assuming that once every 5-10 years you will need to re-record them onto an updated media or possible a new format. Sure I still have tapes from 20 years ago that are readable, but I have some from 4 years ago that aren't.
Well, it is certainly a lot easier than it was even as recently as last year! Drives are getting larger and cheaper even faster than camera resolutions are increasing, and the arrival of DVD has given us another factor of 5 in archival capacity. Firewire and USB2.0 have also made it relatively simple to add fast storage to PCs, versus having to rip them open and wire new drives in with a rat's nest of flimsy ribbon cables.
One technology that is slowly becoming affordable for home and small office use is network connected storage. These boxes, made by companies like Network Appliance, Sun and Dell, offer a turnkey solution to network storage with replaceable hard drives. So far the ones which are more or less affordable at the low-end are relatively small and expensive, but the idea is sound. By having a separate box for your drives you can maintain them separately from upgrading or replacing your computers. For these to become widespread they need to come down the same price curve that bare drives have. There is no reason they can't be cost competitive, but so far they are still priced at a premium. Also, you become dependent on your network speed, since these devices connect directly to your network. If you have at least 100Mbit (now practically standard) you'll be in good shape--but make sure you take full advantage of your 100MBit network cards by having a 100MBit switch for them to connect to!). Gigabit networks are just now becoming practical for home and small office use as well. The cards are inexpensive, but switches are still a little pricey. By next year Gigabit networks will also be an option for anyone moving a lot of images around, even on a small budget.
Disclaimer: I bought all the storage products I use (except for the DigitalPro card wallets) and I don't get paid by any of the companies mentioned in this article (except if you buy PhotoRescue from nikondigital.org), so my opinions are truly my own based on experience as a photographer and customer. The stores listed are ones I happen to buy from and have had good experiences with, but they're just starting places. The products are ones I have direct experience with. There are certainly plenty of others to choose from, but these at least give you a sense of what is available that works.
Please join us on the DigitalPro forums and let us know how you work with your digital storage and what new products you'd like to see.