DigitalPro Shooter Volume 2, Issue 6, March 17th, 2003
Welcome to DPS 2- 6. One thing is certain about shooting digital. You will eventually fill up your hard drive. No matter what camera you use or how large your drive is, you'll fill it up. This issue of DPS provides you with 10 strategies for dealing with a full hard drive. We're sure that some combination of them will prove useful to you! We've also got our tip of the week and an introduction to our new forum look and software.
10. Get a larger disk. Years ago it made a lot of sense to actually upgrade your disk to a larger one. With the low cost of external drives and the fact that it is not much more expensive to upgrade your entire computer than upgrade your hard drive this option doesn't make much sense for most of us. But if you have a machine with an external drive bay and feel comfortable pulling the cover and working with the ribbon and power supply cables then an additional internal drive is often the most cost effective alternative for adding more storage.
9. Get an external Firewire hard drive. The cost of external disk drives is plummeting. You can get fast external Firewire drives for almost as low as $1/Gigabyte. That isn't much more than the cost of quality CD-Rs to archive your images! They are quick, reliable, and as long as you are using a relatively recent version of Windows or MacOS should be fairly easy to configure. Many of the drives even come with an auto-archive feature where at the push of a button you can copy one external hard drive to a second one for backup. Of course you either need to have Firewire (aka IEEE1394 or Sony iLink) built in to your computer or purchase and install a Firewire adapter. Make sure the adapter you buy is OHCI-compliant to provide the most compatibility with OS drivers.
8. Back up your files to CD-R or DVD. Fortunately for those of us who need to make offline archival copies larger media have kept pace with larger camera files. DVD has started to replace CD-R as the preferred format for volume image storage. Until recently the format wars between DVD vendors made this a risky proposition, but multi-format drives like the Sony 500 have made that a moot point. The Sony comes as an external or internal drive, works with USB or Firewire, and reads and writes all major DVD formats at a brisk clip. They've made DVD archiving about as painless as it will get. DigitalPro2 has built-in cataloging of offline images, so I've started taking some of my old, large slide scans that I don't need constant access to and archiving them off to DVD-R with a catalog of them in DigitalPro2.
| 7. Stop shooting Raw files. Just kidding:-) But seriously, JPEGs are a lot smaller. If you are shooting Raw files, or
TIFFs which are even larger, make sure you know why you are doing it and
that the extra space is worth it. You may find that for many purposes you
can capture the image at the time you press the shutter and a JPEG will do
the trick. Or if you are shooting Raw files, you may be able to process them
once and then just save the JPEG and archive (or delete) the NEF depending
on how crucial it is for future work.
6. Move your project files to another disk. DigitalPro, for example, allows you to specify a completely different disk or drive for your project and submission files. If you've filled up your long term filing drive but have spare space someplace else on your machine or network you can use it for your working files. Photoshop also provides you with the ability to move pieces of your workflow onto other drives. |
|
5. Add a network attached storage (NAS) server to your network so that you'll have shared storage that you can use from all of your computers. Right now this is still not a cost effective alternative compared to adding an external disk drive since reasonable size NAS solutions are in the thousands of dollars, but over time as their prices drop the added flexibility of having the storage easily accessible and computer independent may become a compelling advantage. This is one we'll keep monitoring for you and we will certainly do a review of the first NAS to be cost competitive with adding multiple external drives.
4. Buy a new computer. With entry level machines available for $500, and even the smallest current disk drive being measured in the 10s of Gigabytes, this isn't as silly as it sounds. A new machine with a 120GB or larger drive can be had for under $1000. If all you need to do is expand your disk, of course this isn't the fastest way, but if you find that you're moving more and larger images around and would like a processor upgrade, then you can kill two birds with one stone. The only other issue is the time it will take you to move your applications to the new machine.
3. Flatten your Photoshop files. Unless you're really going to be making the big bucks re-visiting your old images and re-editing them, consider flattening your Photoshop work files and possibly even saving them as JPEGs. Sure, keep one copy on some type of long term offline backup on tape or DVD, but your multi-layer Photoshop files may be hundreds of megabytes each and all those layers may not be buying you much if you're not actively working on the image.
2. Review your old images. First, its fun to go back through your old images and see where you've been and how you shot when you were there. Second, it is educational--look at what worked, what didn't work, and think about how you might do things differently next time. In many cases you'll find you kept shots that you wouldn't look twice at today. Cleaning house can make it easier to find the images you want later as well. When I go back through my old images I not only remove ones that don't hold up to my current standards but I take the time to mark the best ones with an IPTC Priority tag in DigitalPro, so that I can easily pull them to the top of the folder when I need to do a submission. Don't delete too much though! If the images are sharp and communicate then with disk storage at less than a penny per megabyte, go ahead and save it.
1. Be glad you aren't shooting film! When you think about the $200-$400 you may need to fix your space issue imagine how much work it would be to store the same thousands of images as negatives or slides. I sure don't miss hauling slide pages out of filing cabinets, not to mention moving the file cabinets every time I needed to move my office. That doesn't include the cost of the slide sheets, file cabinets and the square footage they take up. Even with D1X NEF files an external hard drive can now hold the equivalent of 2,000 sheets of slides. And if you're shooting D1H JPEGs you'll get nearly 12,000 sheets of slides on a single external drive!
Let us know if you have any other creative suggestions at our Bits & Bytes--Hardware forum.
On a related topic, if you are considering buying a new computer, make sure and investigate the low cost RAID (fancy term for group of disks working together) arrays. Until recently RAID arrays have been built only from the more expensive SCSI disks & controllers and cost many thousands of dollars. But now they can be built from standard IDE/ATA drives with inexpensive controllers. RAID arrays can provide either increased performance (striping), redundancy (mirroring) or increased data integrity through adding an additional "checksum" volume. They're not for everyone, but if you want high-performance and high-reliability you can get RAID arrays built-in to your new machine for less than $1000 for a 4-drive array, which is a fraction of what it would have cost even two years ago.
When I configure RAID arrays, I also make sure all the drives have separate, removable drive "sleds". That way if a drive fails or needs to be upgraded I can just pull it out without dis-assembling the computer. If the drive is mirrored I can even replace it while the machine is running. These sleds will cost you around $45 each depending on your computer vendor.
If you buy a new drive for your computer, you can use DigitalPro's Travel/Return feature to move or copy all your image files to the new drive. It will preserve your rotations, priorities and image thumbnails for you. Just as importantly DigitalPro preserves your original image file date so that you can use it to find files later. If you just copy the files using Windows your file dates will probably be changed and your files won't sort correctly or find correctly any more. To do this, simply: 1) Create the new top level folder you want to move your images into, 2) Set the new folder as the "Server" folder in Travel/Return, 3) Set your current image folder as the "Laptop" folder, and 4) Run the "Return" command with your choice of either Move or Copy.
|
We've upgraded the forum software with lots of great new
features. There are too many to mention here, but they include:
New choices of Themes for how the forums are displayed
Stop on by the DigitalPro forums to share and learn about digital photography. |
We've also added a Birds & Birding section to the nikondigital.org bookstore. It features a selection of useful volumes to learn about and learn how to identify birds.
DigitalPro2 Preview4 was released this week. Preview4 adds support for D60 Raw images, more improvements to NEF processing and fixes to user reported bugs from earlier Previews. To learn more about the complete feature list of DigitalPro2 or download a Free evaluation version, visit the DigitalPro2 website.
Great Blue Heron Courtship
From the forum thread
on photographing Squirrels