How Big is your Archive?

[Alistair]

Now that Sony has joined Canon in the manufacture of sensors, the megaixel race seems to have recommenced (14 mp prosumer bodies, 5dII will probably be 16mp).

Even with current cameras the size of our precious image archives is growing all the time.

What size is your archive currently? What do you store it on? How do you back it up and generally keep it safe? What are you going to do when it outgrows your current disk capacity and the one after that etc?

Very interested to hear how folks on this forum are approaching this.

[Josh-H]

Now that Sony has joined Canon in the manufacture of sensors, the megaixel race seems to have recommenced (14 mp prosumer bodies, 5dII will probably be 16mp).

Even with current cameras the size of our precious image archives is growing all the time.

What size is your archive currently? What do you store it on? How do you back it up and generally keep it safe? What are you going to do when it outgrows your current disk capacity and the one after that etc?

Very interested to hear how folks on this forum are approaching this.
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Currently storing my main active library on a 2 Terrabyte NAS running RAID1 for redundancy.

This is backed up to DVD's on a semi regular basis.

[Bart Heirweg]

For the moment my archive (400 Gb) isn't that big since I have been photographing more often and moire determined for about 1,5 year now. I have a 500Gb external HD attached to my computer and 2 other smaller external HD's with my backup on it in my closet. I've stopped backing up on DVD's since my archive is becomming larger.
The largest HD with all my files on it is attached to my computer so that I can access all my files immediately, when ever I need to. Since storage is becomming so cheap, I will buy a bigger external HD (for instance 1 TB)and attach that to my computer and use the older one as another backup disk.
It is a good thing that storage becomes cheaper when increasing capacity, so I don't see any storage problems in the near future. Just buy another HD.

[jjj]

PC has 4x500g HDS and 2x400G HDs inside all mirrorred for storage.
10x 500g and 2x 300G Externals mostly duplicated in pairs with important data.

The MacPro is proving a real problem as you can only have 2 internal HDs[both 1TB]  in addition to OS HD and a swap drive. I am trying to use a hightpoint eSata RAID card to RAID 5 4x 750G external eSata drives. But the Icybox 4 drives enclosure was sent back as it was horribly noisy and failed to recognise my drives!  When I tried using individual enclosures the drives could be seen, but not utilised.  
The Mac Pro also has connectors for another 2 Sata Drives on the motherboard, but are very, very fiddly to access for adding two more Sata Drives, whether in spare optical bay or as eSATAs.  The Mac Pro has been flattened [yet again - 3rd time since March] and OSX installed from scratch again, finder keeps crashing and now my keyboard function keys don't work!!  I am a very close to returning MacPro back to store, this time through the glass front window!

[Farmer]

1.5TB RAID 5 main archive.

500GB Secondary (currently fits all data - the 1.5TB has some room for growth).

1.5TB RAID 5 OFFSITE mirror.

Basically, a friend and I mirror each other's archives on identical RAID systems to provide offsite backup.  The RAID 5 provides local redunancy and the 500GB Secondary does exactly as the name infers.  We each have one of the 500GB and swap them to keep the mirrors up to date.  When that becomes too small, we'll move to a 1TB drive.

Basically this gives each location a backed-up, redundant system that is then mirrored offsite with the same backed-up, redundant system.  There is obviously some lag between manual exchange of drives but since we're only 15 minutes apart any large ingestion of images is easily followed by an exchange.

In my case, the 1.5TB is in my main workstation, but I'll be moving that to a Gigabit NAS fairly shortly.

[Tim Gray]

I only archive about half of what I shoot...  By the time I finish editing and working up a shoot, any files with "no stars" are deleted.

My practice is to use a pair of USB hard drives and when full, move one off site.  It took 4 years to fill the first pair of 150 gig, 2 years for the second at 250 gig and now after less than 18 months the third at 300gig is full...

When I get my next pair (this weekend) I'm thinking of subscribing to Mozy for an offsite backup of the "in progress" - then that that pair is full and one goes offsite Mozy will delete and start on the new "in progress" pair.

The "in progress" are stored on a pair of esata drives (one external, one internal) and when these are full they are transferred to a pair of USBs.

[stever]

just be sure to fire up those archive drives every couple months to make sure they still work