According to Infotrends (as reported in Picture Business Magazine), when asked what their long-term plan was for photo storage, approx. 60% said they either had “no plan” or simply weren’t “actively following a plan”.
Infotrends recently issued two reports “2008 Online Photo Services End-User Research” and “2008 Online Photo Services End-User Research”. According to these, the average consumer (since you, as a reader of this blog probably aren’t ‘average’, you probably have a lot more than the average) has 900 photos saved. 18-24 year olds have almost double this number, and Hobbyists have as many as 2,000.
Now, let’s focus on Hobbyists for a minute. Let’s assume that you (like Veit and me and a number of other serious amateur photographers we know) shoot 12 megapixel RAW images and have 2,000 of them. At 18MB for a 12-bit RAW file, that’s 36GB. Obviously, if you shoot mostly 3MP iPhone photos, then that’s probably 2GB at 1MB per compressed JPG image–much smaller storage footprint. Neither of these represent huge storage issues. However, if you shoot RAW images, iPhone JPG images, AND have several shooters in your household — not an unlikely scenario these days– then you could easily accrue several hundred gigabytes or more of images in a few years or less.
Add to this videos that you may shoot with your Flash-based or Hard-drive based 1080i video camera that you want to store reliably, you could easily have multiple terabytes in a few years. And, then, of course, you have your music downloads acquired through iTunes or other music stores…
The InfoTrends studies indicate that 57% of consumers store photos on optical media (CD/DVD), 32% on external hard drives, and 31% on prints. 65% indicated they would pass on 64% of their photos to future generations via optical disks and 57% would pass on images via prints stored in albums.
Many people are heading to heartbreak if they don’t do what I recommend below, however…
Here are the dilemmas:
Optical Disks:
Optical disks have a shelf-life of as little as 3 years (but could be as much as 100 years). Factors which contribute to ‘optical morbidity’ as I will call it include ‘disk rot’ (which occurs when the substrate of the disk decomposes due to the manufacturers using materials and dyes which eat away at the protective disk coating), disk labels or disks to which the wrong type of labeling pen have been applied causing the disk to become unreadable by the optical drive itself, and improper or hostile storage conditions (excessive heat, sleeves which contain PVC materials which can eat away at the disks that are stored therein).
Online Storage:
This is actually a good solution in conjunction with other solutions, because it guarantees you will have your precious photos offsite if there is a fire, theft, or other home-based disaster, like a power-surge which isn’t shielded from your equipment by surge protectors.
However, online storage now has its own set of issues: a) online storage vendors routinely go out of business and if you don’t catch it in time you may not transfer your photos to another vendor before the old vendor goes out of business; b) you have to remember to routinely upload your newly added images to your online storage — this can be easily automated with the right online storage vendor; c) in some parts of the U.S., ISPs are now implementing bandwidth caps on your monthly data down/uploads. This means that if your ISP caps you out, say, at 40GB per month (which, remember, includes not just your photo uploads and downloads, but your son’s online gaming, your work-from-home file transfers, e-mails, operating system patches, YouTube, Hulu and Netflix streaming, etc.) and you exceed this cap, you start to run into expensive overage charges.
Albums/photo books/prints:
These old-school analog repositories (sorry, couldn’t help it) for your images have the obvious issues: a) prints fade and deteriorate over time; b) images can be destroyed in a fire or other natural disaster; c) you can lose the prints or at least misplace them and d) it potentially takes a long time to access them. I have lots of slides, prints and albums, but I rarely review them, whereas I can find photos I catalog in Adobe LightRoom in minutes or less and view them via my Xbox 360 on my 50″ Plasma TV.
Single-backup Hard Drives:
If you’re one of the 1 in 3 people who stores images on external hard drives (which I believe is the best option), you’re headed in the right direction. However, put simply, hard drives will all eventually fail to work. So, if you have no backup of your images to a second hard drive or to a RAID array (which I will get to later), and your hard drive stops working, you are either out of luck passing on your photos to future generations or you have to send your hard drive to an expensive data recovery operation to rebuild and this can easily cost you thousands of dollars (yes, thousands of dollars).
So, what’s the solution to make sure you preserve your beautiful iPhone, compact camera, and D-SLR images that you have so painstakingly shot and edited?
Well, here’s what I would recommend after thinking about this quite a bit myself (side note: I have over 60,000 digital images, most of them RAW photos, but at least several hundred digital abstract art pieces that I have created as well that total approx. 400 Gigabytes):
Get a network attached storage device (NAS Array) that accommodates 4-5 hard drives and offers RAID levels 5, 6 or 10. Backup all of your photos, videos, etc. on a regular basis to this NAS Array. Plug into this NAS Array a single external 1.5TB hard drive and backup the array to that. Keep the external hard drive either in your car or your office or at your friend’s house. Use online backup as well if you want an extra layer of protection.
Networked Attached Storage plugs directly into your network router and is/should be accessible from every computer in your house and from your network-enabled PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 (real men use Xbox 360s 
).
If you buy a Drobo, Thecus, Qnap or Buffalo NAS (all of which I have researched and can recommend, though I lean towards the Thecus and Qnap because of speed of data transfers and the fact that the Drobo, strictly speaking, doesn’t offer network connectivity [even with its optional 'Droboshare' add-on, it transfers data from the network through an RJ45 connection to the Drobo via a USB 2.0 connector]), and set them to RAID 5, you have pretty good protection.
Raid 5, without going into even greater detail, allows one drive out of 4 or 5 to fail and allows you to replace it without actually stopping the NAS while doing so. With RAID 5, if you have four 1.5TB in the array, you have a total capacity of 6TB, but only 4.8TB (80%) which is usable–the rest is used for data redundancy. Drobo has the added benefit (perhaps compensating for its overall slowness) of letting you use any combination of hard drive sizes, so that you pop a drive in and don’t have to worry if it matches the others in brand or capacity.
A number of these NAS boxes, including the Thecus N4100Pro (which you can now buy minus drives for the same price as the Drobo), have an eSATA connector that you can plug an eSATA external 1.5tb drive into and then backup the NAS Array to that single drive. You can then take that single drive offsite or store it somewhere else.
What will this protection run you? The Thecus N4100 Pro costs $379 unpopulated with drives (Amazon: $400.95
Setup is fairly easy on these and all you have to do is slot the drives into the NAS appliance; if you’re totally lost with respect to technology, though, you should get the Drobo. If you have any competence with computer hardware, you wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring out how to setup the Thecus. Add to this a Seagate FreeAgent Extreme eSATA 1.5TB external drive (I have one and it works great and looks pretty cool too) for around $150 and for under $1000 you have a solution that gives you piece of mind that your photos will truly survive to the next generation.
Now you may say, “Joe, why do I need 4TB (effectively 3.2TB of usable storage if you use RAID 5) of storage?” My answer is: you may not need all of it today, but you will eventually. Better to set it up now and have room to grow then get a smaller array now and then have to add another one or upsize later. Either way, though you’re better off using a NAS RAID array of any capacity than not using one at all.
Just think of the future iPhones that you will trade-up to which will 5, 10 or 12MP imagers. It will happen. If you’re not shooting with a 10 or 12MP digicam now, you will be. Trust me. You will.
My friend and co-blogger, Veit, has a Drobo and has offsite storage as well as several other forms of backup I think. He is one of the best-prepared people I know personally. [Note from Veit: I store my photo workspace on a Firewire-800, RAID-1, Western Digital Studio Edition II, which in turn is backed up on a Drobo with four drives. I have copies of every original I ever shot on the same Drobo regardless whether they reside in my workspace or have been moved off. Of all these images, originals and workspace, I have two other copies on external hard drives - one in the house, one outside of the house. And that does not even start to address online storage. You can never be too paranoid!]
If you want to check out a very cool podcast devoted ENTIRELY to the issues described above, check out My Digital Life. Very informative and helped me formulate my thoughts for this post.
More info on Drobo: www.drobo.com. You can buy the unpopulated Drobo for $349 after rebate at B&H Photo (please use our link — it costs you nothing but helps us run the site). You can buy the drives at several online resources, but I recommend NewEgg.
More info on Thecus 4100Pro
You can buy this at J&R.com for $379 before shipping for a limited time this month.
Seagate FreeAgent Extreme 1.5TB — by the way, you might well ask the following question if you’re good at math: “Joe, how can I back up a NAS Array of 3.2TB to a 1.5TB external drive?” Well, that’s a good question and I realized that I hadn’t addressed this in the initial version of this post, so wanted to come back and address it.
First, you obviously can’t back up 3.2TB of UNCOMPRESSED data to a 1.5TB drive, but you might be able to back up a significant portion of compressed data to it–certainly all of your most precious photos and videos assuming that you have populated this array with other, less precious files as well.
Second, if you are filling up 3.2TB of storage space (effective capacity of 4TB array), and need to back up all of it, then you should use two or three 1.5TB FreeAgent drives. There are 2TB external drives you could use, but they are at a price premium currenlty. The other option is to get a second array (perhaps a Thecus for your main working array for performance, and a Drobo for your offsite array backup), periodically update it from your main NAS array, and then take the Drobo offsite.
As I indicated above, I’ve been researching this purchase quite carefully, because while I already have one RAID 5 array, and two RAID 1 arrays, I am running out of room and only my 1.0 TB Buffalo TeraStation is capable of running on my network directly. In my research, I found that the Thecus offers all of the benefits of the Drobo (except for mixing and matching different sized drives) plus is stronger in speed of throughput, and has an eSATA connector which the Drobo doesn’t have. Drobo has Firewire 800, but since I don’t have a FW800 connector, I would have to buy an add-in card, which I’m not eager to do — my slots are already full.
Let us know if you have questions, and don’t be one of the poor schmoes who has to tell their spouses and families that the visual record of the first 5 years of their childhoods are gone for good!
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