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File organisation??
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Hi all,
I’m looking for some tips on file storage and organisation. Until now I’ve been backing up all photos to cd and keeping my hard drive clean(ish) other than current photos. Now I have an external hard drive, so I’m going to put all the photos on cd on it for easy access. What’s the best way to organise them? I have BridgeCS3 and Lightroom(which I’m still learning my way around). Any hints or tips are most welcome.I organise mine using folders and sub folders but if you have Lightroom you should be able to organise using tags. There is no one way for organsing photos, everyone has a different method, some organise by year.
What way are you cds organised? Maybe use whatever name you have on the cds and create “virtual cds” on your harddrive i.e. folders with the same name as the cd.
Btw if you only have one harddrive get yourself a second one and preferably a different brand just to be safe.
Yes, definitely get a second external disk and back up to it nightly (or configure Lightroom to back up to it when you import images from your camera.
The way I organize things is with a year/month/day folder structure to give a basic organizational framework, and I augment that by using the ‘Collections’ feature in Lightroom to organize by subject matter.
Just pick one (simple) system that works for you – for example, a top-level collection for ‘family’, then individual child collections for each person. Or if you travel a lot – a top level collection for countries, followed by child collections for regions in each country, etc.
Cheers,
PeterMy structure tends to be yearmonthevent. I find using an event name (rather than date) helps me find what I’m looking for quicker.
It’s a matter of finding what works for you.
Thanks for that lads. So far I have the photos on hard drive by year only , no sub-folders yet, so I have some sorting to do. Must look into picking up a second external hard drive.
Cheers
Adam.Adam,
Lots of systems out there. As long as you can find everything quickly then that’s what matters. I personally go with a Year/Month system. My images come out of my camera looking like IMGP0001 etc. I rename them 08020001 where the first 4 digits are the year and month. This makes sorting easy and also ensures that there are no duplicate shots as my camera goes round the 9999 clock.
Regarding backup, this needs some careful thought.
There is a big difference between archive and backup. Hard-drive is a great for backup but I wouldn’t trust them stored away in a cupboard for 20 years (nor would I even trust CD). To be honest I wouldn’t trust any sort of archival storage. I favour rewriting data over and over again. I freshen up my data by rewriting it at least once a year. Now the scary bit, what happens if you have some undetected corrupt data and you proceed to copy bad data over good data? This is very hard to detect unless you are accessing every file.
Anyway, with that word of caution, I personally have at least 5 copies on the go at any one time.
1. Master copies on my main hard drive
2. Daily Incremental backup to a permanently plugged in USB drive (complete rewrite once a year)
3. 2 Monthly complete backups on a 500GB USB drive (unplugged from system and stored upstairs). This one stores previous backups with no overwrites so that if I ever discover corrupt data I can go right back.
4. Complete backup on a 160GB pocket drive (stored offsite)
5. Another complete backup on my works computer (just in case !!!)The 5th backup there is not really needed but it means I can pull images at work.
Never trust your data to a single USB drive and even 2 is pushing your luck in my opinion.
Here’s a good example of having at least 3 copies. My main drive recently failed. I replaced the drive but did not unplug the connected USB drive. I proceeded to partition what I thought was the new internal drive but later discovered it was the USB drive. Therefore 2 copies all lost. The 3rd copy saved me. Phew!!
And then there’s always burglers or fire to worry about. get a copy stored offsite !!
Andy
Andy –
Yes, the lack of reliable archival storage gives us all ulcers. I have the mirrored USB drive approach, and have recently added an offsite backup which gets added to nightly.In the days of yore, tapes had enough capacity and reliability to safely archive data. Now disk sizes have outstripped tape capacity many times over, and DVDs/CDs are almost a totally unknown quantity in terms of long term storage.
Peter
amcinroy wrote:
Now the scary bit, what happens if you have some undetected corrupt data and you proceed to copy bad data over good data? This is very hard to detect unless you are accessing every file.
Actually, that’s easier than you might think! All you need to do is put in place a file integrity check system utilising something like a CRC32 or MD5 algorithm. Then you simply save the checksum on the disk along with all the files. Every time you make a copy of the disk you simply verify the checksum value after copying to ensure that there hasn’t been any file corruption. The one caveat is that you must generate the checksum before you ever create the disk. There are plenty of free checksum utilities out there and I use a few of them myself. Have a look at FileCheckMD5 for starters.
petercox wrote:
In the days of yore, tapes had enough capacity and reliability to safely archive data. Now disk sizes have outstripped tape capacity many times over
Tapes are still alive and kicking. Most large companies still use them for backing up network servers etc, very large capacity on them and much cheaper when backing up large amounts of data. Think tape capacity is larger than your normal disk capacity unless your using a san. I use two usb drives myself for my pics so i have three copies of everything….
M
Martin –
I suppose you’re right. In the organization I used to work in before I dumped IT as a career we used tape for long term archival storage and NetApp’s ATA-based filers for 30-day ‘oh crap, I deleted that spreadsheet, now I need to get it back’ backups.I guess the last time I looked at tape for home storage was about 5 years ago, and the problem was getting everything onto a single tape. Changing tapes in the middle of a backup is enough of a pain that it will ensure the backup doesn’t get done – and your home user can’t really afford a tape robot.
Perhaps things have changed – at the time DLT IV tapes and a drive were the best and most affordable option I could find (not least because I could get an unlimited supply of tapes from work for free =).
Cheers,
PeterBlu-Ray looks promising, but it’s still a little expensive. Currently a good quality 25Gb disk is about €12.
Offline storage (maybe using Amazon S3) will also become more practical with the broadband upload speed increases being talked about (via eircom and others).
I’m already using it for some things, but need to leave uploads running for a long time. However, my upload speed should be about
2 1/2 times faster in the next few months.Frank –
You have a link to the upload speed discussion? I’d be interested in learning more about that.Peter
Hi Peter,
it’s mentioned in a few of the Irish blogs/forums like : http://www.mulley.net/2008/01/31/eircom-announce-speed-iterations/
This also applies to any other services using eircom (like UTV, who I use).
I’ve gone for the 3Mb package, which will double in speed ‘real soon now’.Other (Dublin-only, for now I think) ISP’s like BT and SMART are also increasing their speeds.
As always though, the increases will come to the cities first.
FrankC wrote:
…with the broadband upload speed increases being talked about (via eircom and others).
ROFL, Ha ha ha ha – I nearly fell off my chair laughing there! I finally got a 1MB broadband connection installed just before Christmas from some guy running a small local operation. Four weeks later I got a postcard from Eircom to advise that the exchange has finally been broadband enabled and that there were delighted to announce that broadband is now available in my area! I don’t know how they can start talking about speed increases when they are so behind the times in getting broadband rolled out to everyone in the country. Compared to other countries in the EU, it’s still far too expensive and too slow over here and I can’t see anything changing until the government and Comreg do what is right for the country rather than serving the interests of a small minority because it benefits them to do so!
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