WTF is Digital Asset Management good for?

can be useful ;) i have already too many cd's with my pics :D
--
Seen in mad.melon home page (?)

I do an incremental backup to an external HD once every week, but not as elaborately as in the article.

This kind of "off-site storage" is actually not a backup. What about when your external (single harddrive i assume) storage breaks? What if you lose it?

Why? I do have a 1:1 copy of every single RAW-File on a different HD. What else is a backup?

A single external hard disk is not reliable. Think of the following szenario:

- Local disk: 50GiB
- External disk: 320GiB

You are doing backups of you local disk to the external disk, when your local disk runs out of space you remove data from it, as you have it in your "backup". Now think about what happens if this single point of failure breaks. You will lose your whole backup as well and as you already removed the files from the local disk, you don't have the files anymore at all.

And especially the external USB hard disks are very fault-prone. The disks (which are actually made for a fixed mounting) are shaked, transported and so on- that's not good at all for the little mechanical parts in the hard disk.

So to summarize it... as long as you don't have a reliable backup media, it's not a backup (in my point of view).

no external hd and my burner died :D now i'm just thinking that i really need more luck ;)) my scsi died once and i lost ca. 300 pics :/
--
Seen in my account recent activity (?)

Well, for me (~7300 images) Aperture handles all the Backup processes. I backup my photo library to Aperture’s so-called vault after I have shot a few new pictures or after I invested some work into tagging or fiddling around with a bunch of images.

In addition to that, I have a full backup of my hard disk which is not older than a month.

And I have an offsite DVD archive with my pictures (though I only update this about once per year).

In total this means one current backup on an external (eSATA) HD, another reasonably current archive on another (Firewire) HD and a somewhat old offsite archive on DVD. Feels safe enough for me. But then again I have had so many HD failures over the course of the last years (… I guess do like to treat my laptop roughly and I am on the road a lot) that I would not feel safe with anything less than that. A single HD backup somehow seems a bit unsafe to me.

I think the article makes some good points about keeping your images in order, tagging them etc. Maybe I will actually start making captions…

You are right, I should start copying my pictures to DVD's. But I have aprox. 7300 pictures on my HD, most of them RAW-files from my EOS 400D. That makes round about 58 GB at the moment and I started taking RAW-pictures in April 2007. I take aprox. 300 pics à 8 MB per month. If I continue taking that many pictures per year, DVDs won't suffice in the long run...

Yup, DVDs seem to be not overly well suited to this task – I am also not too convinced of their reliability with regards to being able to read them after a few years have passed. The reason I used DVDs was that getting 10 or 20 DVD-Rs is much cheaper than buying another hard disk and thus allowed me to make a backup immediately…

DVDs are not reliable at all (one accidental scratch and all data is gone). I think you are economizing at the wrong end. I've invested about 350 bucks in my current backup solution and I think it's all worth it's price- i'd lose much more money when one of my hard disks breaks and all data is gone.

You’re right, of course – but the decision was either no backup at all or DVDs (no nice orange “pro” label here ;) ). And since by now the DVDs are only the tertiary backup layer (and stowed away in a safe corner) I guess the risk is not too high. However, hopefully I will soon replace my laptop’s 160GB HD with a 320GB, then the 160GB drive one will become the tertiary, offsite backup layer… and the old DVDs the quartiary (?) layer ;)

ouch, that sounds so business like... "asset management"

Does it? Not to me who is completely ignorant of such commercial issues ;D.

Another thought: do any of you use ipernity or a similar online service as your backup? I don’t for privacy reasons. But nonetheless, uploading some precious shots here gives me a feeling of added security…

Hi Doomshammer,
What kind of backup-system do you use? I use external hd as well...

Hallo dolobo, wenn du die 'reply'- oder 'antworten'-Funktion unter dem Kommentar benutzt, wird derjenige besser auf deine Antwort aufmerksam gemacht. Gruß Agnus.