Backing up your photos and matting and framing your prints in the last COBA meeting of 2004.
A funny thing happened on the morning of the last COBA meeting of 2004, my primary photo hard drive crashed! I was working on the computer when I suddenly heard this awful clicking and scratching noise emanating from one of my hard drives. When I realized that it was the hard drive that contained all 70,000+ images, my heart sank. Though I had just backed up the hard drive the night before, I neglected to copy over the iView catalogs that contained all of my annotations for the past 3.5 months.
I stopped all work and looked at my options for recovering the data. Apple's Mac OS X Disk Utility found some of the files but not those precious iView catalogs. I purchased and downloaded DiskWarrior, but it ran into some bad blocks and slowed down tremendously reading the hard drive. An email to the developers and a search on the Internet revealed that DiskWarrior was still working, but that the process could take hours or days. Unfortunately, the progress bar wasn't moving at all, and there were no other indications that the app was not frozen (despite the hard drive's light flickering every few seconds).
I then proceeded to purchase and install Data Rescue X. The thourough scan also ran into some bad blocks, but the program displayed progress indicators that it was pushing through and continuing to work. I left the house around 7:00 to head over to the COBA meeting. When I returned, Data Rescue X was still working and was over 50% of the way through to scanning the hard disk. In the morning, it had completed its scan, and I was able to recover those once-though lost iView catalogs! Data Rescue X earns my highest recommendation!
Now, I'm investigating hardware RAID 5 solutions. Any Mac OS X users out there using RAID 5? I'll consider getting a cheap Linux or Windows machine for my RAID needs. Any tips out there?
At the COBA meeting, we spoke first about how members backed up their data. Many people seemed to favor hard drive solutions (either two hard drives like what I currently use or RAID solutions). There were several people who also backed up to CD/DVD. If you haven't yet backed up your data, do it now! You don't want to gamble and have to experience that sinking feeling you get when you realize all of your precious data is gone!
Edan Yee gave a great presentation on framing and matting your prints. He brought in his Logan Mat Cutter, which is a great tool for cutting mats ($170 from americanframe.com. Edan covered the types of mats available and the various prices for them. Expect to pay about $11/sheet (32x40) for Bainbridge acid-free mats, $4-5/sheet for Crescent mats and $30/sheet for suede mats (there are also mats with different textures on them — linen, cloth, etc.). For $15, one can buy a 32x40 mat and enough foam core to make 4 16x20 mats. That's significantly cheaper than going to a store and purchasing pre-cut mats or having the store cut them for you.
Edan likes using plexiglass (which you can get from TAP Plastics) instead of glass in his frames. It's lighter and more earthquake-resistant after all. He and David Blanchard recommended changing the blades on the mat cutter every 6-8 mats; dull blades make for bad mat cuts.
Edan also mentioned this great deal over at Elco Color. A 20x30 print for only $9.95 (minimum 2 prints). Other tips included a link to a web-based program for optically print centering your prints on a mat.
COBA is going to take December off and come back strong in January! I'm hoping to get the Konica-Minolta rep to demo the new Maxxum 7D digital SLR. We're also looking at having a photography book review session in 2005. If you have any suggestions about future COBA meetings, let me know!
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You may know this already.
If you go the Linux route just check that the raid controller is supported. The more established manufacturers are providing Linux support.
Highpoint are producing affordable cards with good Linux support.
The only other issue is that I've run across bad RAM quite a bit lately. If machine reliability is paramount then better quality ram or using motherboards with ECC registered RAM are worth considering.--posted by Andrew @ Monday, November 15 2004, 2:12 am PST
very informative.
keep up the good word.--posted by Elias Safatli @ Wednesday, December 1 2004, 16:59 pm PST
Adam,
A few thoughts on your redundant disk scheme:
If you're using a Mac desktop, you may do software RAID. My suggestion is to use a standard mirror pair rather than a full RAID5 set. Unless you're dealing with more than three or four physical disks, you'll not benefit from R5 over R1. There is substantial overhead associated with parity striping on R5 and even when this overhead is handled by a hardware processor it suffers from limitations of bus performance. There are definitely circumstances where you'll benefit from R5 but I do not believe this is one of them. Your chief concern is avoiding a single-device failure. Even with RAID5, you'll gain no more safety than with a mirror set, for if you lose more than one physical device, you lose the data set. May as well stick to the mirror and enjoy the enhanced performance. RAID5 was more relevant when individual disk drives were often too small to be used indivdually for a partcular data storage task. In your case, you can buy disks that are reasonably sized for your use over the lifespan of your machinery.
If you're using a laptop and choose to go with an external server running Linux, the same idea holds true. If you find yourself holding onto a large number of identical disk drives (I do) you'll want to use RAID5 to aggregate their capacity, but if you're building a solution from scratch, stick with a dual disk configuration using basic mirroring. Virtually all the motherboards on the market today offer some sort of hardware-assisted RAID. As the first poster mentioned, it is absolutely crucial to do your homework on the supported hardware list. While you can bet that a Windows box will have the drivers for anything you may buy, I don't think Windows would sit well with your ethic. Check your Linux Distribution of Choice's website for information on an "approved hardware compatibility list" which could point you in the direction of desirable hardware.
Finally, you can probably buy (but I have not personally looked for) an external RAID storage device. A quick Google search turns over this: http://www.cooldrives.com/noname.html which appears to have what you would need. Hotswap enclosure for two disks and an onboard RAID controller so you won't worry about managing special drivers. If you buy an external disk and choose to use MacOS X's software RAID, I cannot comment on how it would treat the disk array if you disconnected the Laptop to travel. *I THINK* it stores the array configuration on the host operating system, so removing the disks would be a bad thing - but if it is intelligent enough to store the configuration on the actual disks, it may allow you to hot-disconnect the array and leave the pair of disks on your desk during travel.
Do a little research on the Mac front, the only concern I have about setting up additional computers for storage is the amount of additional maintenance and time you invest in it. A local storage solution would require less time investment and represent fewer hosts on your network to secure from viruses, intrusions and whatnot.
- Bill--posted by Bill Ward @ Saturday, December 4 2004, 14:23 pm PST
Have a look at Wiebetech's line of enclosures, including some Firewire to ATA RAID units. It would be RAID 0+1, not RAID 5, though. RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives, usually 4 or more, and you start looking at fairly expensive solutions like the Apple XServe RAID (we use them as storage for our Oracle databases on Sun, they work great, and Oracle themselves are switching, but that's probably more than you want to spend).
--posted by Fazal Majid @ Wednesday, December 8 2004, 20:02 pm PST
It's great to hear good stuff about the Apple Xserve RAID. I use them religiously at work.
Preserving data integrity is best done by mirroring. Even with a RAID 5 you're likely to have issues as ALL the drives in the RAID set ages over time.
List of easy to hard backup methods:
1. An offline backup solution can simply be an external FW drive (or spare drive in a desktop) which you make weekly rsyncs or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Rsync command for OS X.
rsync -Pae ssh --delete "user@remoteserver.local" :
Use multiple FW drives (or burn DVDs) to dump data out for weekly/monthly backups.
2. A typical home solution can be done by setting up a RAID 1 (mirror) on a separate computer/server, if you want higher availability (always on). I don't recommend Linux if you're not familiar with it, unless you're OK with having all your data stored in ext2, ext3, or any other filesystem that OS X might not be able to talk to. If you Linux storage server dies, then you'd be hurting to setup another Linux server to get the data off.
3. Buy an Xserve RAID, connect it to a server and run RAID 5 with a hot spare. Mirror the RAID5's.
When using any server based solution, it is REQUIRED to use a UPS to maintain data integrity (lose write data that's in cache) in the event of a power failure. Routine background scans of backup hard drives are suggested to monitor drive health.
I use method 1 since it's an adequate home solution. It works well if you're using an Xserve (WITH UPS) for the spare desktop computer, since it has multiple hot plug drives.
Good luck--posted by Henry Chiu @ Tuesday, January 18 2005, 1:09 am PST
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