I have a huge archive of photos. I shoot tens of thousands of photos every year. Storage requirements for all those photos was bad enough when I shot in Jpeg but then I switched to RAW and space usage jumped! Here’s what the last 3 years looks like:
169GB of data is a lot of stuff to store. Originally I had them all duplicated on two external drives but then I bought a 500GB internal drive for my laptop for speedier access. Unfortunately that drive simply wasn’t big enough. I need to convert some of my RAW files to Jpeg to save space. To preserve the original RAW files I want to archive them somewhere permanently. I have a DVD writer so that was an obvious choice.
Burning data to lots of DVDs is tiresome. You can use tar, zip or another archiver to split the data but then you have to run through all the DVDs to pick out a file to restore. I like having the files directly accessible but that means endless selecting files, making sure they’re as close to the DVD size as possible, burning them, moving on to the next bunch. In the bad old DOS days I had a program to fill floppy disks if you pointed it at a directory but I’ve spent years searching for a similar Linux script. Last week I found one.
Enter Discspan. My 2007 archive was already burned to DVD, and I wish I had this script while doing it. I’ve burned my 2008 archive with Discspan and it was a doddle. Point it at the right directory, feed it some details about the DVD drive and let it go. 26 DVDs later and my 2008 archive is safe on DVD!
The script scans the directory, figures out how many DVDs are required and it fills each DVD with data, spanning my digital archive over multiple DVDs.
Be aware when using it that you should let Linux detect the next blank DVD before pressing return. The first time I ran it the script bombed out when growisofs didn’t see media to write to. You also need to patch it because it doesn’t detect the right size of DVD+R’s but it’s a simple one-liner.
Another Linux project, Brasero promises to span disks too but it didn’t for me. It’s the default CD/DVD burner in Ubuntu now and it’s a shame this functionality is broken in it.
Hopefully Brasero will be fixed for the next release. I’d offer to help but my C/C++ is very rusty.
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Backed up my entire 2009 archive (so far) to 41 DVDs. That was too easy. I’m happy
Hey Donncha, why DVDs? the price per GB of HDD is competitive, especially considering that most DVDs sold today are of cheap quality – no good for archival. My experience with DVD backups is that they deteriorate rapidly (had read error after two years on “good” brand DVD), they need to be kept in absolute darkness. I always kept double-copies and checked them (checksums) every six months, replicating on new media when one of the two copies had an error. I stopped. This kind of manual RAID is time consuming, environmentally unfriendly and expensive. I now use offline SATA HDD. On my desktop machine I have a panel with a SATA connector. Plug it in, back it up, and store away in a foam padded pelican case (the main risk is mechanical shock). My photos and videos are currently growing at 10 GB per week. They first go on a 2TB network attached RAID, and once in a while I take the archive HDD out of the case and rsync to it.
Happy New Year
Yuv
I’m not too happy about the idea of archiving to harddisk although for practical reasons it might be the way to go. Buy 2*1TB disks. Duplicate everything and store the drives safely somewhere. I may consider Bluray too. At 25GB per disc it’d take a fraction of the time to archive everything.
A more pressing need is “current” space. Because of duplication for safety I have about 150GB of space on my internal drive. Looks like I’ll have to retire 2007 back to the external drives.
[...] that I’ve archived my photo collection to DVD (only 41 DVDs for 2009 so far!) I’m converting RAW files to Jpeg to reduce the insane [...]