Storage for Photographers

Definitely quite a few companies are attempting something in this space. I think the one that will win will be the one that actually has photographers as founders and understand the need.

Unfortunately it is quite a niche and most photographers are gadget hounds and don't mind having 2-3 drobos (including an off-site one).

StacyC• 13 years ago

It appears that Loom is founded by photographers.

http://www.loom.com/about

I'd love to hear more about this service from some users. I am bumping up against Dropbox limits with my photos as well.

petercooper• 13 years ago

If you want to avoid having any backup devices yourself, would you need to upload to two or more Glacier-like services?

I also trust Amazon to stay in business but mistakes can always happen (not just hardware but ID theft, card expiry while you're on a 6 month hike, etc) and unless you're prepared to say "losing these is OK" using one service would be risky.

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

This is true, but what other Glacier-like services are there that have $0.01/GB/mon storage + retrieval?

dublinben3• 13 years ago

Offsite tape backup can approach that price, but I don't know of any exact alternatives. It would certainly fulfill the requirement of having two different media types and providers.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

joebo2• 13 years ago

How about git-annex assistant with the glacier remote? http://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/glacier/. It will move files off your local once they have been transfered to the remote.

zellyn• 13 years ago

+1 to git-annex assistant.

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

The large part of this post for me is about the local thumbnail exports of the RAWs so I actually know what files are what without having to go just by album names, dates et cetera.

joebo2• 13 years ago

You could keep the thumbnails local and annex the raws. Based on the thumbnails, you could selectively git annex get from the remote glacier

azov• 13 years ago

Backup is about having several copies. If you delete files after you uploaded them to the cloud, you don't have a backup - with all the problems that come with it (say, if you delete a file by accident there will probably be no way to restore it).

If your files are important to you - you need a back up. If not - just get rid of them in the name of simplicity :)

PS. Also, uploading many gigabytes over a typical ADSL connection is just painfully slow... even local NAS is too slow over WiFi for my taste, and if I have to have a wire - I can just as well connect an external drive.

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

I only used Glacier in this example but I did mention how it could be tied to additional cloud services. The thing is that not many like cheap long-term Glacier alternatives exist yet. Rest assured when they do, this ideal app would have them in the settings. :)

apaprocki• 13 years ago

I wanted the benefit of Glacier plus backup functionality so I went with Arq. It encrypts everything and supports Glacier. Works really, really nicely.

tankbot• 13 years ago

I use Arq as well. Easily one of the best backup options for Macs.

dtauzell• 13 years ago

I backup offsite via CrashPlan which keeps files even after I delete them. I sent them a hard drive for my initial upload. Now, I've got about 800M backed up. I haven't yet had to get it all back :)

famousactress10• 13 years ago

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this:

- 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow.

- Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress

- Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need access to last 1-2 yrs of jpgs randomly/sparsely w/in 1-2 days of a print order coming in

I definitely think some well thought out service that uses maybe a hybrid of glacier and S3 could be really awesome. Especially if the pain is taken out of getting the bolus 40-50g of photos "uploaded" in the first place.. We'd happily pay for a service that just sends us an external drive and a postage-paid box.. we drop it in the mail after a job and get another drive sent to us right away.

[EDIT: Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today. Today we get home, and immediately back up onto an 8-bay Drobo Pro (http://bit.ly/1diZUHD). It's a fancy proprietary RAID-like system. I think ours has 7 1TB Drives in it currently, and it's at about 70% capacity. Then we back up the same jobs to an external hard drive which gets driven offsite (used to be my office, but now that I work at home it's the in-laws place) and copied to a hard drive for permanent offsite storage. Once that happens, the cards from the camera can be cleared. After processing, the final JPGs get copied to the drobo and make it into the sneakernet offsite process as well.]

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

This thread is becoming great customer research for people to build this app. :)

rfnslyr4• 13 years ago

You can all go home. I've already started.

alinspired• 13 years ago

Your happens today is very similar to mine. I'd say that I need additional offload of the RAID array (drobo in your case), while little is needed to be changed on my processing laptop

Terretta3• 13 years ago

Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today

I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up to 32 TB).

Interestingly, because these are all direct attached, BackBlaze will happily back them up offsite at ridiculously low cost if that's your thing. Initial backup of several terabytes will take several months, though.

For fast cheap offsite backups, partner with a colleague with similar storage needs who uses the same ISP via the same head end. Just backup to each other. You can enjoy near LAN latencies at maxed out link speeds. This trick will save you both time and headaches.

Finally consider a product like the CyberPower OR2220PFCRT2U (this one also blends nicely in an AV cabinet) to keep an Airport Extreme and Mac Mini along with all that storage running for about 80 minutes of power outage.

famousactress10• 13 years ago

The idea of partnering w/ someone using the same ISP is interesting. It's really offsite that's the whole challenge. If it takes three days to get 60g uploaded (setting aside the nuisance of saturating our bandwidth for doing things like making Skype calls), then I effectively have close to no solution.. because during a busy season I have at least one job exposed for half of most weeks. House burns down, and I lose recent work.. which is the most important work since it hasn't been delivered.

Really, I need something that gets a copy of the images away from my home within a day to have something I'd be comfortable with.

MrSourz• 13 years ago

If you're using a newer MacBook Pro I've seen some people swap out the disk drive bay for a 2nd SSD. This doesn't sound like much but that allows them to run a RAID 1 setup on their laptop (1 drive with a mirrored second drive).

These guys talk about doing that with a RAID 0 setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaXZVHcdGM

VikingCoder4• 13 years ago

I think your strategy has a huge flaw -

The Joplin, Missouri tornado, Moore, Oklahoma tornado, Hurricane Sandy and Katrina.

I don't think you should rely on someone who MERELY uses the same ISP. I think you need to be a thousand miles away from each other.

tyng• 13 years ago

The idea of a P2P backup solution is interesting, more so if you can hook up strangers into a massive backup network.

Of course, the challenge is to make sure the peers are online when you need the files, and for this reason the network may need 5-10gb of storage for 1gb of data to duplicate the content across multiple users.

xxpor• 13 years ago

Would http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ work?

famousactress10• 13 years ago

Yeah, probly. But I want a company to wrap all of it up in a nice predictable package. Dealing with understanding AWS pricing complexity alone is enough of a service to spawn healthy-margin companies.

VikingCoder4• 13 years ago

How much would you be willing to pay to permanently archive that 40-60 GB, assuming the system provided adequate access?

Do you want a one-time fee, or some yearly fee?

famousactress10• 13 years ago

Good questions. So today, the way the math works out is we can maybe fit 25 weddings on a 1TB we pick up for 80 bucks.. so that's about three bucks, six to do it twice. We think of it as a part of the cost of a particular wedding. You could charge me 10 or 20 bucks to archive before I'd even do the math. We likely spend more in gas for most weddings. Hell, I think each wedding costs us four dollars in business cards.

If you could get me to _really_ trust your service, I'd consider up-selling permanent archives to our clients. Lots of our clients would pay 50-200 bucks for the re-assurance, I'm sure. I don't know that I'd want the ever-growing liability though (right now we contract for 1yr of backup/online-gallery, but keep everything permanently without committing to doing so).

One time or yearly fee doesn't make a ton of difference to me, but with other services we've definitely been tempted into fixed "Unlimited" pricing so that we don't have to think hard about math, or end up tempted into picking and choosing what we backup. Simpler is better.. Managing a store of assets where some are backed up and some aren't sounds like a really bad accident waiting to happen.

famousactress10• 13 years ago

[Too late to edit]

EXTRA CREDIT: Anyone who considers tackling this and finds themselves interested in the niche of wedding/event photographer should look at combining this service with shopping-cart/gallery solutions that currently exist. The marketplace for those is fucking awful. Feel free to email me, but googling will get you the big players. I just don't wanna bash them by name in a public forum. All well meaning folks I'm sure, but every one of them are terrible flash-based, no-mobile software. Do backup and gallery/print-ordering management correctly and we're a customer at four figures per year.

peteforde2• 13 years ago

I appreciate the spirit of your suggestion, but might I suggest that this would be the exact wrong move for someone trying to build the ultimate long-term cold storage for photos?

Simply, they are two radically different businesses with entirely different feature sets. You might very well need both.

bambax2• 13 years ago

Most (serious) safes are capable of withstanding a fire or a flood.

I don't have near the volume of pictures that you have (around 1.5 TB) but here's my setup: - one disk attached to the Lightroom computer, with all images on it; it's local, so it's fast - one NAS (NAS1) with a 4-disk RAID that backs up this drive (3 TB capacity) - another NAS (NAS2) with just one 3 TB disk that backs up the other NAS

On NAS2 I rotate disks; disk A is in the safe when disk B is in the NAS.

I think my setup is quite similar to yours, except driving is replaced by "going to the safe in the basement".

If a disaster happen I should have at least the disk in the safe intact, which holds the data since the last rotation; and since backups from NAS1 to NAS2 are quite fast I try to have both disks pretty much in sync (after an important shoot I back up to disk A AND disk B).

Of course I won't know if this setup is good until my house does burn down (I hope I'll never know!) but it does give me peace of mind, which is at least something ;-)

danso• 13 years ago

I'm in a similar situation as the OP...an amateur but avid photographer with terabytes of RAW image files.

Currently, I have several multi-terabyte drives that I erratically back up to...I just got a 4TB drive that I'm going to try to backup everything I've ever shot in the last 3 years...

But I do want to move it to online storage...and I think this requires triage. For nearly every photoset, I've quickly gone through them with Lightroom and starred the ones that I kind of like, and then for maybe 1% of them, have taken the time to fully process, label, and upload them (in JPG form) to Flickr.

So for online storage, I think what I'll do is write a batch script that dumps all the unstarred RAW files as JPGs, because they chances that I'll ever need these photos in RAW is very slim, and then upload them. For photos that I've given at least one star and/or taken the time to properly edit and categorize, I'll send up the RAW file along with the processed JPG.

If I have about 3TB of RAW files...and maybe 10% of those are RAW images that weren't disposable...that's 300GB right there. And then the remaining RAW "keep em just in case" files would end up being compressed from 24MB to about 2-3 MB (let's say 15% as an average)...so 400GB.

700GB is still quite a big footprint. However, the biggest problem will be...let's say I give up local storage all together and rely on the cloud...what's the best way to browse any photoset at any arbitrary time? When it's all local, it's trivial to pop open Lightroom and do some quick browsing and filtering. For online storage, I'll have to put a ton of work into proper folder-naming, at the very least

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

Your last few sentences are exactly why I wrote this post. I want everything stored in the cloud but ALSO have a decent way of browsing them locally. The idea is to just store tiny jpegs (you can set how big they are, but something like 500-1000px wide likely, just for you to get a sense of which photo this is and allow you to remotely delete, retreive, etc)

stevesearer• 13 years ago

This is basically what I need for Office Snapshots. I keep all of the original photos submitted so that I can use the full images in the future (if need be) and would love to store them somewhere other than my laptop.

If I could browse locally with smaller images (as you describe) like I currently do with Picasa (galleries, tags, etc) and then have the ability to download the original images when and if I need them, I'd be in heaven.

davak• 13 years ago

All of this would be trivial for Apple (or someone creating a plugin) to implement. Apple's flagship photography software aperture already allows the user to work with previews while keeping the mega-huge raws on an external device. Instead of an external device, Aperture should just allow the user to point to a service in the cloud.

Of course, Apple's iCloud is very little like an actual usable cloud for most pro users.

btgeekboy• 13 years ago

Exactly. What I really want is something that Aperture is aware of. I want to be able to click "Archive" with a Project and have the local copy deleted. Yet, it's still in the catalog/library offsite, so if I want it, I click "Retrieve" and can pull down the set and start fudging the RAWs. Or, if I want to work on just one, I can browse through and work on it as well.

PavlovsCat2• 13 years ago

Here's my rant, take it for what it's worth :) I keep 4 types of photos:

1.) Personal: This doesn't mean I don't delete, but I generally tend to keep photos even though they might not be really good photos, especially if I only have a few of that day or person. I know I might enjoy looking at them decades later anyway, a blurry photo is better than nothing.

2.) Archival: like taking a photo of a flat before moving in. These aren't very many, so I tend to keep them no questions asked.

3.) Siblings of Keepers: You could call these "proof I really made the keeper photo" photos. Let's say I come across an animal I never photographed before, and like one of the photos enough to publish; then I'll still keep the others around. Or keeping a wider crop in case you change your mind later, etc.

4.) Keepers: here I try to be as harsh as I can. Photography is about painting with light for the pros, for me it's mostly about selection, that's the part of it I enjoy most. I walk around, and from the thousands of things I see each day, only a few make me take out the camera. Then I select keepers (partly before the images even leave the camera), and even years after I might revisit some keepers again, decide that my standards improved, and delete them.

I don't want to tell others how to pursue their hobby, but I think the web is full of galleries not even the owners look at, and that generally, a lot of people need to learn how to delete. The same goes for blogs and whatnot, the idea that everything has to be written on this indelible roll of toilet paper seems silly.

On one extreme, there is being OCD and deliberating endlessly what to keep and how to rank it, on the other there is just making more stuff to throw behind yourself on a pile you never investigate, because it's too awkward to wade around in. Productivity lies somewhere in the middle I think.

uptown• 13 years ago

A service would be great ... but you might be able to "roll-your-own" with some basic scripts to handle the conversion (down-sizing) and backup sync - and something like Koken to handle the sharing with friends & family.

http://koken.me/

For back-ups - just buy a huge disk or set of disks, and keep 'em off-site wherever you have a trustable location (friend, family, work - if allowed and bandwidth isn't an issue) and use CrashPlan's free software to sync a copy to the secondary location. It's free after the initial expense of the drives and gives you encrypted, but physical access to the content in case of an emergency. You could find a friend with the same problem, and just agree to dedicate a certain amount of disk-space to each-other for this purpose.

sreitshamer5• 13 years ago

I think Filosync (www.filosync.com, currently in beta, I'm the founder) would work for this. You could have many projects in your cloud and only sync the one(s) you need to a given computer. We'd just need to add a feature that stores "previews" of the items in the folder so you could browse without downloading. But it uses S3 in your AWS account, so would be cost-prohibitive for a consumer storing terabytes.

healthenclave• 13 years ago

This is exactly what I was thinking about... I want cloud based storage which I am not locked into with a decent UI , way to browse and basic image management (something like ThisLife for the fronted)

I think it's possible to have a either S3 or GDrive based system that has a Angular.js (or some other JS MVC) that can operate without a backend for very simple browsing features and connecting to the S3 via apis.

I think it's doable ...

rdl• 13 years ago

I still prefer local storage and self-hosted storage, but what I'd like is a good plugin for Lightroom to manage cloud storage and multiple, versioned USB drives (or network locations) for images, from within the Lightroom interface.

(for local storage, once you go beyond individual USB drives, I'd go with a Synology 1813+ NAS ($999 chassis, 8-bay) or an Areca ARC-8050 thunderbolt raid ($1499, 8-bay).)

mahyarm• 13 years ago

I've always wanted to work on this, but didn't want to work on the stereotypical nth photo sharing/management startup, especially with other projects taking up my time.

rb2k_• 13 years ago

Wasn't that the idea behind "bitcasa" ?

-> https://www.bitcasa.com/

mrushton14• 13 years ago

Highly recommend http://www.mosaicarchive.com/

geuis• 13 years ago

"I open the folder where Lightroom imports are stored and drag these shots to the RAWbox (fake name for this ideal photo app) desktop application."

You shouldn't be touching the directory structure. This tool should be either a plugin for Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop or an entirely separate application.

I would lean towards separate application. It could be a background agent that detects when new files are added, would work for any known editor or user-defined directory.

Hovertruck3• 13 years ago

I'm actually working on this idea right now!

https://plover.co/

We want to take backing up, sharing, and monetizing and make them very simple and enjoyable to do. We've started rolling out slowly already, our goal is to be open to the public within a month or so.

hamburglar2• 13 years ago

I hope your business model doesn't rely too heavily on the "monetizing" aspect. I know there are lots of photo hosting services with a "sell prints" option, but I get the impression not very many people actually use those in enough volume to cover the hosting costs. I'm imagining a non-pro track that's targeted at the enthusiast who just wants backup and sharing, but won't actually sell any prints. I'll be watching.

Hovertruck3• 13 years ago

We don't make any money off of prints, only the photographers do. The business model is subscriptions.

tghw5• 13 years ago

We applied to YC with exactly this idea. We made it to the interview, but were turned down. I wrote about that experience: http://tghw.com/blog/pull-hard

We pulled our bootstraps hard and tried to get it going, but soon realized that there's a pretty big flaw with the idea: most photographers have no idea that they should backup their photos. They know hard drives crash, but they never expect it to happen to them.

This meant that we'd essentially have to become insurance salesmen, convincing people that bad things will happen to them.

Eventually, we decided to shut it down, which I also wrote about: http://tghw.com/blog/well-that-sucks-what-else-you-got

The old homepage is still up at http://www.snaposit.com/.

famousactress10• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'd expect the market for this is more niche but could be high revenue-per customer. As a wedding photography studio we'd pay 100$/mo in a heartbeat if this was done well.

[Edit]

Also note that OP wasn't really just pitching "backup". He wants you to reduce the footprint his images take up locally. I think the messaging to casual and hobbyist users probably ought to play on this. Note Loom's taglines "more room to play". Backup is probably boring for people not under the pressure of liability like pros are.

tsycho• 13 years ago

Would you be willing to open source your code? I am running out of hard disk space as well for my photos and have been thinking of writing coding up something very similar to this idea _when I get time_. But I would be willing to contribute to an open source project that does this for self-hosting my photos etc. Contact me if interested, email's in my profile.

tghw5• 13 years ago

Let me consult with my cofounder. I've considered it in passing, but haven't put any time into it.

dublinben3• 13 years ago

If you're looking for a more immediate solution, I've been pretty satisfied with FastGlacier, as an Amazon Glacier client.

http://fastglacier.com/

bsimpson• 13 years ago

For this experience, we spent less than $1,000. Compared to an entrepreneurship class at any college, that's quite cheap!

My undergrad was in USC's entrepreneurship program. One of the points they always hyped on was whether or not you were "selling vitamins or vicodin", so to speak. As you learned through Snaposit, most people when making chit-chat will be supportive of your venture, but you won't know how they really feel until they vote with their wallets.

Most of the professors were older guys who didn't get online startup culture, but one of their favorite tricks was to put up a landing page detailing a concept they were interested in, with a buy button. They'd spend some AdWords to get people to the landing page and measure the conversion rate. If enough people tried to buy to justify the service, they'd go out and build it.

gohrt2• 13 years ago

FWIW, that's the original Lean Startup model.

In fact, that's how the Four Hour Work Week or one of those books was written -- ads first, and when the ads converted, the book was then written.

mfenniak• 13 years ago

Professional photographers know they need to backup their photos.

It looks like your product targeted consumers, but professionals seem like they'd be a better market. And it should have been priced way, way higher; the more it cost, the more secure it looks. I'd have a hard time trusting my money-making business assets to a $9/month service.

Of course, I'm not a professional photographer nor do I have your experience in trying to build this business, so who knows what my opinion is worth. :-)

digitalsushi• 13 years ago

The problem with the term 'professional' is that the word is ambiguous - do we mean 'people that live off this' or 'people that know what they're doing'? I have two professional photographer friends, and neither have the slightest clue how to protect their data. They live off it, but never grow out because word of mouth is karma and you can't lose someone's wedding photos. These are people that have a duty to protect other people's memories, and are leaving it to chance. They are everywhere.

tghw5• 13 years ago

Actually, once we started getting into the market, we found that most do not know they need to do regular, offsite backups.

Consider the some examples:

* An older photographer who grew up in the days of film who has just transitioned over to digital.

* A homemaker who is trying to add some much needed income for her family, with a passion but no formal training.

* A well-off software developer who moonlights as a photographer for fun and a little extra money.

Of those, only the third has been exposed, formally, to correct data backup procedures. The others are likely to keep their photos in folders on the desktop of their laptop.

Furthermore, photography is not a very lucrative profession for most photographers. That limits the amount you can charge. Our original pricing was much higher, but we realized that would be problematic, considering the average photographer brings in around $30k per year.

foxhop3• 13 years ago

Yeah, you guys decided to push more efforts to blurity if I remember correctly.

martin_kivi• 13 years ago

I believe Photry (www.photry.com, currently in beta, I'm the founder) could be a possible solution in the long run. Since we started, a lot has changed on online photo storage market.

With that in mind we've started to look more on how photographers with larger photo volumes could benefit from our service. From the feedback from few photographers we've already included some features (RAW photos with smaller JPG thumbnails, workspaces and personal sharing for example) that will make the day to day workflow a bit easier. Currently our goal is to build something that would fit better for professional photographers (public for clients, ordering prints and possibly integrated payment flows, win/mac client + plugins for your favorite photo software).

Pricing wise we are currently not the cheapest but we have thoughts on how to make this better for high volume photographers. If you're one of them then please send me an email (martin at photry.com) and I would love to talk a bit further what we plan to do and if we would fit your storage needs.

cenhyperion• 13 years ago

Great post. I appreciate the focus on minimalism and hobbyist photographers. I think it'd be an interesting project to take on. The technical side doesn't sound too difficult, plug into Amazon, lightroom/aperture.

While the post mentions avoiding externals I think a handy feature would be to push to both an external drive, glacier, and then remove the RAWs locally. That way you have two copies, so the data is actually backed up. Trusting all of your photography to amazon not losing data doesn't sound ideal.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

I've been looking into Glacier, but the pricing in the case where I might want to retrieve a substantial portion of my data is quite complex. As far as I can tell, the headline $0.01/GB rate for overages they quote is misleading. They don't, as you might expect from that language, calculate ([GB retrieved] - [5% of GB stored]) x $0.01 and bill you that.

Rather, they charge you on a monthly basis, according to your highest hourly retrieval rate from any single hour applied to the whole month (standardized at 720 hours). So if your peak hourly retrieval in a month was 10 GB/hr above your pro-rated free quota for that hour, you're charged for 7200 GB of retrieval overage, or $72, even if you retrieved nowhere near 7 TB of data. For companies with relatively constant retrieval this doesn't matter, but for small users, someone who has a large overage one day will be charged as if they were incurring the same overage continually all month.

To put it concretely, if you store 200GB of photos and then do a bulk retrieval, you aren't charged $1.90 ((200-10) x 0.01). Rather, the xfer is counted as 4 hours, so you have a peak transfer of 50 GB/hr. Your free daily retrieval is allocated to the hours in the day you retrieved data, so in this case 10/4 = 2.5 GB/hr free. So your overage is 47.5 GB/hr. Multiply by 720 and $0.01, and the fee for retrieving 200GB of photos is $342. Plus $22.88 in outgoing AWS bandwidth.

Or at least, I think that's what their pricing page says. Maybe someone else can better interpret this explanation: http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_will_I_be_charged_wh...

jychang• 13 years ago

This should be mitigated if you're running a service, though. It averages out.

wmf• 13 years ago

Glacier retrieval pricing has a strange and un-Amazony economy of scale. If you're just backing up your own data you'll be charged a ZOMG huge amount to ever download it. But if you're backing up 100 people you pay nothing to get data back.

tnorthcutt• 13 years ago

Holy crap. I started mulling over the idea of using Glacier as a cloud backup to my Synology NAS, but this makes me extremely hesitant.

csears• 13 years ago

I seem to recall a Glacier discussion from a while back suggesting that the recovery fees might be covered by insurance (homeowners, loss of business, etc). If you're primarily concerned about doing a restore after a fire, theft, or natural disaster, it might be worth looking into.

sreitshamer5• 13 years ago

Right, you definitely shouldn't request all 200GB at the same time, because it'd be expensive and also because you probably can't download all 200GB immediately either.

Arq (a backup app I wrote) takes a transfer rate from you (guesses your max transfer rate as a default) and then requests enough to be downloaded in 4 hours at that rate. 4 hours later, it requests another 4 hours' worth while it downloads the first 4 hours' worth, and so on. This mitigates the peak-transfer fee.

aarondf• 13 years ago

just downloaded arq. looks amazing, can't believe I didn't know about this before.

jasondenizac• 13 years ago

Does Arq fit the OP's use case of backing up files to AWS without keeping them on your local machine?

short_circut• 13 years ago

This idea is great, but it ignores on very real problem. Namely that you still have not addressed the issue of bandwidth. Take for example your 4th of july example. If I were to do that upload the way you describe, I would already be over my monthly bandwidth allotment with my ISP as would many hobbyists.

roc• 13 years ago

The US bandwidth situation is the elephant in the room.

There really is no good solution to automated offsite backup when it takes several days of uploading to handle a single day's worth of data capture. To make any internet-backup service work, you'd first have to pitch the photog on switching from their residential broadband package to something more expensive -- if that's even available short of their leasing office space somewhere.

I guess you could try to build out a reverse-CDN sort of network, with local relay nodes scattered across the various ISP networks, that might achieve faster uploads from the user (and maybe not get counted against bandwidth caps) which then use a fat pipe to send that data to larger regional storage nodes.

Neither seems particularly plausible at scale.

callmeed2• 13 years ago

My company serves thousands of professional photographers (wedding, commercial, fashion, etc.). What you're describing is definitely an issue for photographers but I think getting them to use a tool like you've described would be an uphill battle.

Right now, most of them use Drobos or similar devices. You'd be asking them to add steps to their workflow which is always tough to do.

Also, I think your estimate of 18 mins to upload 6+GB is an order of magnitude off. We have tools that allow people to upload JPEGs and most customers claim it takes longer than that just for 100s of MBs.

My (wild) guess is that Adobe is going to get in this space too. It only makes sense to have your Lightroom catalog in the cloud. Maybe they wont offer an affordable solution for terabytes of data, but I'm not sure photogs want their images in two different "clouds".

I think the key is to do customer development from full-time photographers who aren't hackers. I'd be happy to send out a survey to some clients if you want do more research.

beat2• 13 years ago

As a photographer with a couple of terabytes of old raws (I back up to Time Machine locally, and offsite at a friend's house occasionally), I'm very curious as to what Adobe will offer in this regard with LR5.

callmeed2• 13 years ago

They may not offer anything at the TB-level, who knows. But something is coming: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#storage...

and I still think it will be hard to convince people to "put these files on Adobe's cloud and these files on this other cloud using X software"

jwarren2• 13 years ago

Spot on. In a few years, cloud storage will be more acceptable, working photographers will be ever more tech literate and bandwidth will increase.

I think you're totally right about Adobe too. Those Smart Previews they added for LR5 - those are not just for space-starved SSD drives...

bambax2• 13 years ago

My Lightroom catalog is backed up to a folder in Dropbox, and this works really well.

You can't really have the current catalog in Dropbox because then each action and edit become really slow.

But if you set up Lightroom to do a backup every time you quit the program, and that backup is in Dropbox, you get the best of both worlds (strong backups + snappy edits).

Lightroom backups are really "backups", as they are named by date+time, so in Dropbox I have a history of everything I ever did in Lightroom, not just the current (last) version.

It's also fast because I suspect Dropbox is able to do some rsync magic and only re-upload new packets; my Lightroom catalog is around 150 MB and the upload to Dropbox is almost instantaneous (on a pretty lousy upstream bandwidth).

Of course this doesn't address the problem of backing up RAWs, but as far as Lightroom is concerned I feel pretty safe.

gerardmurphy3• 13 years ago

Just to be clear here... Your Lightroom catalog is very important but is not backing you your Photos. (which I know you said at the end. I am just emphasizing)

Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)

Brandon02• 13 years ago

I'll jump in here and share our current problem and how we are addressing it today. Hopefully it proves useful for whomever tackles this project!

So we are an ecommerce company and we do our own photography for products -- and we do a lot of it. We average about 2-3 photoshoots per month, and each photoshoot can be upwards of 40GB before any processing. We shoot raw images and are starting to experiment more and more with video. After we do the post-processing work and start the video editing we can push 70GB a shoot easily.

Our current workflow is like this:

Shoot tethered to a laptop each day (typically each shoot lasts two days). At the end of the day, we upload the files up to our local NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS, just shy of 3TB) which is redundant.

At the end of the shoot, we load a copy of the entire shoot on the local computers that will be editing so that they don't have to work directly from the NAS. Over the next few weeks while they edit the files, they will push the new files up to the NAS into specific folders.

(This is where it gets hairy) We also have an offsite NAS that is located in the business owner's house (about 6TB, but this one is not redundant). We used to attempt to upload files each night from the local NAS to an offsite NAS via rsync, but the pipe was just way too small. It would take days to upload a photoshoot, and everyone in the office suffered from slow internet while that happened. Now what we do is bring the offsite NAS onsite every few weeks and do a manual sync! Locally the sync only takes a few hours and then that night it goes back home with the business owner.

Now since the local NAS is less than 3TB, we can't store all of our shoots on there forever. When we get close to full on the local NAS, we grab an external hard drive and archive old shoots (typically 2+ years old) to it, and then store that in our massive safe (on-site though). If we need access to just one or two files, we can retrieve them from the offsite NAS, but if we need access to quite a few of them, we can dig them out of the safe.

So that's our workflow. Probably not bullet proof, but it has been serving us well for the last few years. If someone came up with a better solution, we would be all over it!

josh2600• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, how big is the pipe at the office? The one holding the local NAS?

Brandon02• 13 years ago

I thought it was a 50/5, but the speed test I ran just showed 65/5.

hfanson1• 13 years ago

It is important to be careful with how you try to use Glacier. I have been looking its pricing; It costs $0.01 per GB per month only if you want to upload your data.

Downloads add significant cost if you want to retrieve more than 0.17% of your data in a day.

Downloading 5% of your data increases your monthly rate to $0.097 per GB. 10% increases to $0.187 per GB 50% increases to $0.907 per GB 100% increases to $1.807 per GB

Downloads are also delayed by 4 hours after you make a request.

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

if I have 2TB stored and only want to retrieve a single 10GB photo shoot one month (or even just a single photo), it would not be anywhere close to 5% (.5% in fact) of my total amount stored. The key point here is that we are dealing with TBs of photos that are there for safe-keeping and they have already been tinkered with and all photo JPGs needed have been exported and put elsewhere. This is just for RAWs and you likely won't need to access them again, definitely not 5%+ of them like this.

martingordon• 13 years ago

Has anyone used Lightroom 5's new Smart Preview feature? It generates lossy DNGs from your full-sized files that you can still work with while your original sits on an external drive. Once you plug your external drive back in it, it syncs the non-destructive changes back to the RAW file.

hnriot4• 13 years ago

"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III"

Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane.

What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5

rfnslyr4• 13 years ago

Because cloud this and cloud that! I feel like I'm the only person firmly against cloud storage. I'd constantly feel paranoid about my data randomly disappearing at the hands of a company I don't know run by people I don't know on hardware I don't trust.

I want everything local.

joevandyk2• 13 years ago

What happens when there's an earthquake? Or theft? Or fire?

icebraining5• 13 years ago

Local data can randomly disappear too - hard drives don't always fail in a predictable fashion.

Personally, I prefer to use both local and cloud storage (encrypted, bien sûr).

dublinben3• 13 years ago

A local backup isn't much of a backup. A single fire, flood, theft, storm, earthquake, etc. shouldn't be able to destroy every copy of your data. You must have at least one offsite copy of anything valuable.

http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview

joevandyk2• 13 years ago

The point of the mark III isn't megapixels. It's image quality, less noise, higher iso, better highlights/shadows, more images per second, better autofocusing, movies, etc.

hnriot4• 13 years ago

how do you think it comes by that image quality? It's a total waste of money to use a 5Dmkiii in 5MP mode. You'd never notice the difference between nouse, shadow detail, highlight clipping, autofocus if you used an entry level canon. The 5D MKiii is for pro's, not weekend amateurs. You did your part for the Economy, but you wasted your money.

beat2• 13 years ago

Offsite backup, man. What if you're running a business? Do you want every scrap of data your business runs on in the same building? What if it burns down?

It's all about the importance you place on the data, and your level of technical skill.

tambourine_man• 13 years ago

Backblaze?

sreitshamer5• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced that retrieval time doesn't matter. If you decide you want several photos, wait 4 hours to retrieve them from Glacier, then realize you wanted a few more and have to wait an additional 4 hours, I think that would get old pretty quickly.

hadem• 13 years ago

I was wondering something similar. Does Glacier have any way to see a preview of the images you are downloading? If I upload 100 images with serialized file names (001.jpg, 002.jpg) how do I know which images to download?

Pyrodogg• 13 years ago

This is most of what the proposed software is. A local, lower-res index of the huge files you have deep archived.

sreitshamer5• 13 years ago

There's no preview. Actually there's no way to download or even list your archives through the AWS Console. You need to write (or find) an app that uses the Glacier API.

bigbento• 13 years ago

Over the past few years, I worked on a few versions of this as a side project. The last iteration didn't do the backup itself--it connected with your Dropbox, sync'd the raw images, and processed them at a preset +-2 EV, and 3 color temperatures. The image results were good, but honestly I never found it particularly compelling.

In any case, building this sort of thing is a pain. The most obvious problem is the size of the images. Glacier is an interesting backup solution, and had just come out around the time I decided to stop working on my app. A less obvious problem is raw conversion. All the best converters are proprietary, meaning that I had to piggy back off the Mac OS converter engines. Again, I never got to the point where I felt the product was worth the trouble of buying racking up a Mac Mini to run a little market test. Maybe I'm wrong.

I had a (frankly somewhat scattered) draft of a post mortem written, and since it seems like there's some interest in this subject, I posted it: http://scraps.bigbento.com/2013/05/30/hiatus.html

stevewilhelm• 13 years ago

Smugmug's SmugVault

"SmugVault is an added service to your SmugMug account that lets you store almost anything for next to nothing. Including files not normally supported by SmugMug."

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84562-more-...

sreitshamer5• 13 years ago

Although Smugmug is awesome, the issue I'd have with them is the lack of control. If my objects are in my AWS account, that feels more permanent long-term. It's just a gut feeling.

throwaway420• 13 years ago

I wish I could trust the cloud because it would be a lot more convenient to not have to worry about storing photos, which involves a lot of effort once you advance beyond a casual hobby and you get into storing Terrabytes of large RAW files and maintaining adequate backups.

But the idea of storing any files in the cloud is very distasteful to me ever since the NSA Snowden story broke. Even something as innocent as a photographer taking pictures of a skyline or some beautiful architecture could land him in hot water if the government is looking at metadata and figuring out that he took lots of photos of a government building or a bridge or a power plant and randomly throwing him on some watch lists or no-fly lists. People have been hassled by the feds for a lot less.

My preference would be for all of these cloud storage providers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Amazon, etc to unambiguously and fiercely challenge the government on this and somehow unambiguously prove to people that they're respecting peoples' privacy and not complying with this stuff. Their denials so far have been obvious non-denials that are very carefully worded around "no direct access" when that's enough wiggle room to do just about anything.

Using some kind of cloud photo storage is a bad idea IMO until this gets sorted out.

chadk• 13 years ago

FINALLY. I was going through every comment on this thread and I was wondering why no one was talking about security. This is one of the key features of the data warehousing business we have been contemplating.

prirun2• 13 years ago

Everything must be encrypted on the client before sending to any cloud service. Then it doesn't matter if the encrypted backup is obtained.

post_break• 13 years ago

"I almost always shoot in small (5.5MP) or medium (11MP) on my 22.3MP Canon 5D Mark III3."

Sorry but what? I actually had to read that a couple of times.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

I only have a 128GB SSD on my MacBook Air, which is my primary computer. I used to run out of space until I read somewhere that you can use DropBox advanced settings to not keep specific directories on specific devices. So, I am not likely to have directories like, for example, videos2012, pictures2012 synced on my Air but they are on my old Linux and MacBook Pro laptops which have lots of disk space.

With high network speeds, I can quickly re sync directories, or just power on one of my old laptops.

bcl• 13 years ago

My solution is to copy them all to Glacier, I also have local copies, Glacier is only for worst case scenario retrieval. I wrote about the little script I use here: http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and...

fsckin• 13 years ago

I'm the SO of a professional newborn photographer who generated somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30TB of RAW photos, backups, LR xmp sidecars, etc in the last year. JPEGs don't even register. High end DSLR RAWs are gigantic!

I'm the technical support for overall workflow, storage & backup engineer, etc, etc. I wear many hats.

Right now I've got a backup on import to a FreeNAS (BSD) filer running on a HP Micro Server. Lightroom backups go to the same filer and are synced as well. My local server rsyncs the delta every night to an identical machine at a friends' house.

This isn't perfect. The one place that isn't 100% backed up is current projects in post-production. That's an acceptable trade off for now.

The most important thing to note is that there are two kinds of photographers: Those who never lost data, and those who care about backups. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, converting members of Group A into Group B is a tough sell. Video testimonials might be a good option.

A storage service for photographers MUST be invisible to their workflow. Make it as easy to use as an egg timer. At the MOST, an addition of a single screen with sensible defaults (just click next) on photo import.

Ignoring error messages that get in their way is to be expected. Care more about their backups than they do. Send me (tech support guy) an email to notify if there haven't been backups added in X days, along with weekly reports of data usage per day -- how many photos, how large, what root folders, usage trends, etc.

An ideal installation would be automatic detection of what program they're using, what places files are stored (hint: It's not just on a local drive). Detect new file locations and back those up too.

An inexpensive (<$25) option of "only backup current projects I'm working on and anything I shot in the last month", that actually works... I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

FollowSteph3• 13 years ago

And what happens if one glacier decides to close? Do you think you'll get any notice ahead of time? I wrote about these types of risks at http://www.followsteph.com/2012/04/19/what-are-the-risks-of-...

foxhop3• 13 years ago

http://www.snaposit.com/ tried but the market didn't pay.

foxhop3• 13 years ago

snaposit : http://www.snaposit.com/ tried but the market wasn't there. I'm going to send this post to the founder to see his take on it.

josephlord• 13 years ago

Covering video too would be great but maybe a second phase handling them separately is a hassle for users.

gcb0• 13 years ago

What about flickr and the insane free space they provide? you it's free now right?

searching is also a breeze there.

not sure how you'd go about downloading them all though...

philfrasty• 13 years ago

no RAW support...

gerardmurphy3• 13 years ago

I am the CEO/Co-Founder of Mosaic. We are a company that helps serious photographers backup their photographers. I am happy to share what we have learned in the past 2 years. www.mosaicarchive.com

As a background, we now have thousands of users and customers. We also finished raising a series A in February. (Not that raising money proves anything) http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2013/02/mo...

We are now growing at about 5%-7% a week. We recently peaked in the top 100 grossing US iPad Photo/Video Apps in iOS - although most of our revenue comes outside of iOS. (As they take a 30% cut.)

We target serious photographers (pro's and prosumers) who use Adobe Lightroom. For pure backup customers our sweet spot are those who have outgrown BackBlaze and Crashplan. (Both great services but geared at consumers.)

On the backup side, we help photographers manage their backups by using Adobe Lightroom metadata. Customers can choose to backup everything in Lightroom automatically. However, many photographers use metadata like stars or flags to designate their best photos. We allow users to automatically backup these "best" photos. This provides the automation of the best backup tools with more precision for larger customers.

We use Amazon Glacier behind the scenes to store the original photos. (Yes, WMF the restoration costs even out for us over all of our users.) (Sidebar - we actually ran our data center for months before switching to Glacier...very glad to have made the switch.)

However... we are not an online backup company. Online backup is a feature is our service... but not the entirety of it.

Once we have have photographers photos, we also want to help photographers better use, manage, share, and enjoy those photos. At one point I would have said we are a backup company, now I call us a workflow company.

We also offer a web and iOS App to privately view and share your Lightroom photos. (We take JPG snapshots of the RAW files so they load quickly and have the Lightroom edits. This part of the service runs in Amazon S3 not Glacier) This gives you access to your photos in the same way you are used to experiencing them in Lightroom. (Lightroom users try this for free - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mosaic-archive/id627973694?l...)

The next step which we are working on now is adding two-way sync where you can manage your photos in the App and it populates back to your desktop files and Lightroom. We are also working on more collaborative features so photographers can share this culling and editing process with their clients or family members.

The bigger problem we are solving is that photographers have loads of large files... backing them up is painful yes... but managing them all is more painful. Sifting through 000s of images to find your best stuff frankly stinks. This problem is only getting bigger as we shoot more and more.

For those interested in this idea, please consider joining us. We are hiring a couple more software developers this year. http://www.mosaicarchive.com/about-mosaic-photo-storage/care...

Thanks for the discussion and happy to answer all questions.

Best, Gerard www.mosaicarchive.com

PStamatiou12• 13 years ago

Thanks for replying Gerard. Do you ever see a version where I can store directly on my Amazon Glacier account?

Especially given "However... we are not an online backup company." I'd feel tremendously safer and more trusting of your service. I haven't used Mosaic so maybe you already do this, I'll take a closer look this week.

Also (in a nice way), your site could benefit from a redesign. Unfortunately I think quite a few consumers judge the trustworthiness and value of a brand by their site/landing design.

gerardmurphy3• 13 years ago

Hi PStamatiou,

We have certainly thought about giving direct access to customers Glacier accounts and behind the scenes each customer has their own glacier "vault" for potentially this reason. But for many customers they would prefer a set-it and forget it type of service. We didn't want a barrier of first create an glacier account then call us...

We also then didn't know what to do if a customer then changes their glacier files... if we are syncing with Lightroom and this gets out of whack... then it defeats the purpose of the automated sync with your local files. If it just "read only" access, we are already providing this with our App.

I think the difference in what we are providing in online backup is that we are not a pure cloud where we encourage you to delete your local file - We actually want to sync with your local files. Our philosophy on the workflow side is that changes that you make to your files on the App, should be reflected locally in your Lightroom catalog file. This way you always own your own data.

I agree with you on the site redesign... have had our head down on this. Good news is that the design is approved and being implemented as we speak (although won't be out for a couple weeks.)

Thanks again and happy to answer any other questions. Best, Gerard

nchuhoai• 13 years ago

The question OP would also have is whether you can do the whole backup-RAW-and-delete-locally thing instead of "simple" RAW sync-backup

esonderegger• 13 years ago

I really wish we as a developer community would better differentiate between "backup" and "preservation". They are both related to storage, but are fundamentally different problems. The article touches on the desire to have photos safe for decades, but doesn't really get into the strategy necessary to make that happen.

If we care about decades, storing the raw NEF or CR2 file is almost certainly the wrong approach. Those files could easily be as difficult to open in fifteen years as a ClarisWorks document is today (just to choose one example - proprietary formats for professional software from the late 90's are all pretty hard to open today). Also, important metadata is kept in the lrcat file. Unless we expect to always be able to open our copies of Lightroom, we need to migrate that data too.

We used to think of "archiving" as putting something on a shelf and forgetting about it, sometimes taking environmental factors like humidity into account. With our digital data, we need a plan for periodically checking it, both for fixity and to make sure at risk file formats are migrated to current best practices. This will require greater awareness for the complexities involved (and the need for open file formats) from everyone from creatives to storage and service providers.

By the way, every creative industry is struggling with this right now. Recording studios have session files created in ProTools 4. Designers have really old Quark files, even though they've been working in InDesign for the past five years. Composers have Finale files. A lot of these file formats depend on plugins to be able to display properly. I don't mean to sound discouraging, I think there's plenty of opportunities for viable businesses here. We just need to start using the right terms.

graue• 13 years ago

In a word, VMs. If you make sure you can open that NEF or CR2 file in a virtual machine, and the virtual machine image is in a standard, open format, you're set. You just have to worry about the image format becoming obsolete and not 10 or 20 different proprietary formats.

That said, I used to be a pretty prolific hobbyist musician and I haven't pulled this off myself. I have tons of old songs I can't open because they rely on a fiddly collection of old freeware plugins for freeware music apps from 11 years ago. I also have songs I can't open because they only play in a music tracker I wrote, which is open-source, but only runs on OpenBSD.

It is a tricky problem and it seems hard to tackle because the market for professional software inherently favors closed-source, which has no incentive to adopt open, non-siloed formats.

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

Even without getting to format obsolescence...

...do we know, when you store something in Glacier, does Amazon keep multiple copies, or just ONE on some unspecified media? Do they take a hash fingerprint, and compare it to the copy for bit rot corruption?

Even without getting to format obsolescence, the strategy of just keeping the bitstream reliably and verifiably retrievable for 'decades to come' is worth discussing.

hvidgaard• 13 years ago

One of the only ways to do this, is having everything stored in a fully documented format. For photos, I don't think much exist except the most naive raw format (think bitmap files, just in same colour space as NEF or the like), accompanied with an XML/JSON file with the metadata and a document describing this. Once it is needed, you have to convert it. Sounds about right you could build a business on that idea - first step is to find someone willing to pay for it though.

saidajigumi• 13 years ago

I have a serious problem with the proposal offered in TFA and most variants in this thread: it encourages bad backup policy. Critical data needs three (or more) backups. In my experience, one cloud provider can only ever be considered as being one backup no matter their technical architecture.

For example, you can't (and in the broad "you", aren't even qualified to) audit the provider for data-loss or SLA-impacting SPOFs. You just have to assume that they're there. You also take on non-technical failure modes: the provider can go out of business, get bought by an uninterested owner (think Delicious), change focus (Google Reader), or experience myriad other problems.

FWIW, the best success I've had with helping others switch to good backup policy happened once it became economically feasible to buy a new laptop and two bus-powered external drives as big as the laptop's internal storage. The externals become bootable backups, one of which can be preiodically rotated to an offsite location. This has prevented severe dataloss events for myself and others far more times than I care to count now.

famousactress10• 13 years ago

FWIW, I'm more technical than a typical user might be but I'd be very intrigued by a provider that used multiple cloud service and gave me the keys to the underlying S3 buckets (or whatever) so I could independently verify. That's probly a more valuable idea to a company selling backup to nerds though, I guess.

peteforde2• 13 years ago

I'd use this. 100% for sure.

In fact, "a plugin for Aperture/Lightroom that backs up to Amazon Glacier" is on my idea list. Great minds think alike, fools seldom differ.

One thing I'd like to point out is that photographers are unlikely to be as cost conscious as other consumers. We put a lot of effort into taking these damn photos, and it'd be nice if I could be confident that they'd outlive me. I'm willing to pay a premium for that.

Paul12345534• 13 years ago

Currently using Crashplan to backup my photos. I copied 200+ DVDs of photos to my hard drive in numbered directories... then deleted them after I had them uploaded (Crashplan keeps deleted files if you choose that option).

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

I just need to know they are somewhere safe for decades to come.

The thing about Amazon Glacier... unless they are themselves making more than one copy, and taking hash fingerprints, and storing a couple copies of the hash fingerprints, and using it all to check for bit rot on a regular basis...

...and I don't think they're doing all (any?) of these things...

...then people are sadly going to find that their stuff _isn't_ neccesarily safe for decades to come. One copy on a single piece of media in an Amazon data center somewhere does not actually make for 'safe for decades to come'.

eurleif• 13 years ago

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/#highlights

Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. To increase durability, Amazon Glacier synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives. Unlike traditional systems which can require laborious data verification and manual repair, Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.

adelmand• 13 years ago

We (cintrexav.com - a small video conversion service provider) are building something very much like this right now. Will post here when we get to MVP in a month or so!

madao• 13 years ago

I did some on the side admin work for a Photographer once, a real big name. He was in the middle of making up exactly what this was, however he came up against the same issues everyone has. Firstly space costs money, Hardware costs alot too, not to mention bandwidth, this guy would easily do 100-200gb of photos in a couple shoots. all very high res shots (talking about for big company ads) his idea is to sell a server with a software suit that people can dump into a datacenter or at home and upload photos to it, personally I liked the idea but local storage and hardware failure + the ability to grow the storage was a real killer for his idea.. (not to mention that your playing with peoples businesses and lives if you lose those photos)

espinchi• 13 years ago

I'm helping build Photofeed, a platform that stores and organizes your private photos from your different devices in the cloud.

Photographers with the problem described in the article are within the target audience, even if we didn't implement some of the key features for them yet (e.g. storage of images in RAW format).

We'd love having some early feedback from you guys! (Didn't officially launch yet.)

VikingCoder4• 13 years ago

I just came across the Plug Kickstarter, which I think might be the basis of a viable back-up storage for professional photographers.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brai...

Specifically, the $129 level, where you get two plugs, which they claim, "to replicate your data in 2 different places." Talk two of your friends in remote parts of the country into letting you Plug in to their home networks, and this might be viable.

qq66• 13 years ago

Draft feature set:

- Local daemon running that manages this process, on PC or Mac. It can't be done solely from the browser.

- The software manages the import from the SD/CF cards, you put them all in, it sorts everything out and wipes the SD cards on the way out.

- You then use Lightroom to do whatever you're going to do. The software would do well to have a Lightroom plugin that lets you select particular images to mark as "high priority" and "low priority."

- Now the daemon uploads all of your RAWs, Lightroom metadata, and corrected JPGs to cloud storage.

- Based on your settings, these RAWs get discarded after some set amount of time (maybe immediately, maybe never), and the highest-quality JPGs are also discarded after a longer amount of time for lower-quality JPGs just in case you need a emergency backup. After 6 months you lose the raws, 1 year the highest quality JPG, 2 years the medium quality JPG, etc. You are charged per gigabyte per month so you can decide how much you care about backup. Basically offload the cognitive effort of discarding old data that isn't worth its upkeep costs anymore.

- The files are available via an API that you can use to build your own gallery/shopping cart site, with the ability to call a certain quality, PROOF watermarking, etc. on-the-fly. But the service offers a default site right there for you to do the same, that's stylable and can be implemented on your own domain.

- You can get your entire catalog shipped to you on a hard drive at any time for a few hundred dollars.

resistore• 13 years ago

Relying on only one storage provider is a little bit risky to me. I started a small desktop app for backing up my files with my family photos in mind, leveraging the properties of erasure coding and multiple dropbox/google drive services. Also adding a bit of crypto to follow the post-prism trend... Please, take a look at http://yleprovost.bitbucket.org/

prirun2• 13 years ago

I've been developing a backup program for a few years now, HashBackup, that encrypts your files locally, with your own private key, and sends them to offsite storage you control: your own Glacier or S3 account, your offsite rsync server (rsync.net for example), your Gmail or other IMAP account, an ssh server, or ftp server. www.hashbackup.com

Storage for Photographers

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