Archving

The vast majority of photographers loath confronting the task of archiving digital imagery.

Somehow, these days, just a giant stack of teetering hard drives is the way most photographers store data. That's a scary concept to behold since one just never knows when drive number 9 simply refuses to turn on, effectively losing all the data it contains.

There is tremendous value in a well organized photo archive. Massive amounts of energy go into creating a single photo, therefore it's important to be sure those photos will be around for a long time, and can easily be found when needed.

At Bitfire we employ the simple acronym C-H-O-T as a checklist to round out a solid archive solution without spending a fortune on datacenter space.

C - H - O - T

• C for Cloud - We recommend every photographer adopts a cloud computing solution to store JPG's which are keyworded to maintain a searchable database of all of your images, including the backup status and location of hi-res files. Thousands of full resolution JPG's can be stored inexpensively or for free at most cloud computing destinations.

• H for Hard Drive - Hard Drives are the fastest way to recover data. However most hard drive's contain moving parts which makes them prone to failure every 1-5 years. Bitfire has several RAID array's which are monitored constantly to safely store large amounts of data, while keeping it on active spinning disks. Buying HD's endlessly can be costly over time, but it's easily the most common form of longer term storage.
  
  
• O for Optical Disk - Optical disks include CD’s, DVD’s and Blu-Ray Disks. They are impervious to electro-magnetic interference, have no moving parts, and will last a very long time if treated properly. However if treated improperly, 1 scratch can ruin a disk. Luckily most optical disks are very inexpensive, so making multiple copies of your data doesn't break the bank.

• T for Tape - A magnetic tape technology, such as LTO-5, can store up to 3 terabytes (~3000 GB) of data per tape. Data tapes have minimal moving parts, and are rated to last 50-100 years, when stored properly. The magnetic film inside a tape is encased in plastic case which protects your data from scratches. Tapes are designed for life-long storage, by trading off slow data recovery. Average recovery window for a 100gb shoot, approximately 24 hours.
  

When the C + H + O + T methods are combined, what's left over is a powerful archiving solution with an extremely low probability of data loss. This ensures your data will be around for a very long time.