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Earlier this year we saw the awesome results some friends of ours (TinyWater, Orbie Pullen, and Chung Li) had at Preston Castle, a decommissioned juvenile "rehabilitation" center for boys built in the late 1800's along the Sierra foothills. To say a few of us were envious would be putting it mildly; we loved the distressed setting and the juxtaposition of wedding dresses in a less than pristine location. So, what did we do? We unabashedly produced a shoot for ourselves to branch out and experiment. In deference to our friends, we tried not to create an exact copy and decided to go for an evening and night shoot instead.
The ladies from Beauty Mark Ink, Judy of Iridescence Bridal Couture, Christine of Outburst Flowers, and Andrew of StudioMSV joined with Chyna Darner, Jennifer Low, Laena Brandenburg, Nicole Smith, Supasit "Joe" Srisawathsak, and myself last Saturday in Ione, CA. Our beautiful models were Natasha Levitan, Kaycee Phillips, and Rizza-Belen Diaz - all from ModelMayhem. Clark's Corner Coffee House was incredibly accomodating and set aside some room for us as a makeshift salon. Thank you Megan and Andrea!
OK, this is not one huge wedding vendor ad, I promise! After a very pleasant 2 hour drive where I was tempted several times to pull over and buy some fresh cherries and strawberries, we pulled up to a charming cafe painted bright yellow :) Check out the Frigidaire plate, it was attached to a huge old walk-in wooden refrigerator. Located in a ranching community, the cafe had a wooden wall displaying the actual cattle brands of local ranchers - how cool is that? I had just seen Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay the night before and had the image of Doogie Howser's "NPH" brand fresh in my mind. BTW, the cafe is open till midnight, that's right midnight!!!, serves coffee, beer, AND wine, and offers wireless internet, nice!
Off to the castle... We arrived a bit later than anticipated but had free roam. I would totally go back to do a shoot there with a special couple. There are so many wonderful locations in and around the main building. Other photographers were present, but the place was huge and we were always able to find a wonderful spot to work. No more words, on to a small selection of images.
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I'm guilty of neglecting my blog and spending a little too much time on Facebook. Been working on a few other exciting things as well and hope to post updates very soon. In the mean time...
This wedding was submitted recently to The Knot by my friends at the very picturesque CordeValle in San Martin, a Rosewood Resort. My Real Wedding posted the images. How cool is that?
I could hardly contain the excitement last year when I got word in June that The Knot Northern California was going to publish Kalaya and Dan's wedding. I've waited for over 6 months and picked up the first issue I found at the local newstand earlier this month!
The couple decided to base the reception theme on one of their favorite pastimes - movies. Credit goes to the creative force of Gloria Wong Tritasavit from Sash and Sugar (soon to be Gloria Wong Event Design) for putting together all the details associated with this wedding and coordinating. She dressed up the already stunning Westin St. Francis. It was an awesome wedding experience and I was honored to play a role on the big day.
There are more images on theknot.com. Also, here is a link to the original wedding post.
Sorry about the long hiatus from my musings, the Holidays and some other catch up work kept me from blogging for a while.
So today we are talking about the ways you can and archive your data. There are 3 or 4 commonly accepted methods depending how complex you want to make it for yourself. The common thread is our need to maintain multiple reliable copies of a single file. You can use a RAID storage device, DVD/CDR’s, external hard drives, or remote data hosting. (please excuse my wordiness, there is alot of interesting info to cover)
RAID’s
RAID stands for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks” thus all RAID implementations require more than one hard drive to accomplish its functionality. There are several types of RAID’s the most common of which are: JBOD, 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. JBOD stands for “just a bunch of disks” and allows you to make multiple hard drives behave as they were a single drive or volume. JBOD offers no data protection, however. This is most useful when you have several small and cheap hard drives that you want to gang together. JBOD’s is less relevant these days as 1TB drives are increasingly available.
RAID0 is called “striping” which is a method of arraying data in somewhat parallel fashion between 2 drives with the benefit of faster reads and writes. The speed gain is a result of performing reads or writes simultaneously on each drive. In practical application you will never experience a 2x performance gain. Like JBOD it also offers no data redundancy.
RAID1 is referred to as “mirroring” in which one drive serves as the main drive while the second is hidden and used only to maintain an exact copy of the first. For example, with two 500GB drives you effectively only have 500GB of storage. Thus the effective capacity is 50% of the total. Losing one drive, however, will not result in any data loss. This scheme is simple and highly fault tolerant as the likelihood of two drives dying at the same time is slim.
RAID5 requires four hard drives with identical capacity to provide a useable capacity at 75% of the total. This implementation is more storage efficient but you sacrifice speed and complexity. Your data has been encoded and spread across 4 drives which can tolerate the loss of one drive while allowing you to continue operating seamlessly. RAID 5 performs a bit slower because each read/write operation requires an encode or decode step. The speed also varies depending on whether the system uses a software (cheaper) or hardware (expensive) RAID controller.
RAID6 is an extension of RAID5. Five drives are arrayed for roughly 60% capacity efficiency. This RAID level is more fault tolerate permitting 2 drives to fail while still storing your data error-free. However, this configuration is somewhat impractical for small office environments as the likelihood of 2 drive failures at the same time is slim so advantages from the extra redundancy are lost.
RAID10 is a combination of RAID0 and RAID1 that typically utilizes eight identical drives. This implementation is commonly found in corporate data centers and mid-level business servers. Data is mirrored and striped to maximize access speed and redundancy. As with RAID1 you effectively operate at 50% of total capacity. Don’t let your “green” friends know you have one of these at home unless is runs on solar panels and hamster power.
Burned Media
We are probably all familiar with DVD +/- R and CDR’s these days - virtually every computer has a multi format burner. No doubt you also know that DVD’s enjoy higher capacities than CDR’s (4+GB v. 750+MB). You have probably noticed that the two sides of these disks are colored differently. In order to store data on this media a laser burns away dye from one side during the encode or write process. The embedded silver or gold colored metal is used to reflect the laser when reading. This media is not the same as manufactured CD’s which have the data physically pressed into the actual plastic material - no dyes involved.
Writeable disks are NOT archival and generally have a useful lifespan in the 10 year range. Duration can vary depending on the storage environment. Readability depends on 3 factors: reflective material, dye chemistry, and obsolescence. Reflective materials are often alloys of aluminum which may corrode or oxide over time rendering the disk unreadable. Be weary when buying gold disks as anything can be colored gold but few materials share its stable properties. Manufactures claim gold disks are inherently archival but this is not completely true and does not account for the dye used. Dyes deteriorate over time and with exposure to UV light and heat. Again, resulting in an unreadable disk. In the photography world, archival has traditionally meant a hundred years or more - the planets would have to align for this to happen. The last item, a disk is only good so long as you have something to read it with. I challenge anyone to readily find a 5.25" floppy disk drive today. How about a 3.5" drive? Remember the 8-track tape? There will come a time when you can no longer find a drive to read that 100-year old DVD. Hmmm, even if you can find a drive, I could be likely the RAW or JPEG or TIFF formats become archaic too. Maybe we will all start using film again.
For completeness, all formats are not created equal. With DVD’s you have a choice between formats DVD-R or DVD+R. Capacities are roughly equal but data encoding algorithms are not. Suffice it to say that DVD+R has several benefits in this arena which make it a better choice for data storage. Chances are good that your drive can read both formats. If given a choice buy DVD+R's. They don't really cost much more and provide a layer of protection against loss.
Bottom line, use DVD's to make short term copies. Don't expect them to last more than a decade. Keep file copies on DVD and other storage devices. Upgrade your archive when technology changes. Do some research and invest in a reputable brand. Taiyo Yuden and TDK are well respected. These are the brands I use.
Hosted Archiving
Have you heard of services that will store your priceless wine collection in a large temperature-controlled and secured warehouse? Well, those exist for your data too. Carbonite, Iron Mountain, Mozy, and SystemSafe are some that I have found. Amazon offers this too and I'm sure Google will eventually rule cloud computing, online storage, search, fast food, and home building. Data archiving has long been the world of corporate computing and warehousing. Critical data is often bundled up late at night and transmitted to remote servers for safe keeping. One company I worked for would send DAT tapes via courier. Sometimes files are instantly available via Internet browser while others may require a more involved process. One thing you can be sure of is that you data will be kept safe. Of the above, Carbonite has been making waves and actively marketing to small businesses. Their prices seem fairly reasonable. On top of that Carbonite has no cap on the amount of data you can store. Sounds great!
How does it work? You open an account, give them your credit card, and you are ready to go. Most have a small client application that runs on your local computer and communicates with the storage company's network. From the client you can schedule regular backups, determine what files and folders to backup, view history, keep track of usage, and restore files. Of course, you will want the fastest Internet connection you can get and make sure to schedule backups to run at night. When the backups occur, the software will usually apply a loss-less compression to your files and encrypt them before transferring.
If cost is no factor, these are probably the best long-term archiving option. But keep in mind that few of us require totally secure facilities like a large bank would. One of the few drawbacks to something like this is actually getting the bulk of your data there in the first place. You will probably require weeks to upload everything because you'll probably only want to do it during periods of inactivity. Something worth mentioning is that the archiving solution is only as good as the company doing the archiving. Companies go out of business all the time so stay on top of it.What I Do
I prefer maintaining at least 2 copies of my images and usually have 3. My working copy is always on a local internal SATA hard drive. This gives me fast everyday access for tasks like making albums, enlargements, and online portfolios. Once I’ve completed editing a wedding or session, RAW and xmp files are saved to a RAID5 NAS and burned to a DVD+R for long term storage. Both require little time to obtain a needed file and are relatively safe. Perhaps if hosting costs come down even more, I might get rid of the RAID.--------
Winter Musings are monthly posts between November and February. They cover a range of topics related to wedding photography with couples and photographers in mind. I hope you will tune in next month. Comments and requests are appreciated!
Data storage seems to be a hot topic these days as RAW format files increase in size, cameras pack denser sensors, and adoption of digital capture is approaching saturation in all realms of the photography business. Issues like capacity, workflow, and processing speed are things we now have to deal with. Topics covered here will be internal versus external drives and USB/Firewire or networked storage.
Please keep in mind that a variety of factors can affect computer performance like how old your processor is, how much RAM you have, how many applications you have running simultaneously, file fragmentation, free hard drive space, and how long you have been running the same OS installation.
Internal or External?
If you like waiting around for images to load then continue using external USB or FireWire hard drives as your primary working disk. On the other hand. If you believe time is money, install internal drives and take advantage of your computer's SATA controller. Here's why. The slowest variety of SATA is spec'd to be almost 3x faster than USB2.0 and FireWire400. It is 50% faster than FireWire800. Last I checked, it is much easier finding the faster SATA II drives which is 6x and 2x faster than USB and FireWire, respectively. These figures hold even when taking into account protocol overhead which reduces the overall data rate. Unless you reguarly switch your USB drive between computers it is better to go with an internal drive.
Most computers purchased within the last 4 years have SATA controllers. You might be nervous about cracking open the computer chassis to perform the installation, but it really is easy as pie these days. All it takes is a screwdriver and the instruction manual telling you where to plug cables into the motherboard. Once powered on, format the new drive and you are ready to go. Your drive will automatically take on a lettered drive designation along side your other drive(s). An added benefit is that internal drives cost less.
NAS or USB/FireWire?
A NAS (network attached storage) is a device with one or more hard drives and (often) an embedded computer controller. Some may offer advanced features like FTP, access to files via a browser, multi user administration, streaming media services, RAID support, the list goes on. At its heart, every available consumer NAS is a basic file server meaning it provides transparent access to files that may be stored on another physical machine. The main benefits are the ability to share data between any computer on the network and the rate of transfer.
Why should you consider a NAS? There are three reasons I have a NAS. At some point your computer hard drives will fill with files you do not use frequently like 3+ year old wedding images. It is necessary to off load them somewhere safe yet accessible in case you need it for a project later on. Maybe you also want to maintain temporary backup copies while you work in case your internal hard drive should fail. You can also use the NAS to store things like documents and music files so you can access them from the workstation or laptop with swapping plugs and cables.
These devices increasingly come standard with Gigabit Ethernet ports (10x faster than standard Ethernet) which is handy when transferring large amounts of data like image files. Raw data rates approach SATA speeds which is much faster than USB. Speed is a huge motivating factor as is built in redundancy. With hard drives so cheap, you can buy a multi drive NAS that can be configured as a RAID to protect your data. There are very few USB/FireWire RAID options. More on this in the next post.
Conclusion.
Install internal SATA drives whenever possible, they will provide the best throughput for images that are actively accessed or maintained in a library like Bridge, Lightroom, or Aperture. They are also cheaper than external options. Network your workstation to a Gigabit Ethernet enabled NAS instead of using USB drives and be sure to use Gigabit Ethernet routers and switches. Configure the NAS to support Jumbo Frames to maximize network throughput.
I have decided to split this Winter Musing into two posts for November because it covers such a broad range of data-related topics. In the next post I will cover data archiving.
FYI, I am due an upgrade but run WindowsXP Pro SP2 on a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 with 3GB of RAM. I have 4 internal hard drives: 250GB for applications, temp files, and OS, 250GB for images, and two 500GB SATA I drives for currently active libraries. I also have a Lenovo T60 laptop sporting a Core2Duo, 3GB of RAM and a 100GB hard drive. NAS-wise there is a 250GB Buffalo Linkstation which I use for shared files and a 1TB Buffalo Terastation configured as a RAID5 for my image archives. I just ordered a 500GB Netgear ReadyNAS Duo which will be my new RAID1 file server. Another RAID5 is in the works too because the Terastation is running short on room.
Glossary.
Firewire (IEEE-1394). Apple's external serial bus standard intended for use with professional A/V equipment. This technology was favored for its high data rates. The two most common implementations transfer data at 400 Mb/s and 800 Mb/s.
Gigabit Ethernet. A networking standard that supports data transfers at 1Gb/s. Also known as 1000Base-T or IEEE 802.3ab.
NAS. Network attached storage which is simply mass data storage accessible via a computer network - commonly Ethernet.
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). A configuration where multiple hard drives are linked to provide a larger overall storage space and data protection. There are several versions including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10
SATA (Serial ATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). A fast internal computer data bus technology that hard drive makers have adopted and built into modern workstations. It replaces PATA, EIDE, and IDE technologies. Currently exists in 2 flavors: 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s.
USB (Universal Serial Bus). A simple and ubiquitous external attachment method for all sorts of computer peripherals like flash memory, printers, webcams, hard drives, etc. The main selling point was the ability to hot-swap a peripheral without restarting the workstation. Competes with the Firewire standard. These days most USB devices are USB 2.0 and transfer at rates of up to 480 Mb/s
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Winter Musings are monthly posts between November and February. They cover a range of topics related to wedding photography with couples and photographers in mind. I hope you will tune in next month. Comments and requests are appreciated!
Earlier this year we saw the awesome results some friends of ours (TinyWater, Orbie Pullen, and Chung Li) had at Preston Castle, a decommissioned juvenile "rehabilitation" center for boys built in the late 1800's along the Sierra foothills. To say a few of us were envious would be putting it mildly; we loved the distressed setting and the juxtaposition of wedding dresses in a less than pristine location. So, what did we do? We unabashedly produced a shoot for ourselves to branch out and experiment. In deference to our friends, we tried not to create an exact copy and decided to go for an evening and night shoot instead.
