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Storing photos

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by friendsote

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Would anyone be able to inform me if there is an external accessible site for storing photos as we have a Graphic Designer who has reams of photos and use up a lot of our network storage space. As a charity we cannot afford to keep upgrading the storage, so I need to find a way of storing her photos offsite. Do ISPs offer this facility to business customers? Any ideas welcome. Thank you.

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by senior program analyst

Im not sure about off-site storage facilities - Im pretty sure they exist but I imagine they cost you as well. I would think about using hard media storage. Have the person Burn his Graphics to a CD or DVD (make 3 copies of the burned media - 1 for instant access in his office, 1 to keep stored locally for urgent needs if his daily disk gets damaged, and then 1 in an offsite long term storage (another building of your business or other facility - same as you use for long term paperwork storage).
He would have unlimited space without using any of yours and still be accessible to them. You can also purchase USB Drives or KeyDrives, but they arent easy to have backups of. Tape Backups would work also, but they wouldnt be as quick to recover or use daily (however they would be good for the long term storage offsite.)
Burnable CDs and DVD disks are about as cheap now as the old floppy drives used to be.
If you are concerned with security then use a encryption program to encrypt the files so if the disk gets mis-placed or tried to use by an unauthorized person they cant read the files.

by hal 9000

I was at a conference recently where Kodak claimed that digital images burnt to CD/DVD started to degrade in as little as 5 years. :(

Keeping them accessible on a HDD is the way to go but with the small costs of 200 GIG HDD's now days they must have massive amounts of stored data if they are unwilling to increase the network storage space any more. A couple of NAS's should be a cheap alternative and not suck up too much bandwidth.

Col

by senior program analyst

It depends on the length of storage time. For long term storage and if you are concerned about degrading or CD/DVD going bad then your only real option is tape backup. You could do a tape backup of each years graphics from the CDs to be stored offsite. Since Tape Backp is not readily accessible for quick restores or everyday references the CDs stored locally should be sufficient especially if multiple copies are made and stored seperately.

Hard Drive Space usage for Long Term storage I don't recommend unless you are Raid Protected at best - Ive had too many hard drive crashes not to use raid protection and if this is your only copy of these files even that is risking loss.

by choppit

There's all sorts of issues with storing your data with a third party (cost, security, bandwidth, capacity). Expanding your local capacity or archiving to tape/CD/DVD may well be your most cost effective options. Have you considered using compression techniques?

by gralfus

I doubt that offsite storage could be cheaper than onsite. Hard drives are getting really cheap these days, unless you are committed to SCSI. For example you could make a small storage tower of 5x400GB drives (2 terabytes) for around $1800. Or 5x300GB for (1.5 terabytes) around $1000. This should be able to store a zillion photos. I got these prices from Newegg.com
(You might be able to get a grant for something like this. If so, get even more storage.)

by jaqui

storage means public access.
any online system can be hacked into, any webspace can hold the images, but they can be accessed publicly.

will cost to use online storage.

much better to use cdr / dvd to store them.

by jdclyde

with the price of cd's just burn them to disk.

this could archive them until they are needed.

Another option is to take an PC with a large hard drive and use it for a file server. Doesn't need to be a fast system and you could get away with win98 but I would recommend linux using Samba. It will run faster.

by hal 9000

I was thinking of a RAID setup as that is the only usefully way to work with any form of reliability.

I to have seen my fair share of dead HDD's and while we do not let any HDD out of the place once it has been installed into a computer it really just isn't an issue with us as we always seem to have a bulk supply of these things stored awaiting either destruction or if they are big enough they tend to be recycled into other applications where their speed isn't that important.

Col

by wrlang

Show your graphic designer and management the cost of storing the pics.
Find out what's really needed, delete the rest.

Compress the pics with something, although pics don't compress all that well, do some testing to see if its worth the CPU. I see something like 5-10% with zip.
Cheapest storage will be CD/DVD.
Recopy on a set timeline.

If the pics can be public, there are some websites that allow you to store some amount of pics for free.
Your ISP may offer storage for a charge.
Hotmail and yahoo offer email storage that I've used for storing noncritical stuff, but there is no garrrauntee it wont be lost.

Good luck.

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