Monthly Archives: November 2010

Drobo S for Photographers

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Some of you may know that I had my computer and several hard drives stolen. Most of that data was backed up other places, but in a miss mash of backup drives. I had 4 external drives hooked up to my computer. A TimeMachine backup, a main images drive, a drive with video, and a drive of older images. It and the video drive were usually not switched on. They didn’t go to sleep well.

It was a big pain. I decided to upgrade. I would buy one unit that would hold all of my current space needs, and provide some redundancy. I went with a Drobo S. I got it Friday, and went to work getting setup. (It is now Sunday Night and I have it all working. My images are on the Drobo, and my Lightroom and Aperture catalogs are on my desktop and all talking to each other)

The drobo unit is not cheap, but still I was surprised to see that all cable options were included. They have a USB2, a Firewire 800, and an eSATA cable.

I was a little surprised that the drives that I ordered with the unit (Direct from Drobo) didn’t come preinstalled. They are in very generic, straight out of a bulk shipment, from Western Digital. The drives come out of their boxes and insert easily with no cables to attach. Just drop them in. The cover on the Drobo S at least, is magnetic. That’s right, no tools required to put drives in or out. I like that a lot.

I also noticed that it does have the little lock slot on the back, which I intend to use. However, because the drives are so easy to get in, there is no way to lock the drives into the device. I guess I will be hoping that the next idiots that break in, if it happens, just get frustrated when the device is locked, and leave it with the drives still inside.

I hooked the Drobo up using the supplied firewire 800 cable. I will see how that is working out speed wise over the next couple of weeks. I will store my images in the Drobo, so it will be interesting to see how it works out. I have done this in the past with USB2.0 only, but I have another option in mind. OWC has an upgrade option, where you send in your computer and they upgrade it to have an eSATA port. It would be underneath where the vents are. This might be tempting, but then I would have to be without the computer for awhile again.

I had 4 different external hard drives that my data was scattered over, 3 of which had a backup. They are all getting combined into the one Drobo. I have 5 1TB drives in this thing. With their Beyond Raid tech, I have single drive failure protection, and 3.62TB of available space for my data. Lets get going…

The first thing I did was to create two volumes. I wanted to do this to provide 1 volume for TimeMachine. If I just provided a folder, not a volume, TimeMachine would never prune and delete old files, just keep on growing. I didn’t want that. I am a little confused about what happened. You have to choose a maximum size, and you have to pick less than the available drive space in order to create multiple volumes. I picked 2TB, and it created two volumes each 2TB. I should be able to add more space later to use the extra (I have less than 4TB, remember). The part I am not sure, is that I read a post that said the second volume will be allowed to expand past that 2TB when you add larger drives. I don’t know about that. I might need to do a shuffle when that happens. It would be better if you could set separate sizes in the Drobo Dashboard config tool. I could set 2TB for TimeMachine, and 12TB or more for the other volume. If it is possible, it sure isn’t clear in the tool or the help files.

Time to copy some data.

I plugged in one of the external hard drives to my computer and started to copy files. This will take awhile.

I came back to the computer (after a night of copying data) and found everything silent. The computer had gone to sleep (set to 3h, 1 drive copy had finished successfully), the drobo lights were off, the fans were silent. Very cool. That I like to see.

I don’t have enough time with the unit right now to give any more data than this, but it seems to be working just fine. My Drobo and the 5 supplied drives are working well. I do wish I could see the temperature of the drives or get individual SMART data from them, but the DROBO is supposed to alert me if something is going wrong.

I’ll let you know more as I learn it.

Nepal Star Trails

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I took this picture only a couple of hours before I was sick for two weeks. Yup, I was up on a roof in a t-shirt freezing by the end of the shot. When I came down from the roof I was shivering uncontrollably, and shortly after that I was spending way too much time in the bathroom.

No, I don’t really think that this got me so sick. Probably the flu, or some food, or something, but I was quite sick for a few days, and didn’t really feel “fine” for about two weeks. Anyway, more on the shot:

It was taken in Nepal, in a little town called Bandipur, down a very windy road west of Kathmandu. I was on the roof of the guest house we were staying in.

This is a multiple exposure image. I was shooting at f/4.5, ISO 200, for 5 min per exposure. I took seven pictures of star trails from the same roof that a couple of hours earlier I had taken the sun setting in the mountains picture. I used a simple cable release, and a timer. I then put them together in Photoshop.

They went together quite easily. I just stacked the layers and set the blend mode of each layer to screen. That worked well for the star trails, as only the stars show through, the black sky doesn’t, and you have the trails.

I then added more canvas room to the image, put the stars at the top, the mountains at the bottom. When I had them lined up how I liked them, I had a few stars in the mountains. I then created a mask, and applied a gradient to the mask, white at the bottom , black at the top so the stars didn’t show up on the bottom. I played with that a bit until I got it looking the way I wanted.

Thats it. I have wanted to play with star trails before, but it is amazing how little light pollution it takes to ruin the image. Anyway, it was fun.

Does your Backup System Protect your A$$

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My backup system was put to the test this last week. I had my main photography desktop, an Apple iMac, it’s time machine backup drive, and two other hard drives containing pictures of family, clients, and my recent trip to India. I also had a laptop, an Apple MacBookPro with client info, documents, and some miscellaneous pictures. So, was this a disaster, or an inconvenience? How well did my backup system work? Was I prepared?

The answer isn’t quite so clear cut. It wasn’t a disaster, but I found out I didn’t have a perfect system. Lets look at what happened, and what could be done differently.

So what backups do I still have? Didn’t they take my hard drives? Well, they did take a drive that was my time machine backup for that machine. I have no backup for that. I have lost several documents. I had PDF’s of client contracts, bank statements, time sheets from my computer coding jobs, eBooks, and other things. Many of these things I didn’t have a backup for. Some of these I can re download, but some like the client contracts, I only have a paper backup. Good job I have that, but for something that important, I really needed an off site backup.

As a side note: I do have a password on my login, but none of the data was in an encrypted volume. I hadn’t anticipated that I would lose my desktop. I figured a laptop, sure, but how would I lose my desktop? This ostrich head in the sand plan isn’t a plan.

So, did I have any off site backup? Yes. But my system needs work. The hard drives that were taken consist of my RAW files, and I had off site backup of those. They are manually mirrored drives. Every week or so (I have to admit that the time could grow) I would bring the drive home from a remote location and use RSYNC to mirror the data, and then bring the drive back. I have family pictures in one off site location, and client RAW images in another. Problems with this: it relies on my getting the drives to and from home manually. I was also only syncing RAW files. That was all that was on those drives. I didn’t have off site backup for my other documents.

The laptop I got lucky on. I have a wireless backup through time machine to a Apple Time Capsule. It is not in the open, and wasn’t taken. I just got a new laptop, and was able to pull in the data from that time machine backup. I don’t keep as much on the laptop however, partly as a way to minimize loss if stolen. But at least it was up an running quickly.

I was also somewhat lucky in that I have a NAS. It was not taken, as it was not out in the open. This should be a spot that I keep much of my documents, but I still haven’t set something up to get data here easily, or automatically. It is really there so that other computers on my home network can share data. If I don’t need to share it, I haven’t been putting it there. Also, this set of drives is raided, but not remotely backed up.

So, do I have all my photography data? Sort of. There are three types of images in my system. The RAW files, the lightroom ‘developed’ files, and photoshop adjusted files. There is also other data in lightroom catalogs, and things like presets, and export and print presets are not saved in regular lightroom catalog backups.

I did have backups of my catalogs. There were also on my external drives, and I had a fairly recent version on my off site backup, so we were good there. But was it good enough? I had to postpone two client meetings where they wanted to order images, but I didn’t know what I had, and couldn’t show them the images on a computer. I didn’t have them with out my RAW images, and a Lightroom catalog, and LR3 to process them. What would have helped? Having jpeg copies of all my ‘finished’ client images. I will get back to that.

The last bit of my system is finished PDF files. Well, some of them are with my Lightroom RAW files. When I head to photoshop from Lightroom, the PSD (or TIFF) gets stored in the same folder. But, I have (had) some photoshop files that are composites, or HDR’s, or other images that didn’t start with Lightroom. Because they were not getting saved with my RAW files, they were only on my desktop (and the time machine backup that disappeared) and not synced to an off site backup drive.

As well, the presets that I had developed my self, and others that I had downloaded are gone. Same as the PDF files, no off site backups. I had recently read on the lightroom blog about syncing those to dropbox, but didn’t get around to doing that.

Ok, so what have I learned, and what can I do different? First of all, nothing at home (or an office/studio) should be considered safe. You need to have an offsite backup of everything. Just having a backup at the same location is not enough. It protects you from drive failure, but it will not protect you from theft, or a worse disaster like a fire. So how do we get all this data protected off site?

Well, lets look at where we can put our data. First would be a service like Mozy, or Carbonite (PC mag review). There are issues with using these for lots and lots of RAW files. First, they take a long long time to sync up. Second, they can get expensive. Mozy home might be free for 2gig, but move to the pro package or get 500gig of photos, and it starts to add up. I don’t think that it is a cost effective solution for a working pro and their RAW files. These systems are set up for home users with a few gig, not someone with lots and lots of gigs.

How about what ever web site you use? For example, I have a service with a web host and run my own blog, I could just put my RAW files there right? Well, look into the TOS. Most say that you can only put files there that are in support of the web site. Backups are not allowed. Hmmm… Well, how about Photoshelter? I have a Photoshelter account. How about putting full size RAW files there. Looked at their prices for add on data storage? Yikes. (Plans) I started putting full size images up there at first. Sounded like a good backup, but I was filling up my space too quickly. So, I have another idea. First, I am not sold on Photoshelter. It doesn’t work perfectly for selling events and weddings anyway. I am thinking of switching to Smugmug. One of the things they offer is unlimited storage of jpegs. So, what I am thinking is that I will export full size images of everything that I put up there, and I would put up images for every client, even if I didn’t intend to send them there. That way I always have a full size finished image backed up on the internet somewhere. I wouldn’t have been stuck like I was this week needing both my raw files and a light room catalog. I would always have images I can review with clients.

Ok, so having client images readily available is a good thing, but I don’t want to lose my raw images. I think that I will still need to follow my manual sync, off site strategy for these images. It is just too much data, and too expensive to save RAW files to the cloud. I just need to be more diligent about the backups.

Ok, what about the other documents? That is what I think I will use something like Mozy home for. I won’t have multi hundreds of gigs for regular documents. This will be an affordable use of these cloud services. This is where the presets and things should be synced. The other photoshop files need to get saved to the same drive I have my RAW files on so that they will get synced to an off site backup. Ok, so how about my NAS? It provides a great way to share documents on my network, store video, music, and provide local backup of files, but to get it backed up would be a lot of data. It will need to be a combination of manual off site hard drives for video and music, and then making sure that everything stored on the network is also on backed up into the cloud service from the computer I was using. The NAS can’t be the only location I have those files.

So, the biggest thing I learned was that I need to have off site backup for everything. That can get expensive. The solution is to figure out how to use hard drives manually, home cloud services, and a better thought out plan to make sure that everything is getting backed up.

What do you think? Are you backing everything up off site? What’s your strategy? What do you think of mine?

The Smoke has Cleared

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The smoke has cleared, so to speak. I have my images and a working computer back and functioning. I had taken a bit of a break to let my images from Nepal breathe a little, but then got a bit longer of a forced break while I got my digital darkroom back together again.

Anyway, this was taken in Kathmandu, Boudha Stupa.  This man would walk around the Stupa several times a day, waving his incense around as he walked. He is facing the front right now, where on each revolution he would stop, and recite something.

I took quite a few pictures of him. So much so, that he would recognize me, and laugh when he saw me as if to say, “Not again, why do you keep taking my picture silly man?” I have no idea what he was thinking, but he seemed good natured about it. This is one of my favorites.