backing up: photos
one of the things i’m really behind on doing is setting up a good way of backing up all of the photos i’ve taken (and will take in the future). one thing i’ve considered is using amazon’s simple storage system (s3). i have about 25GB of pictures, so unless my math is faulty, it would cost about $5/month to store and $6 (once) to upload them all.
but hey, i’m already paying $25/year for a flickr pro account, and that includes unlimited storage and bandwidth. so now it is just a matter of figuring out how to get all of my pictures over there — easy to do, unless i want to do it right.
doing it right would include synchronizing the photo titles, description, and keywords (tags) between flickr and iphoto, and dealing intelligently with the photos that i have already uploaded to flickr. there’s also the issue of photos that are edited in iphoto, where it would be nice to also have the original (unmodified) photo backed up.
maybe picturesync is much of what i want.
i still want to play with amazon s3, but i have another idea for that: email archiving.
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hey, btw, I set up a Dreamhost account purely to store backups; they offer a very competitive rate for storage (under $100 for 2 years x 200GB).
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2006/10/03/amazon-s3-vs-dreamhost/
reliability may not be quite S3 levels, but this is a backup, after all -- by definition I'll have the files somewhere else, too. ...hopefully.
Also, damn, I really need to sort out my wedding photo situation too... it's been 5 months now! :(
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I have somewhat of a similar problem, although I have 250GB of photos (roughly 65,000 total photos, about half of which are RAW files) Many of these photos have been uploaded at some time to one of my websites, and the information about their titles and captions are stored in several mysql tables. I have written a ruby script that walks my tree of photos, of which I have currently on both a FreeBSD server with gvinum software based Raid 5 and a G4 tower with mirrored software raid and about 50gb on my laptop, check their captured time stamp stored in EXIF and then check the different tables which I have combined in to one big table, for entries with similar timestamps. Once it finds a match, I use exiv2 to add IPTC titles, captions and some other info directly into the image. The only problem is that this only works with the jpg files, the RAWs need XMP sidecars which I haven't yet written the script to generate. Once I get those working, I think I am going to do the S3 thing, although I also have a flickr account, I am trusting flickr less now that they are a yahoo brand and they are forcing me to use my yahoo account.