OT nasty computer noise

The Reid said:

M is a big USB

How big?

Quoted message said:

that I couldnt scandisk till I
got more memory.

My external 300 was originally formatted as FAT32, but I think it came with
a warning not to run Scandisk on it from XP. I reformatted it to NTFS
anyway.

Quoted message said:

Where have you got all that stuff backed up?

Half of it is for backup, that's why I need more. I need one 300 just for
photos, and another to back it up. As well as archiving onto DVD as well of
course. Can't be too careful.

Am wondering whether to use removable hard trays for each drive, or put them
all in external USB cases (bit more pricey that option). Any views?

Quoted message said:

PS the box has stopped vibrating and making noise, thats either
good or very bad!

Like I said, fan noise tends to be periodic, intermittent. Maybe the
"blockage" has cleared itself?

Paul

Dave McLaughlin said:

Have you given any thought as to how on earth you back up 1TB of data
with what's available for the average PC?

Yep, a second 1TB drive! Been doing this for years now, I buy drives in
pairs and use the second to back up the first.

Quoted message said:

1TB will take about 218 x 4.7GB DVD's,

Not so bad when you do it gradually, as the data comes in (i.e. take a few
hundred photos, burn a DVD).

Quoted message said:

1500 x 700MB CD-R's, or about
728,000 x 1.44MB floppy disks :-)

Hmm... I never bothered with those high capacity floppies, I used 720s.

Quoted message said:

Scary stuff! It's not that long ago (well, about 20 yrs!) when I was
lucky enough to get one of the first new hard drives for my pc at
work, size of a house brick, with a *massive* 10MB of storage,

I could never afford one of those. My first hard drive was 270 meg, which I
chopped up into 10 partitions!

Quoted message said:

You'll never, ever fill 10MB as long as you work here,

I filled up my 300s faster than I thought I would.

Paul

Following up to Paul Saunders

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

M is a big USB

How big?

200 Gigs

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

that I couldnt scandisk till I
got more memory.

My external 300 was originally formatted as FAT32, but I think it came with
a warning not to run Scandisk on it from XP. I reformatted it to NTFS
anyway.

Quoted message said:

Where have you got all that stuff backed up?

Half of it is for backup, that's why I need more. I need one 300 just for
photos, and another to back it up. As well as archiving onto DVD as well of
course. Can't be too careful.

Indeed, backup is the biggest headache of digital. Slides I had
no easy way of copying so I just kept them safe as possible.
Digital you can back up and need to as storage fails.
Are DVDs better than CD other than for size?

The other thing I'm finding hard is assessing the images, its
much easier to play around with a box of slides on a light box
than view large files on a PC.

Quoted message said:

Am wondering whether to use removable hard trays for each drive, or put them
all in external USB cases (bit more pricey that option). Any views?

only that the more independent the better
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" <-- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" <-- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to The Reid

Quoted message said:

Indeed, backup is the biggest headache of digital.

what would be neat would be a way of making a non electronic back
up. I reckon you could design a device that could store all the
information in a TIFF file by converting it to another form that
was stable and could be viewed optically or re captured by
whatever was around at the time. I reckon you could project the
images onto a light sensitive material and store the results,
mounted in frames in trays? This could be the future!
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" <-- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" <-- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

The Reid said:

what would be neat would be a way of making a non electronic back
up.

CD, DVD?

Quoted message said:

I reckon you could design a device that could store all the
information in a TIFF file by converting it to another form that
was stable and could be viewed optically or re captured by
whatever was around at the time. I reckon you could project the
images onto a light sensitive material and store the results,
mounted in frames in trays? This could be the future!

Probably not very efficient. RAW files are compressed for a start.

Paul

The Reid said:

Are DVDs better than CD other than for size?

Shouldn't think so, but I suspect CD will become redundant before DVD. But
DVD is bound to give way to something else with better capacity, already
they're starting to appear small compared to the latest hard drives and the
latest high megapixel cameras.

One disadvantage with DVD is putting more eggs in each basket, but then
again, you need less baskets, and my digital collection is starting to take
up a lot of CD baskets.

Quoted message said:

The other thing I'm finding hard is assessing the images, its
much easier to play around with a box of slides on a light box
than view large files on a PC.

Disagree. Haven't you got a decent file viewer? ACDSee is my favourite for
speed, particularly the older versions (ACDSee Classic I think it's called)
Displays even large jpegs at lightning quick speed (I convert all my RAW
files to JPEG for convenient quick viewing). Other software is slower.

Mind you, your processor is probably a bit ancient from the sound of it, get
yourself a decent computer and you'll be amazed at the difference.

Other file viewing/cataloguing options are Photoshop Album or Photoshop
Elements - very easy to use, easy to categorise, thumnails resize on the
fly, you can display the thumbnails as large as you want (great if you have
a big monitor). In Photoshop Elements you can stack images too, so that
only one image is displayed (you can stack similar images together -
likewise you can choose to display only the images in a stack - useful for
comparison to help you choose the best).

iView MediaPro is pretty good, a more professional option, this has a
lightbox feature where you can display up to four images at the same time,
zooming into 100% with all of them to compare sharpness for example.

Breezebrowser is not bad either. With all of these you can catalogue your
RAW files, but I find that makes for very inconvenient viewing because they
have to be converted first, that's why I'm cataloguing my jpeg versions
instead, for quicker viewing.

Worth trying some of these, demo versions available for download. But it
may be your processor that's the bottleneck.

Actually, there's a free version of Photoshop Album, version 3.0 starter
edition I think. It's a cut down version (doesn't show EXIF info and is
laden with upgrade ads) but is still very useful for cataloguing and
categorising.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Am wondering whether to use removable hard trays for each drive, or
put them all in external USB cases (bit more pricey that option).
Any views?

only that the more independent the better

Well they have to be removable or external, because I can't fit too many
drives in at once, but removable is good because the backups can be stored
away from the computer, useful in case of fire or theft. In fact, all my
personal docs and photos are on removable drives.

Paul

Following up to Paul Saunders

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

The other thing I'm finding hard is assessing the images, its
much easier to play around with a box of slides on a light box
than view large files on a PC.

Disagree. Haven't you got a decent file viewer? ACDSee is my favourite for
speed, particularly the older versions (ACDSee Classic I think it's called)
Displays even large jpegs at lightning quick speed (I convert all my RAW
files to JPEG for convenient quick viewing). Other software is slower.

I looked at the TIFFs. I'll do your idea of a set of JPEGS for
selection purposes.

Quoted message said:

Mind you, your processor is probably a bit ancient from the sound of it, get
yourself a decent computer and you'll be amazed at the difference.

what! Be up to date! The thought!
(snowing again here)
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" <-- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" <-- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

The Reid said:

I looked at the TIFFs.

Yes, they would load a lot slower, especially if they were compressed tiffs.

Quoted message said:

I'll do your idea of a set of JPEGS for
selection purposes.

Yes, much more useful. I know it consumes a fair bit of extra space, but
you could always reduce the quality a bit if that's an issue. Not too much
though, because you need to be able to zoom in to check the sharpness.

My jpeg collection is currently taking up 72% of the space of my RAW
collection. I save them at the highest quality that Canon's Zoom Browser
will convert them to.

Paul

The Reid said:

PS the box has stopped vibrating and making noise, thats either
good or very bad!

Could be either. I have a fan that squeaks on starup. But it may have
stopped altogether!

Andy

Paul Saunders said:

The Reid said:

Are DVDs better than CD other than for size?

Shouldn't think so, but I suspect CD will become redundant before DVD. But
DVD is bound to give way to something else with better capacity, already
they're starting to appear small compared to the latest hard drives and the
latest high megapixel cameras.

<snip>
Not convinced of that. CDs are "good enough" for most people. But we'd
all like HDTV pictures with full surround sound - and DVD isn't good
enough for that.

Andy

Andy Champ said:

Paul Saunders said:

The Reid said:

Are DVDs better than CD other than for size?

Shouldn't think so, but I suspect CD will become redundant before DVD. But
DVD is bound to give way to something else with better capacity, already
they're starting to appear small compared to the latest hard drives and the
latest high megapixel cameras.

<snip>
Not convinced of that. CDs are "good enough" for most people. But we'd
all like HDTV pictures with full surround sound - and DVD isn't good
enough for that.

The use of CD and DVD here is as storage media for files rather than
the music and video files on commercial discs. You can decide how good
the files you put on them are.

However it is important to realise that recordable discs use different
technology to the discs you buy with music and movies on them. The
recordable discs use dye technology and are susceptible to degradation
with time in a way that the bought discs are not. It's no good keeping
an archive copy of a file if the material it is kept on isn't up to
the task.
--
Phil Cook looking north over the park to the "Westminster Gasworks"

The Reid said:

Following up to Paul Saunders

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

M is a big USB

How big?

200 Gigs

I just bought a 200 Gb for $40.00 American after rebates.
Good thing I waited for the prices to come down a bit.
The first hard drive I bought was 5Mb and $2500.00 American.

Haad I bought back then it would have been $100,000,000.00

Paul Saunders said:

Dave McLaughlin said:

Have you given any thought as to how on earth you back up 1TB of data
with what's available for the average PC?

Yep, a second 1TB drive! Been doing this for years now, I buy drives in
pairs and use the second to back up the first.

I had to address this a couple of years ago when I bought my first
digital camera and realised after a short time that most of my pictures
consisted of a single copy on a laptop hard-drive.

Since then I bought a pair of Linksys NSLU2 file servers/NAS devices.
The first has 2x160GB drives, and does an overnight copy from the first
drive to the second. It then runs a backup job to the second file server
which has a 200GB drive. The fileservers themselves are pretty
reliable, and they use external USB disks. At some point I'd like to do
backups over Broadband to another fileserver at a relative's house.

To view the pictures I use Photoshop Album which Paul mentioned as one
of the options earlier. At the moment I have just over 5000 images
catalogued. The images and catalogues are stored on the fileserver so
the Album software accesses them over the network. Performance is fine
over the wired network but is a bit slow over wireless. Still a nice
flexible solution for me, though.

Mike

Following up to Paul Saunders

Quoted message said:

In 100 years time, it'll be someone else's problem, not yours. Will your
photos be held in high enough esteem to keep doing that? Or will they end
up in a box in the attic that gets thrown out with the trash one day?

<weeps>
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" <-- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" <-- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Phil Cook said:

The use of CD and DVD here is as storage media for files rather than
the music and video files on commercial discs. You can decide how good
the files you put on them are.

However it is important to realise that recordable discs use different
technology to the discs you buy with music and movies on them. The
recordable discs use dye technology and are susceptible to degradation
with time in a way that the bought discs are not. It's no good keeping
an archive copy of a file if the material it is kept on isn't up to
the task.

Not only is the technology different between commercial "silvers",
write-once "Golds" (which are often not gold any more) and CD-RW discs,
there are several different technologies for Golds. Some of the better
ones are sold "for archiving" but I'd still want to do a check read
every couple of years, and copy them off if there was any sign of
hesitation from the drive - implying it was doing error correction of
some sort.

Andy