p.2 #2 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
There are two principles that date from the management of large timesharing sites such as existed at universities and research labs in the 1970s and 1980s:
1. People want to save more than they really need to, “just in case”, or simply because they can’t be bothered working out what should be deleted. If you implement scarcity like disc space quotas (within reason) the amount stored reduces with no actual data loss.
2. You need to provide different levels of size vs. speed of access. For example, there was often an archiving facility where you could queue a file to be removed to tape, from where it could later be retrieved with a day or so’s notice.
While the technology has changed, the principles remain valid. Instead of tape, today’s cold storage is an offline hard drive or AWS Glacier, or maybe a NAS in high volume cases. Instead of quotas, we have high storage prices.
Applied to photography and video:
• Have a clear idea of who the audience for your photos are. This will inform you which ones you actually need to keep. I don’t keep unedited raws around at all.
• Intermediate edits in .psd or .af files should either be sent to cold storage or just deleted after a period of time. I just delete them after two months.
• Raw files for paid jobs like weddings and commercial shoots belong in cold storage once the product has been delivered to the client. Intermediate files could be archived with the raws or just deleted, depending on your business policy.
• Out-of-the-camera video clips go to cold storage once the editing is completed. I know of one YouTube creator with > 3 million subscribers who just deletes them.
p.2 #3 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
johnvanr wrote:
HCB left an archive of at least 200,000 negatives. That’s a lot of decisive moments…
Good point, but quite manageable in the digital realm.
From a personal point of view, who is going to manage your negatives and digital files? I think for most of us, the hobby stops when we do. For those that have made a name for themselves, I’m sure that your will spells out what is to become of your work. Perhaps, burial with negatives and hard drives would mimic the ancient burial with jewelry, weapons and armor.
p.2 #5 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
bwcolor wrote:
Good point, but quite manageable in the digital realm.
From a personal point of view, who is going to manage your negatives and digital files? I think for most of us, the hobby stops when we do. For those that have made a name for themselves, I’m sure that your will spells out what is to become of your work. Perhaps, burial with negatives and hard drives would mimic the ancient burial with jewelry, weapons and armor.
My daughter studies archiving. Maybe she can take my stuff on as a project…
p.2 #6 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
Two years ago, I bought some 18TB hard drives for about $330. Today the same drives are going for $900. On a per TB basis it went from $20 --> $50.
I shoot only still photos and add about 1TB per year to my archive. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup process, then I need basically 3TB per year or $150 to hold my photos. A lot more $ than before, but not much of an issue in the grand scheme of things.
Many of my files are from older sony bodies which I shot with uncompressed raw. I have been compressing these losslessly with the adobe DNG converter to save significant space (it saves about 50% vs uncompressed and maybe 20% if lossless compressed raw were available). I've also typically turn on compression in my TIF and PSB files. This also saves a lot of space at the cost of file open/save times.
p.2 #8 · What’s the future of photography and videography when storage is getting insanely expensive?
EB-1 wrote:
For example an 8TB NAS drive was $325 ten years ago but is now around $350.
Nine years ago an enterprise/high-grade 7200 RPM 10TB drive was about $420 and is over $450 now.
I have dozens of 7-10 YO 8TB He drives that were planned to be trashed, but now it seems like too much value.
I also have a goodly amount of 10TB He drives 6-9 YO.
EBH
There are higher density 12 and 14TB disks available today for the same per GB cost as 8TB. So it's a question of how we measure value. Factoring in 30% inflation over 10 years makes a difference too. An 8TB drive in 2016 cost $425 in today's dollars. That's $0.50/GB compared to $0.37/GB for a 12TB WD Blue today.
