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Old 17-10-2017, 08:48   #1
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Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

We shoot lots of photos and in the past we put all our photos on C/D and DVD for long term storage. It has proved to be a good solution although it is rather bulky and does require an optical drive. I will probably continue to use an optical drive from some of our photos unless something better comes along.

On land, I am putting things in the cloud because cloud storage is so cheap. The downside of the cloud is that uploads are very slow. Downloads are much faster on internet than uploads, and uploads while cruising would take forever and be prohibitively expensive on wireless.

Spinning hard drives are now relatively cheap, but they can crash, and if you have important photos and videos, you might need to back them up to a second hard drive. Boats at sea sometimes have a relatively violent motion, and hard drives could be damaged by all the thumping and bumping.

Video storage is a problem because lots of devices shoot 4k video, and files get extremely large very quickly, and so storage is a problem if you do a lot of video.

During the last half of our circumnavigation we shot video with a Canon XL-1 and XL-2 which was written to tape. It was easy to store but the tapes presented their own challenges as well.

Solid state hard drives are quite expensive and they also require back up of important photos/data.

What are most cruising photographers using for photo/video storage?
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Old 17-10-2017, 09:00   #2
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

I've had two hard drives crash in the 8 months we were aboard. The folks on Totem said the AC powered hard drives seem to last longer. I think they also had a small RAID on board for their critical photos and files.
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Old 17-10-2017, 09:03   #3
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

I think compact flash and SD cards - which most small modern cameras (gopros, SLRs) will take - are your best bet. Small, stable, and cheap.
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Old 17-10-2017, 09:12   #4
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Quote:
Originally Posted by maxingout View Post
We shoot lots of photos and in the past we put all our photos on C/D and DVD for long term storage. It has proved to be a good solution although it is rather bulky and does require an optical drive. I will probably continue to use an optical drive from some of our photos unless something better comes along.

On land, I am putting things in the cloud because cloud storage is so cheap. The downside of the cloud is that uploads are very slow. Downloads are much faster on internet than uploads, and uploads while cruising would take forever and be prohibitively expensive on wireless.

Spinning hard drives are now relatively cheap, but they can crash, and if you have important photos and videos, you might need to back them up to a second hard drive. Boats at sea sometimes have a relatively violent motion, and hard drives could be damaged by all the thumping and bumping.

Video storage is a problem because lots of devices shoot 4k video, and files get extremely large very quickly, and so storage is a problem if you do a lot of video.

During the last half of our circumnavigation we shot video with a Canon XL-1 and XL-2 which was written to tape. It was easy to store but the tapes presented their own challenges as well.

Solid state hard drives are quite expensive and they also require back up of important photos/data.

What are most cruising photographers using for photo/video storage?
I'm not aware of any storage media that cannot fail. DVDs, hard drives, SSDs, thumb drives, etc. Even if you don't drop them, something can happen.

That said, redundancy is your friend - two of everything. Portable USB hard drives will still get you a nice combination of capacity, portability, size, price, and speed.

Keep one copy off the boat and somewhere safe.

Be proactive if you find that the media that you are using is becoming obsolete or has a limited life (e.g. DVD's) - transfer your bits and bytes to a newer technology.
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Old 17-10-2017, 09:20   #5
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

i have experienced flashdrive fail. oops 4 of 10 went bad or whatever that means.. unprogrammable, after they ditched all my fotos.. but i wanted to save em..hahahahaha saving pix is having no say over your storage. oops gone. start over. is only things. you know who you are and from where you came.
i keep my important hard copy pix with my mom and my sister. hard copies are land based. eeps my sister ditched my racing fotos and jw growing up ... waaahhhh..
forgetaboutit.
reboot self and continue on. you have the memories in your brain. i figger it is my own arrogance that wants to publicize the pretty i have known.
remember my gorgeous pix i used to post???? seems long ago, but has only been since 2014 i have stopped fotographing everything i see and enjoy....
when my brother died i stopped.
i may not restart.
i was sending him my bit of living to cheer him and get him to be permacrew/partner in boat. he was my shadow and best friend.
i have the memories and i donot need to convince anyone to join me in my lifestyle i so enjoy.
\occasionally i take a pic for momma. when i see something i know she would enjoy, snap... send... no worries aint mine to fuss about any longer. is hers.
the only issue i found in keeping files in puter is puter fail sucks bad. all is lost is a plagiarized title, as it is a direct quote from all who lost pix in puters. ( insert canned laughtrack here)
so i rent storage from google and from foto(b)ukit, and proceed as i do.
i have an external hard drive storing almost a terabite of wtf, prolly entertainment. this was recommended as my flashdrive fails were witnessed by a computer agile friend and neighbor and reason i went back to windoze units. he SAID his has lasted long time.
i wonder if that was asian hooker long time, mexican long time, or ny minute long time.. results pending. it is only entertainment so what do i care if they go away.
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Old 17-10-2017, 09:49   #6
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Our preference during travel is to dump everything to the laptop hard drive, back it up on a small, terabyte-sized, solid state drive, and then upload to the cloud when we're someplace with stable wifi. After uploading to the cloud, we clean out the hard drive to make more space. It has worked well so far and cloud storage can be easily shared, if desired.
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Old 17-10-2017, 11:15   #7
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

I think I will have to do periodic dumps into the cloud when there is good wifi available. That is probably the safest thing to do.

Photographs are how I do time travel.

I lived outside the USA for 28 years and my photographs give me an instant flashback to all of those adventures. I lived in Arabia for sixteen years and I camped in the desert between sixty and ninety nights a year as a family. All of those photographs take me back to one of the happiest times of my life. I would rather be driving over the dunes and setting up camp in the Empty Quarter almost more than sailing. The ocean is the biggest desert in the world, and camping in the desert is very much like sailing, except the waves of sand don't move, and you still get to drive over the waves.

My memories fade until I get out my photographs and do time travel. Suddenly, life is much better than it was just a millisecond ago.

I am a visual person, and the beauty of the world astonishes me. Photographs let me experience that beauty again and again. In addition, when I view my photos, I see things that I did not see when I took the picture. I not only get to do the time travel, but I get to see things I did not see the first time around.

For all of those reasons, my photos are important to me, and keeping them safe is a high priority.
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Old 17-10-2017, 11:28   #8
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

I have a shockproof/waterproof (I realize these are manufacturer terms and may not be 100% waterproof) external hard drive with periodic backups to Cloud when available. I also have do a back up to the laptop I'm using. I work primarily on the external hard drive because I sometimes work on my photos when I go to work so it's just easier to use the hard drive and have lightroom use the external drive for media.

I have my (not created by me as I have no rhythm) music files on mini-cards for the MP3 player with backup on the external hard drive and the laptop as well.

External hard drives are really inexpensive. I could see having two or three for backups, then periodically dumping to the web a couple times a year is getting online access was difficult.
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Old 17-10-2017, 11:38   #9
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Quote:
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For all of those reasons, my photos are important to me, and keeping them safe is a high priority.
Rightly so, after experiences like that. 😃
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Old 17-10-2017, 11:50   #10
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

MY Father in law who is a retired Pro photographer uses a NAS hardrive as his primary. He used to back up to DVD now he backs up to high capacity Compact flash as well. Keeps them in a binder by date.
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Old 17-10-2017, 12:56   #11
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Having been in the TV/Film/Video Post Production
industries for over 35 years the standard for
Digital Only assets was that if they don't exist
in 3 places THEY DO NOT EXIST
Primary
Back Up
Off-Site
Modern Movie and Video
shoots now haw a new position on set
"Data Wrangler" who's job is to immediately
make back up sets of the primary digital media.
Now i'm in the reverse industry where i convert
large amounts of paper photos to digital files
and I advise all my clients to retain the originals.
I advise all my digital photographer friends
that they should PRINT their prized and sentimental
shots to high quality paper.
You are going to be able to view paper photos
long after the storage flavor of the day is long past.
Doubt it? Go find a working Floppy drive,
Zip Drive, Jazz Drive, LTO 1 or any of the many others.
Now that you found the working hardware, find the
software drivers then
have fun trying to get it to work with today's operating
systems. Unless you are willing to make a concerted effort at Digital Asset Migration
PRINT OUT IMPORTANT TO YOU PHOTOGRAPHS
There are a bunch of subscription services that let
you send them a predetermined amount of files per month which are then printed and mailed
Not to expensive.
I just did a project with many photographs
from between 1893 and 1923
Can't imagine my descendants having such an
easy time in 100 years with pics on some antique
and long forgotten digital storage format
There is of course cloud storage but then you and
your photos are Held Hostage
Cheers
Neil
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Old 17-10-2017, 13:04   #12
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Best place is on the device that took the photos (camera/phone/laptop). It is just so much easier to edit the files and delete the millions of photos that people take. You can archive every now and then but keep in mind that if you just dump the files into a hard drive you will rarely go back to them. On the average people go back and view only one in ten photos taken. Unbelievable but true on the average. Clearly some people are more passionate about it and especially if you are a vlogger, it may benefit to get a good RAID system to manage the workflow and continue working in case of a he failure (you do a hot swap) and continue.

In the last 15 years I have not lost any photos but I keep looking only at those that are not archived. Another option is to limit yourself to a number of photos per year (say 1,000) and keep deleting the older photos until you select your best shots which can easily fit on any storage media (flash, phone, etc.). Videos are more complicated but I have found out that unless you spend time to fix the lighting and the composition and then thoroughly edit them, most videos turn out utterly boring. Quality pictures are easier to take with minimal training.
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Old 17-10-2017, 13:30   #13
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

I know it's a bother doing photo albums on the boat, and they are so heavy. But, they are also very easy to look at.

If you have the willingness to print out the best ones, and album them, that may be the best. I would also try to store on flash drives. I would expect there to be unforeseen problems with cloud storage, simply because the more complex something is, the more failure modes it has.

So I agree with the poster who wrote to print them and enjoy. Buy good inks and a good printer and enjoy.

Sorry, Zee, that you lost precious photos. The problem, though, is that we can remember erroneously, not sure that matters much in the overall scheme of things.
But I agree that ether storage is uncertain at best. If we accept that from the get-go, maybe it's easier to stomach.

Ann
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Old 17-10-2017, 14:55   #14
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Quote:
Originally Posted by Time2Go View Post
Having been in the TV/Film/Video Post Production
industries for over 35 years the standard for
Digital Only assets was that if they don't exist
in 3 places THEY DO NOT EXIST
Primary
Back Up
Off-Site
Modern Movie and Video
shoots now haw a new position on set
"Data Wrangler" who's job is to immediately
make back up sets of the primary digital media.
Now i'm in the reverse industry where i convert
large amounts of paper photos to digital files
and I advise all my clients to retain the originals.
I advise all my digital photographer friends
that they should PRINT their prized and sentimental
shots to high quality paper.
You are going to be able to view paper photos
long after the storage flavor of the day is long past.
Doubt it? Go find a working Floppy drive,
Zip Drive, Jazz Drive, LTO 1 or any of the many others.
Now that you found the working hardware, find the
software drivers then
have fun trying to get it to work with today's operating
systems. Unless you are willing to make a concerted effort at Digital Asset Migration
PRINT OUT IMPORTANT TO YOU PHOTOGRAPHS
There are a bunch of subscription services that let
you send them a predetermined amount of files per month which are then printed and mailed
Not to expensive.
I just did a project with many photographs
from between 1893 and 1923
Can't imagine my descendants having such an
easy time in 100 years with pics on some antique
and long forgotten digital storage format
There is of course cloud storage but then you and
your photos are Held Hostage
Cheers
Neil
I read an article about the daily shoots done in professional production where they make multiple copies of the video shot that day. The director of photography and the producer each get a copy to review at the end of the day. As I recall, there were at least four copies made of each days work. Hard drives were multiplying like rabbits in the outback of Australia.

When we sailed from Australia back to the USA we shot about 200 hours of video on tape, and as long as we kept the tape away from magnets, it was fairly affordable and safe. There was only one copy, but we never lost any of the tape footage. I wonder if tape is going to come back some day.

Anyway, the world is now digital, and I am going to have to come to a new agreement with my digital life. I think it's going to be multiple hard drives and solid state storage devices.

I still don't trust solid state storage devices long term. Short term storage is ok but thumb drives have significant failure rates, and I don't know what that means with solid state hard drives. Is their failure rate going to be less than thumb drives.
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Old 17-10-2017, 14:58   #15
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Re: Photo Storage on Cruising Yachts

Quote:
Originally Posted by JPA Cate View Post
I know it's a bother doing photo albums on the boat, and they are so heavy. But, they are also very easy to look at.

If you have the willingness to print out the best ones, and album them, that may be the best. I would also try to store on flash drives. I would expect there to be unforeseen problems with cloud storage, simply because the more complex something is, the more failure modes it has.

So I agree with the poster who wrote to print them and enjoy. Buy good inks and a good printer and enjoy.

Sorry, Zee, that you lost precious photos. The problem, though, is that we can remember erroneously, not sure that matters much in the overall scheme of things.
But I agree that ether storage is uncertain at best. If we accept that from the get-go, maybe it's easier to stomach.

Ann
We have put up lots of photos on the wall of our boat that never drags anchor - our house. They give us a great deal of pleasure. Printed photos are awesome, and we liberally spread them around. Time travel - I love it!
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