Photo Business News archive, 2006–2026. New writing is at Substack.

Storage, Storage, Storage

by
How much does 1 Terabyte of drive space cost? Do you care? You should! Let’s do some math here:

A D2x NEF is about 10MB, a 1Ds Mark II CR2 is about 19MB. 1TB will store about 10,000 NEF files, and just over 5,000 CR2’s. For the D200’s and 30D’s, it returns to about 10,000 files. Now, go look at your camera. They all increment their filenames, rolling over at 9999 to 0000 again. Meaning, you should go and look to see how many images you’ve made to date. For me, I’ve rolled past 9999 multiple times. Oh, you’re not shooting raw? Don’t be silly. Read this from The Luminous Landscape, or this on the Adobe site. Shooting RAW is what professionals do. Professionals who absolutely positively must have JPEG’s immediately after the shutter closes should be shooting RAW+JPEG, and just accessing the JPEG’s, and archiving it all after the fact. Keeping the RAW files gives you the fullest and most complete access to the image your camera captured.

Now, how much do you spend on portable hard drives? Let’s use one of the cheaper examples out there. The Costco Maxtor 1TB is $600, and how about the new Costco Western Digital 1TB that is $400. Not bad, eh? Well, actually, there are a few concerns. One — these drives aren’t just a single drive, inside those boxes, are multiple drives, and there’s been many problems that have rendered these multi-drive-in-one-box systems useless. Single drive enclosures for about 350GB usable space run about $200. Another problem? You’re keeping them all in one place. Either your home, or your sister’s place down the road. No big deal? Check this MSNBC article about how Katrina killed data storage, or perhaps it’s lightning, as in this CNN piece, or perhaps this Business Week article about black outs and other Summertime risks to data will convince you.

There are two types of people in this world. Those that have had a hard drive fail, and those that will. If you’re smart, you’ll take action when you are the latter, or else you will get religion when you become the former. I promise. Back in May of 2006, the SBA issued this press release which cites “A University of Texas study reports that 43 percent of companies experiencing a catastrophic data loss never recover, and half of them go out of business within two years.” Do you want to be in business after a data loss? Would you gamble 50/50 odds that you would be out of business if you had a drive fail?

Where am I going with all this? Well, realize that to be protected, you must be redundant, meaning DOUBLE whatever capacity you need, and double the cost.

Now, let’s talk about all the “free online storage” services that are out there. Global Drive wants $6,800 for 100GB of space for a year. X Drive wants $120/year for 50GB. And, Amazon.com’s storage solution S3 for other web providers who need space charges $0.15 per GB per month. That becomes $1,800 per year for 1TB, without any of the ease-of-use front end. And, ok, many of you might suggest the spaces that talk “free unlimited”, but they have bandwidth caps, so it’s near impossible to really put all that you want. How’s that? Even if you have 750KB/sec as an upspeed, they purposefully limit their downspeed to under 200kb/sec, so you’ll be forever uploading. FOREVER! ExtremeTech did a great job of reviewing six online storage services last week. Their conclusion? “If your files are very confidential, you should probably stay away…also…something to avoid if you’re a serious digital photographer who has a large collection of multi-megabyte RAW files or if you store and want quick access…”.

Enter a secure and safe Photo Shelter. Today, they announced you could access 1TB of redundant storage for an annual fee of $1k. It would cost you more than that to just buy the drives, let alone have always-on-anywhere access to the files, stored on two coasts in redundant storage facilities! Don’t need that much? For $600 a year, you can have 1/2 TB of redundant space. Sweet! Could it get any better? Yup.

Their press release tells it all – “Photographers with slow connections to the Internet, or those wishing to avoid the online uploading process entirely, can take advantage of PhotoShelter’s drive upload service. Ship a hard drive filled with images to PhotoShelter and the images will be deposited directly into their archive.” DAMN, AIN’T THAT SWEET! Check this link for more details.

Correction/Update: Commenter DJ notes my math is off by a factor of 10, and that’s 100,000 files, not 10,000. Thanks DJ! On another comment about the use of web-hosting companies at $400/yr. That’s a good idea, the challenge is in the upload to them, redundancies, and you’d be surprised at how fast you can burn through 2.5TB of data transfer. Search engine spiders load your entire site frequently looking for changes, and that all counts against your transfer cap, and they don’t have the ease-of-use front end that PS (or Digital Railroad, for that matter) has. — John
Please post your comments by clicking the link below. If you’ve got questions, please pose them in our Photo Business Forum Flickr Group Discussion Threads.

Originally published on Photo Business News & Forum on March 5, 2007. Comments are closed; this post is part of the archive.

19 thoughts on “Storage, Storage, Storage”

  1. I don’t understand why people never suggest web hosting company servers as a solution for online storage. While I don’t store images online, the web hosting company I use for my website offers 250GB of space (2.5TB data transfer) for $96/year. Of course, that includes a free domain, email, and all that other good stuff. Theoretically, someone would open 4 accounts to get 1TB of space for less than $400/year. They also have a “business hosting” plan that claims “unlimited storage,” but I don’t know what that really means. Anyway, compare those prices to Photoshelter ($1360/year for 1 TB because I think there’s a minimum $360/year membership fee), Global Drive ($68,000/year for 1 TB), X Drive ($2400/year for 1 TB), or Amazon S3 ($1800/year for 1 TB). Web hosting companies seem like a no brainer. Unless I’m missing something?
  2. Your maths is wrong.

    A terabyte is 1024gb or 1,048,576mb.

    Your numbers are out by a factor of 10.

    Your looking at 100’000 10mb files and 50’000 20mb files. NOT the low numbers you’ve given in the article.
  3. I’ve been using Photoshelter for years. It really is an ideal solution for a wedding photographer. Redundant storage of files at two different dataservers, website integration, so galleries look like your galleries, and GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE!.
  4. The guys ar Photoshelter/Bit Shelter know this business. Grover, Allen and crew are sharp, are the brains behind Sportsshooter and an online portfolio service.

    They host the web galleries for my AerialStock site (http://www.aerialstock.com) and I am very pleased with their service and abilities.

    Within a week, two 500 gig sata drives will be winging their way to NY for upload to their two raid servers.

    This is a good service and fairly priced. I am a happy customer with no business relationship with these guys. They are straight shooters and I feel very comfortable entrusting my files to them.

    Cameron Davidson
  5. A really great and afordable alternative for offsite backup is CrashPlan. (www.crashplan.com). I have been using it for a few weeks now, and very impressed.

    You can either pay to store your files on their servers, or you can connect a drive to a friends or your office computer offsite, and CrashPlan can backup over the internet.

    It runs in the background, is allways backing up and keeps a history of changes… very cool.

    -micah walter
  6. There’s more to storage than digital files. How do you keep control of your equipment, so it doesn’t take over your house and infringe on your family? 🙂
  7. FWIW with going the hosting route – The search engine spiders are easily blocked via a simple robots.txt file so they don’t kill your bandwidth. Also, if you never publish a link to your hosted solution, spiders will never find you. Plus many of the cheap hosting accounts don’t promise data recovery – many explicitly warn you to back up your site.

    That said, there is a lot to be said for ease of use and having a contract in place with a company who’s only job is to store data. In the end, how much is your time worth? Is saving $1000 over a couple years really worth it?
  8. I’ll second Cameron’s endorsement to PS.
    I’ve been using PS for over six months, having met Grover at Visa pour L’Image, great people, great service [how often can you say that about a web-based supplier?]
    This new service looks like they have [as ever] been thinking about what photographers [not techies] really want.
    Clver
    http://www.clive-evans.com
    [ps Hi Cameron! I’m having good fun with the big Fuji!]
  9. the question becomes what perccent of those files that you really need to have accessible at any time. We have over 4T of data and we use tape for our backups. keep online only what sells, not the fear of losing it.
  10. Talk about scare mongering, flawed, bad and biased journalism.

    1k may indeed only just buy you 1TB of HDs (depending on where you live of course) but at least you don’t have to pay for them every year once they are plugged in.

    Give everyone one good reason we should take your comments seriously when you can’t even do simple math.


    More www goobledegook.
  11. I experienced a drive failure and lost 20,000 images. I immediately signed up for Photoshelter and have never slept better. The customer support is great, I can access my archive from anywhere, and most important my images are safe.
  12. I’m using PS and even though there are litterally hundreds of improvements I would like to see, I can’t find any alternative. Native RAW support is of course a requirement and that alone eliminates most other solutions. Being able to FTP server-to-server and being able to customize the site to my own domain, design, built-in shopping features with price negotiations etc. is also a requirement for most professional photo sites.

    Also, even if u just need storage for backup, it has to be safe and use at least replication between 2 different data centers in 2 different geographical locations. This alone means that required physical storage space will be at least twice of what you upload and the replication between data centers are often just as expensive than hosting the data itself.
  13. 賃貸　中央線
    賃貸　丸ノ内線
    賃貸　新築
    賃貸　京浜東北線
    賃貸　大田区
    賃貸　北区
    賃貸　江東区
    賃貸　楽器可
    賃貸　手数料なし
    賃貸　保証人不要
    賃貸　駅5分以内
    賃貸　部屋探し
    東京　部屋探し
    デザイナーズ　賃貸
    賃貸　分譲仕様
    賃貸　中央区
    賃貸　京王線
    賃貸　東横線
    賃貸　品川
    賃貸　渋谷
    賃貸　新宿
    賃貸　杉並
    賃貸　世田谷
    賃貸　千代田区
    賃貸　池袋
    賃貸　中野
    賃貸　文京区
    賃貸　港区
    賃貸　目黒
    賃貸　ペット可
  18. （法新社倫敦四日電） 英國情色大亨芮孟的a片下載公司昨天AV片說，芮孟日成人影片前去成人網站世，sex享壽八十二歲；色情這位身av價上億的房地產開發情色電影商，曾經在倫敦推成人網站出第一場脫衣舞表av演。

    色情影片
    芮孟的財產成人影片估計成人達六億五千萬英鎊（台幣將a片近四百億），由於他名下事業大多分布在倫敦夜生活區蘇活區色情，成人因此擁有「蘇活情色視訊之王」日本av的稱號。
    部落格

    他的成人電影公司「保羅芮孟集團」旗成人網站下發行多a片種情色雜av誌，包括「Razavzav女優leavdvd」、「男性世界」以及「Mayfai情色電影r」。色情a片
    a片下載
    色情
    芮孟情色本名傑福瑞．安東尼．奎恩，父av女優親為搬運承a片包商。芮孟十五歲離開學校，矢言要在表演事部落格業留名，起先表演讀心術，後來成為巡迴歌舞雜耍表演av女優的製作情色人。


    許多評論a片家成人電影認為，他把情色表演帶進主流社會，一九五九部落格年主持破天荒的脫衣舞表演，後來成人影片更靠著在蘇活區與成人光碟倫敦西區開發房地產賺得大筆財富。


    有人形容芮孟是英國的海夫納，地位等同美國的「花花公子」創辦人海夫納。
  19. （法新社a倫敦二B十WE四日電） 「情色二零零七」情趣產品大產自二十三日起在倫敦的肯辛頓奧林匹亞展覽館舉行，倫敦人擺脫對性的保守態度踴躍參觀，許多穿皮衣與塑膠緊身衣的好色之色情徒擠進這項世界規模最大的成人生活展，估計三天展期可成人網站吸引八萬多好奇民眾參觀情色電影。

    活動計畫負責人米里根承諾：「要搞浪漫、誘惑人、玩虐待，你渴望的我們都有。」

    他說：「時髦的設計與華麗女裝，從吊飾到束腹到真人大小的雕塑，是我們由A片今年展出a片的數千件產品精選出情色的成人網站一部分，參展產品還包括時尚服飾、貼身女用內在美、鞋a片下載子、珠寶、玩具、影片、藝術、圖書及遊戲，更不要說色情性愛輔具及馬術裝備。」
    av女優
    參觀民眾遊覽兩百五十多個攤位，有性a片感服裝、玩具及情色食品，迎合各種品味。A片下載
    情色
    大舞台上表演的是美國野蠻搖滾歌手瑪莉蓮曼森的前妻─成人電影全世界頭牌情色電影脫衣舞成人電影孃黛塔范提思，這是她今年在英國唯一一場表演。

    以一九四零年代風格演出的黛塔范提思表成人影片演性感av的天堂鳥、旋轉木AV馬及羽扇等舞蹈。色情影片
    成人影片
    參展攤位有的推廣情趣用品，有的公開展示人體AV女優藝術和人體雕塑，也有情色藝術家工會成員提供建議。

Comments are closed.