Cataloguing 600 gigs of images

[JDArt]

I have a drive with 600 gigs of images on it, and I'm letting ACDSee "catalogue" the files so that, I suppose, it's faster to view them. This cataloguing has been going on now for almost 24 hours. Is this normal?

[Mr. Pickles]

I'd probably say yes, it is normal. It isn't normal to have 600gb of images on one drive though.

[Rense]

JDArt,
Try to figure it out this way:
do a catalog of say 1000 photo's and measure the time.
then find out how many photo's there in the 600G.
Now it is easy to find the minimun time for cataloging the whole bunch.
(the time is minimal, because more records to catalog can mean more searching/updating of records).

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pickles

I'd probably say yes, it is normal. It isn't normal to have 600gb of images on one drive though.

Okay, but what do you do, then? This is the master copy of all my images from the past seven years. I'm not going to do something crazy like put them on DVD.

[Mr. Pickles]

You mean something crazy like, delete the bad ones?

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pickles

You mean something crazy like, delete the bad ones?

You're right. That's coming (when I'm retired). In the meantime, I have to be able to view the images quickly to know which ones to delete.

[Mr. Pickles]

All the Canon ones would have looked better if you used an Olympus, so you might as well delete them

[Jwilmot]

JDArt I would recommend that you back them up with another hard drive. You would probably be safer if you got a couple 500gig external hard drives and copy them over. As a computer tech I can not tell you how many times I have had to tell a customer that the files/pictures/ect on there drive are gone. Normally I would recommend that you back them up on DVD but as you have sooo many it would be impractical. I would recommend from this time forward that you back them up onto DVD as the moving forward cost would be spread out over time.

If buying hard drives is not possible then I would start copying picts to DVD as quickly as you can. IE: when you come across a pic or set of pics that you know your going to keep long term then copy those to a DVD. It will take a long time to back up the important pictures but at least you will have some if your HD crashes.

Johnathan

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by Jwilmot

JDArt I would recommend that you back them up with another hard drive. You would probably be safer if you got a couple 500gig external hard drives and copy them over. As a computer tech I can not tell you how many times I have had to tell a customer that the files/pictures/ect on there drive are gone.

Thanks. You are SO right. I do back them up. Here's what I've got (I wrote about this elsewhere):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817332008

I have two of these.

With this enclosure, I have FOUR drives looking like ONE HUGE DRIVE to the operating system. Really cool. Of course, if one drive dies, all the data is gone. So I have two of these boxes, one backing up the other.

That's a lot of drives, yeah, but I have NO choice. Yuck.

Anyway, it's nice to have up to 3 terrabytes per drive. Currently one of the boxes looks like 900 gigs, and another looks like 1.3 terrabytes to the OS.

And yes, I even have a third backup of this junk, as well.

[Jwilmot]

Nice, at some point I will have to get one of those. I don't have any where near as many pics as you do a few DVD's work for me. But being able to catalog the pics with software would sure make it easier to look one up.

Johnathan

[Blinky]

I tried that with 250GB of images and terminated the process after it ran for about 12 hours with no indication of progress. Is your CPU utilization very high?

[craftysnapper]

Sounds about right, ACdsee has to render a high quality thumbnail for each image and it takes a lot longer for a raw file and 600GB is a lot of images to do in ine bite!

[ascending Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Jwilmot

JDArt I would recommend that you back them up with another hard drive. You would probably be safer if you got a couple 500gig external hard drives and copy them over. As a computer tech I can not tell you how many times I have had to tell a customer that the files/pictures/ect on there drive are gone. Normally I would recommend that you back them up on DVD but as you have sooo many it would be impractical. I would recommend from this time forward that you back them up onto DVD as the moving forward cost would be spread out over time.

If buying hard drives is not possible then I would start copying picts to DVD as quickly as you can. IE: when you come across a pic or set of pics that you know your going to keep long term then copy those to a DVD. It will take a long time to back up the important pictures but at least you will have some if your HD crashes.

Johnathan

Im sorry I didnt hear that.Its like driving a Motorcycle.Its not IF you go down..but WHEN YOU DOWN.Im so relieved to hear BluRay is out there.When price drops.That will be my next back up option.And multiple copies too.

I have experienced and seen way too many DRIVE FAILURES.Internal or External Drives.When Blu Ray becomed affordable.All existing CD's and DVD's will be RE BACKED UP.Seems the larger HD's become as with memory Cards.The more prone to failure they seem to become

An ounce of prevention is worth a pund of cure.Or an expensive Data recovery Center

[pszilard]

Well my 2 cents' worth:

0) Disclaimer: I have zero financial interest in any of the products I mention below. I use them and I recommend them. That's all.

1) Software
Not all photo databases are created equal. Some might be good at something but not at others.

I have been a fan of iMatch from Photools which is an incredible value at USD60. This product has been documented to handle a photo database of 500,000 images. It can also handle off-line images and is fully relational. That means it can handle SQL style queries like "show me all beach images but not family" depending on your classification. It was/is designed by the database architect of one of Germany's largest pharmaceutical companies. It does take a bit of learning thought, but I recommended it.

2) Storage
DVD's are NOT archival. They can deteriorate or even loose content. DO a Google search on the subject and you will be amazed.

I use a RAID 5 array which is able to handle a single HD failure without loss of data. I use a s/w solution NASLITE2 which for USD 30 converted my old PC into a file server par excellence. Mine is connected via a gigabit LAN. I then back that server up to a Yellow Machine terrabyte NAS. The makers of this have unfortunately stopped trading, but the box still works. It has a unique feature called "disk scrubbing" which relocates every file periodically (e.g. every 4 months), this way files that are not edited, still never older than 4 months on the disks' magnetic surface.

3) UPS
All my PC equipment is protected by UPS (that's uninterruptable power supply NOT United Parcel Service).

4) Backup programs
Here I have two recommendations of roughly equal liking. SecondCopy 2000 v7 has excellent versioning, so that it can keep different versions of the same file name. My other favourite is SyncBackSE with it's "fastbackup" feature. Both cost USD30 and can be evaluated before buying.

Hope some of these are of some interest to the readers...

[SidinUSA]

Thanks for the info. I will have to look into this.