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Storage and Backup - Saving Your Bacon - part 7 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Mike McNamee Published 01/12/2015

How much space do you need?
If you look at the RAID array table you see that the cost of additional security is that you get less storage than you pay for. The storage cost of files is shown in the graph and lies between £30 and £50 per TB of disc space for Red Dot enterprise NAS drives. Today a 3TB drive is probably the smallest you should consider especially if you have a high pixel count camera such as a Nikon D810 or a Canon EOS 5DS. For simpler systems you can always add storage anyway but if you are investing in a NAS box then a mistake will cost you quite a few new drives. For a photographer, picture files are far and away the most demanding but if that also includes movie footage then you need to be extra careful as they are even larger. You could review your last year and then at least treble that requirement depending upon how many years of files you wish to retain. If your storage is also to include security cameras for your business then that is another complication - nothing is going to beat sitting down with a sheet of paper and adding things up before allowing a considerable margin of slack.

For perspective we discussed the requirements with a busy wedding and GP studio (sole operator). On average they are consuming 2TB of data every six months and have retained all digital weddings back to 2005. Current weddings consume 30 to 40TB each. In this scenario it would be useful to have about a year's worth of weddings on an active NAS box but to archive data away to storage drives. Such data could probably be compressed providing good records were kept to allow for easier retrieval. We compressed 17GB of files (837 files, 63 folders, a mix of JPEG and TIFF files with some text files) to 9.66GB in 15 minutes; the compression ratios with JPEGS and PDF files are quite low compared with TIFFs and PSD files.

The overriding message from these deliberations is that you need to plan carefully and you need to build flexibility into your storage - who would have imagined at the time of the Nikon D100 with 6MP chips that we would so soon reach 50MP and then throw movie footage into the mix as well!

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1st Published 01/12/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:21

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