[?OT] Image organisation query

[Francesco Scaglioni]

Hi,

Not digikam specific.  Now that my image collection will no
longer fit on a DVD I need to restructure the collection so
that some form of logical backup can continue.  Ideally with
incremental CDs and full with DVDs.

I was considering something along the lines of

Year
----Month
---------Folder_by_event
------------------------ date_event_number.jpg (or ? convert
to PNG)

What do those more experienced than me find works best for
them?

TIA

Francesco

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[gunksta]

> What do those more experienced than me find works best for
> them?

I structure my photos by year only, and I am thinking about dropping even that
simple file-system structure. Digikam can organize your photos by date
automatically, and if you structure your tags right, you won't need to have a
filesystem organization to help you find them. I think it is unnecessarily
redundant to tag your photos AND maintain a carefully structured filesystem
organizational system. You can also have Digikam save your tags to the photo
itself, so your metadata can be recognized by other programs.

As for backing up my photos, I use a very simple system. In my root Pictures
directory I have a text file called dates.txt. In it I record the date of
every back-up I do. The latest back-up is on top, and I back-up approximately
once a month. Thus, it looks something like this.

----------------------------------------------
dates.txt
----------------------------------------------

07/04/07
06/01/07
05/02/07
04/12/07
etc.

------------------------------------------------

When I want to do a new back-up, I just do a custom search that shows me every
picture / video taken since I last did an update. I then burn these to a CD.
Make sure you maintain your directory structure, or this is a PITA. I also
make sure that I burn the latest copy of digikam3.db to the CD or DVD (media
type depends on the month). digikam3.db is where Digikam keeps track of your
tags, and other important metadata. Thus, you want to make sure you keep a
recent copy of this file saved with your pictures.

If I need to restore from my back-ups, I pull out my CD / DVD collection and
start copying pictures onto the hard-drive. This is ~1 CD per month. When I
get to the last CD,I copy the pictures AND digikam3.db, and I'm done.

I really want to buy one of those USB/FireWire external hard-drives and start
backing my photos (and other stuf) to that, rather than to CD/DVD. I hope
strigi and KDE-Neopomuk will make it easy to locate all files changed or
created past a certain date, so they can be mirrored to an external
filesystem.

That's my ten-cents.

--andy
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[Francesco Scaglioni]

What worried me about hard drives is that they have moving
parts and maybe prone to failure (I want to leave my
pictures for my children in the future).  That is why I was
looking at optical storeage (multiple copies) but needed a
structured way to do it.  Certainly a USB har-drive would be
the simplest (along with either rysnc or unison).

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[Joseph Dew]

Francesco Scaglioni wrote:

> What worried me about hard drives is that they have moving
> parts and maybe prone to failure (I want to leave my
> pictures for my children in the future).  That is why I was
> looking at optical storeage (multiple copies) but needed a
> structured way to do it.  Certainly a USB har-drive would be
> the simplest (along with either rysnc or unison).
>
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Just be careful with CDRs as they use a chemical method to store the
data and are prone to early failure aswell.

see these:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/10/1447213
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/24/1253248

It may only affect cheap nasty cds and writers, I don't know.
I treat CDRs the same as 3.5" floppies...unreliable at best and never
for anything you don't want to loose.

The other thing with a harddrive is you don't have to sit through the
load/unload regime when doing a restore.
Also a 120G external harddrive is smaller than 200 CDRs so you can take
your backup with you when you go on holiday.

The other thing with a harddrive backup is every time you do an
incremental backup...you can also to a verify on all the data so you can
pick up an error as soon as it occurs. This means you can replace the
backup drive when you still have your real data intact.

With the CD method...you don't know about a failure until you try and do
a restore.


Just some things to consider.


Joseph.
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[Volker Guelke]

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Hello Francesco,

Francesco Scaglioni schrieb:
> What worried me about hard drives is that they have moving
> parts and maybe prone to failure (I want to leave my
> pictures for my children in the future).  That is why I was
> looking at optical storeage (multiple copies) but needed a
> structured way to do it.  Certainly a USB har-drive would be
> the simplest (along with either rysnc or unison).

if you plan to archive your pictures to optical medias, remember
that normal CD-R and DVD-R are not very good regarding keeping data
over the years. IMHO CDs are good for a maxuimum of 7 years and DVDs
for a maximum of 3 years, but only if they are good burns.

I just saw special Archive-CD/DVD with a golden layer, which are
designed to keep the data for 100-200 years (i.e. from Kodak). I
personally think about using these medias to archive my pictures.

Alternativly the DVD-RAM medias should be much better regarding
their quality, than normal DVD-Medias. Currently I archive on this
kind of optical media.


To easily know which data has been archived, I organized my Pictures
based on the timestamps (year/year-month-day_albumname). This allows
to archive pictures (multiple =;-) year-archive-disks.


Beside of the archive storage of my pictures, I use an external
USB-Disk to keep my complete home-directory backuped. This helps to
easily recover deleted files or crashed harddisks, but is not
suitable for real archiving.

I use an rsync-Script managing incremental backups but keep the
backuped data in an "hard-linked" filesystem-structure, which allows
to access all backuped data through the actual incremental backup
directory, even if the last backup of an file is several weeks ago.
Additionally you have an history about several days which is
configurable.

The base version of the script, which backups remote systems through
ssh, could be find at
"http://www.heinlein-support.de/web//rsync-backup/" which is a
german website.


Regards,
Volker

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[Daniel Bauer-2]

On Sonntag, 5. August 2007, Volker Guelke wrote:

> Hello Francesco,
>
> Francesco Scaglioni schrieb:
> > What worried me about hard drives is that they have moving
> > parts and maybe prone to failure (I want to leave my
> > pictures for my children in the future).  That is why I was
> > looking at optical storeage (multiple copies) but needed a
> > structured way to do it.  Certainly a USB har-drive would be
> > the simplest (along with either rysnc or unison).
>
> if you plan to archive your pictures to optical medias, remember
> that normal CD-R and DVD-R are not very good regarding keeping data
> over the years. IMHO CDs are good for a maxuimum of 7 years and DVDs
> for a maximum of 3 years, but only if they are good burns.
>
> I just saw special Archive-CD/DVD with a golden layer, which are
> designed to keep the data for 100-200 years (i.e. from Kodak). I
> personally think about using these medias to archive my pictures.
>
> Alternativly the DVD-RAM medias should be much better regarding
> their quality, than normal DVD-Medias. Currently I archive on this
> kind of optical media.

Hello,

I have not followed the threads during the past two weeks because I was
abroad, so sorry, if my answer eventually repeats something already said...

If you really want to archive image data "secure" for the future you'll have
to expose them on a sensitive film material (i.e. negative film or
microfilm). This is still the *only* available method to conserve optical
information.

No matter what digital media you use - you can be sure that in only a few
years there will be no machines available anymore that are capable to read
and process the data. Just think on punchcards, 8 and 5.25" diskettes,
magtapes (the large reels you can see in old James Bond moovies...). Look at
your video cassettes that are almost completely replaced by DVDs, think about
the CDs, which are already a phased-out model, replaced by the DVDs that are
already in process to get replaced by new DVD standards before they even
became a real standard....

The same will happen to every new digital data carrier too, the cycle will be
even faster.

Optical information stored on sensitive film will always be restorable as long
as there is light (provided the film was stored in an appropriate
environment).

If you store digitally and want to be sure that you can still use the data in
10, 20, 30... years, you will have to re-save the data approx. every two
years, then using the latest available techniques/medias and eventually
transform them into future file formats or you'll risk to sit there one day
with a piece of plastic that nobody knows anymore what to do with it - even
if its golden and from Kodak :-)

enjoy the sunny sunday.

Daniel

--
Daniel Bauer photographer Basel Switzerland
professional photography: http://www.daniel-bauer.com
erotic art photos: http://www.bauer-nudes.com/en/linux.html
Madagascar special: http://www.fotograf-basel.ch/madagascar/
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[Volker Guelke]

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Hi Daniel,

Daniel Bauer schrieb:
> No matter what digital media you use - you can be sure that in only a few
> years there will be no machines available anymore that are capable to read
> and process the data. Just think on punchcards, 8 and 5.25" diskettes,

> If you store digitally and want to be sure that you can still use the data in
> 10, 20, 30... years, you will have to re-save the data approx. every two
> years, then using the latest available techniques/medias and eventually
> transform them into future file formats or you'll risk to sit there one day
> with a piece of plastic that nobody knows anymore what to do with it - even
> if its golden and from Kodak :-)

You are right. The quick change of media formats is a big problem
which you can only handle by converting the files into new formats
and onto new media types.

But if you are using standard CD/DVD medias it could happen, that
these loose the data faster than you are loosing the ability to
access a compatible drive. I already lost some CD-R and thank god,
they were not filled with important data.

Bye Volker
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[Eddie Armstrong]

Daniel Bauer wrote:
> <snip
> If you really want to archive image data "secure" for the future you'll have
> to expose them on a sensitive film material (i.e. negative film or
> microfilm). This is still the *only* available method to conserve optical
> information. Snip>
>  
This cannot be correct: In order to expose to film you incur all the
problems film gave in the first place
(dependence on chemical systems, grain, recalculating for exposure and
colour matching, unreliability of film stock for longterm storage.  
expensive, time-consuming, film deteriorates and requires special
storage,  dust anyone? scratches? - ah! the good old days)
with no benefits,
Recommendation:
Store on a hard drive, backup to a separate hard drive and archive
regularly to DVD or whatever.
Having two separate HDD copies insues against crashing and you can write
new dvds every so often to ensure against degradation and they are
future.proof as you can just write then to any new technology as it
comes along,
An example of this are solid state DD and bluray *IF* they prove safe
they will eventually be cheap enough to hold huge amounts of files. Just
write to them from your present system, Try that with cracked, scratched
and dusty negs!
My 2p
Eddie
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[Robert Markula]

Francesco Scaglioni schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> Not digikam specific.  Now that my image collection will no
> longer fit on a DVD I need to restructure the collection so
> that some form of logical backup can continue.  Ideally with
> incremental CDs and full with DVDs.

Hi Francesco,
I use th following tried-and-true method, which allows me to be
independent from any specific software, althought my main software is
digiKam:

The folders are categorized into year (yyyy) and album (yyyy-mm-dd album
description).
The images are formatted as 'yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss ShortImageDescription'.
Additionally, all Tags are stored as IPTC keywords.

So, I have a directory structure similiar to this:

Images
|
|- 2006
    |- 2006-09-27 Birthday party
       |- 2006-09-27 19-15-27 Birthday cake.jpg
       |- 2006-09-27 19-16-52 Me.jpg
       |- 2006-09-27 19-16-58 Group picture.jpg
    |- 2006-09-28 Visit from Jacky
       |- 2006-09-28 09-49-21 Cheese everybody.jpg
|- 2007
    |- 2007-01-01 New year
       |- 2007-01-01 07-15-03 Looking tired.jpg

This directory structure allows me to quickly find images even with the
standard filebrowser.

I do a daily backup of all my personal data - including images - on an
external harddrive using rsync.
Every month I do an additional external backup on a trusted friends'
computer in case of any catastrophic event destroing my laptop and the
external harddrive (house fire, theft etc.)
This keeps me pretty secure.

I would never trust CDs/DVDs only.

Cheers,
Ro

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