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About Andy

 

I am an avid adventurer, conservationist, teacher, and outdoor photographer whose photography celebrates the African landscape and its rich wildlife, people, and culture. My photographic safaris allow my travelers to not only enhance their understanding of photography, lighting, and wildlife, but to develop a life-long admiration for Africa ‘s beauty and culture.

Banana Republic recently used my photographs as the cornerstone of their Urban Safari campaign, and my images were seen in all 750 stores around the globe, as well as in their billboards, catalogs and annual report. I was also the winner of the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year in the ‘Wild Places’ category in 2008 and a highly commended in the ‘Creative Visions of Nature’ category in 2007.

I launched Gura Gear in 2008, in an attempt to deliver lightweight camera bags to the market. I was looking for a lightweight camera bag to hold all of my photographic gear, and there was nothing desirable on the market that suited my needs. After spending 2 years with many prototypes, the Gura Gear Kiboko bag was born. More products are now available on the Gura Gear web site.

 

 

 

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« I am headed for Alaska | Main | September Safari openings available »
Thursday
Jul202006

My Storage requirements

My library of digital images keeps growing every year at a faster rate from a space requirement standpoint, and this is mostly due to owning cameras that generate larger and larger files. So how do I store all of my data?

I have a 1 terabyte RAID5 TeraStation hard drive array, made by Buffalo Technology. It isn't a speed demon, but it gets the job done. My primary working drive is a 500GB 7200 rpm drive in my desktop workstation. All of my more recent raw images and layered .psd files are accessed on this drive. Every night these files are backed up to my RAID5 server through the use of Retrospect backup software.

Once a month I back up my RAID5 server to offline USB hard drives. These drives are in varying sizes from 160GB to 300GB in size. It takes me some manual moving around of files, because no single drive can hold enough folders that need to stay together as one cohesive group. In other words, one drive might have baby photos mixed up with African safari photos. Not optimal.

So I am revamping my entire backup strategy in the coming weeks. I plan on turning my Dell desktop workstation into a RAID server of some kind. I am also thinking of buying a 1.6TB ReadyNAS RAID5 server for an additional backup server, as my digital photo library grows by about 200GB per year (yes, you have that correct!). The ReadyNAS is apparently much faster in retrieving and saving files compared to my TeraStation solution. So my backup plan will work like this:

After a shoot, files will be transferred from my MacBook to my Dell desktop with two 500GB drives inside. On a nightly basis, these files will then be backed up to the ReadyNAS 1.6TB (1.2TB usable) server. Once a month I will backup the ReadyNAS data to the TeraStation 1TB server (750GB usable) and any additional external hard drive(s). I will then take these devices off site to a family member's house. Since my library is growing so quickly, I anticipate that the Buffalo server will only contain older shooting sessions from years past, and it is not likely that they will change at all. So my monthly off location backup will most likely only be a USB drive or two.

I am just thinking off of the top of my head, and these ideas might change while I am sketching everything out on my way to Alaska on Saturday. I will have over 7 hours to think about it!

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Reader Comments (1)

IP: 75.36.249.138EMAIL: eddieztech@yahoo.comURL: http://I have about 12 external hard drives in various sizes. I recently purchased a Drobo, and while (as you say) it's not a "speed demon", it's great for my library, and I am starting to scrape my old external drives and using them in Drobo =)

Worth a look...
November 28, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterEddieZ

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