Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
It’s World Backup Day today. Yes, that’s right, there’s a World Backup Day, your annual reminder to set up a system to back up your stuff so that you don’t lose it all in the event of a hard drive crash! So, we’ve been looking around the web to find the best deals on memory cards, hard drives and SSD storage so that you can take your backup game up to the next level this year.
We’ll be updating this list throughout the day as we spot more deals, so bookmark it and keep checking back!
My friend Bill just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica and shot lots of photos and video on his iPhone, including some killer shots of breakfasts with local monkeys.
No surprise that once he got home, he checked his iPhone storage and found that it was 98% full. Just a few more snaps, and he’d be totally out of room.
His solution? “I’ll just put them all on iCloud, and then delete them off my iPhone,” he told me.
Launched in 2017, Google’s Backup and Sync app was its way of tying your desktop computer or laptop into Google Drive and Google Photos so that you could, as the name suggests, back stuff up and sync the data on your devices. That application is now being retired in favour of a new “Drive for Desktop” app. Backup and Sync will stop working completely this year, and the rollout of the new Drive for Desktop app has already begun.
It’s probably not much of a surprise. Google’s cloud stuff is always “evolving” despite what a pain it can often be for its users and it’s already changed Photos around quite a bit lately. The new Drive for Desktop application offers a couple of perks over the existing app, although some are only available if you’re part of a team.
Earlier this month, Fujifilm was a victim of a ransomware attack. Cybercriminals demanded a ransom to bring the servers back, but the company refused to pay. Instead, they relied on backups and brought everything back to where it was.
Gudsen, manufacturer of the popular Moza line of gimbals has been branching out into audio recently under the brand Mirfak. Their latest release, the Mirfak WE10 Pro is a wireless lav mic system operating at 2.4Ghz. The WE10 Pro comes with a pair of transmitters and a single receiver allowing you to go solo and record just yourself or a two-way conversation or interview with somebody else.
Both the transmitter and receiver feature a built-in battery, providing up to 5 hours of use for the transmitter and up to 8 hours for the receiver. The transmitters have both built-in mics as well as a 3.5mm lav mic socket. They also feature built-in microSD card slots (supporting up to 64GB), so that if you experience dropout or interference, you haven’t lost your recording.
Fujifilm has shattered backup storage records with a new magnetic tape backup solution that offers around 50x the capacity of current commercially available LTO-8 tapes – which hold around 12TB of uncompressed data. Fuji’s new format stands at a whopping 580TB of data storage, thanks to the development of a new magnetic particle called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe).
The new system was developed in conjunction with IBM Research and provides a single tape with enough space to store the equivalent of 120,000 DVDs. They say that the newly developed magnetic material allows for finer particles and denser storage while still offering a high level of performance.
Storing and backing up efficiently and securely more than ten years of photography is a complicate technical task.
At the center of my setup I use a Synology DS1515+ NAS, with 8 disks configured in Raid 6 for a total of 14.54TB of available storage.
I wrote about this set up a year ago, but I recently updated it to be more streamlined and secure.
In this article we will review the pros and cons of Amazon S3 Glacier vs Synology C2 to backup data from a NAS directly to the cloud. While the focus is on Synology products, if you use another brand of NAS, the Amazon Glacier backup options may still be of interest to you.
Windows 10 October 2018 Update started to roll out last week, but some users immediately reported that their documents were being deleted. There have been multiple complaints that the latest update has deleted documents, and this includes pictures, music, and videos among other things.
If you are a creative going both video and photos and amassing a huge amount of data you may have considered both a dedicated storage and maybe a cloud service.
Personally, I use a Synology 5 bay NAS as a second storage and Backblaze B2 as my cloud provider. The tip here is relevant for all providers of cloud storage though.
When I hooked up to B2, I already had about 2 Terabytes of data that I wanted to back up. Day to day operations should not be an issue, but getting that initial chunk of data up was something that needed consideration. I needed to get that data up there fast.
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