Sweet. Thanks for the referral, Mike. I put it together in about 90 seconds (first had to enable S3 in my Amazon AWS account)... and now I'm happily uploading about 100gigs of RAW files
I actually posted about JungleDisk back in July here on a similar thread. Guess since im not Mike Lane, nobody took my advice or even acknowledged my post for that matter, after researching to find an answer for everyone. Not that my stuff is all golden, but still. It took a bit of effort.
daf daf My two cents.
I personally do have a lot of interest in storing RAW files linked to jpegs. Certainly there is no need for smugmug to convert them to jpegs since we do apply correction to raw files. That actually means that correction setting should be stored together with raw files.
At the same time current possible price and upload speed do not seem good. But I think smugmug should move into this area while technology improves.
I think it is hard to an average user to estimate risks of loosing his/her photos. What I mean, it seems to me that currently it is much more likely that I will loose my data, not because of earthquake/terrorist act/fire in several locations simultaneously, but because smugmug goes bankrupt. Amazon seems much more reliably since I can see their balance sheet.
I love Amazon (as evidenced by SmugMug's use of Amazon and my shouting about it from the rooftops every chance I get), but I think it's only fair to point out that Amazon is billions of dollars in debt and has trouble delivering profitable quarters. They're a public company - go check them out.
SmugMug's into it's 3rd profitable year and has zero debt.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance - but our track record to date suggests we're unlikely to go bankrupt. I doubt Amazon will either - but that is a large pile of debt.
I actually posted about JungleDisk back in July here on a similar thread. Guess since im not Mike Lane, nobody took my advice or even acknowledged my post for that matter, after researching to find an answer for everyone. Not that my stuff is all golden, but still. It took a bit of effort.
Oh well. Is this thing on? *tap tap tap*
Hi Kerry, I guess I wasn't ready for it in July, and so I didn't post about it. Thanks for posting!
I don't shoot RAW, but I can imagine how cool it would be for people who shoot RAW+JPEG to upload files straight from the card and have the JPEGs handled by Smugmug, and the RAWs automagically sent off for backup at the same time.
I heard you back in July and I'm sure others did as well. Because of this service, which also allows the backup of other critical data, and the cost smugmug would have to charge, it doesn't look like smugmug should be heading down this path for RAW files. I'd much rather see them devote their time and efforts into implementing features that would benefit all smugmug users.
How many GBs of RAW do you have, for example? If it's 100GB, that would easily cost us more than $360/year in costs, leaving no profit for us.
total RAW GB about 100GB but a lot of that's rubbish, so what I actually really need backed up would be a lot less. no idea how much til i go through it all
For a RAW offering, we'd almost definitely have to move away from "unlimited" and into something metered like "100GB = $50/month". Note that I haven't calculated our real actual costs, I'm just ballparking it at this point.
my REAL back up costs (to DVD) are 10GB monthly at most (currently) so- that's about, £1 a month. if i bought a HD to back up I guess it costs about £1 a GB at most? (uk, mac compatible prices)
Is there still interest, even at these price points?
I doubt it, from me, at the moment.
- whilst I'd love to have the facility It would be too expensive unless I was actually making enough money from photography to cover it (tax offsets).Obviously there will be those who are, --
-but a trial would be good
One alternative is that we could store the RAWs in only one location (Amazon OR SmugMug, rather than both), which would save at least 50% of the cost. But then, of course, the reliability theoretically takes a hit. Since this is a backup option, I'd think the reliability is key.
reliability has to be key - but what if the company goes down?(Amazon, that is, NOTHING is 100% safe) Would this still be a better option than DVDs or own HD as back up?
AFAICT, the big benefit to doing this at SmugMug is that it's tied to your JPEGs so you can easily search and retrieve stuff just like you can with the rest of your photos - only in RAW. That seems pretty key to me.
THAT is the only real attraction of this idea AFAIC
FYI, if you store stuff at Amazon yourself using JungleDisk or something else, it'll cost you $15/month for 100GB. So our costs will be higher than that, depending on what people end up wanting. Is it worth it for SmugMug integration?
You need to keep pointing out the advantages to me (+people like me)as I am not up to speed with all this stuff. I think SM integration would be good - I w0ouldn't feel confident going it alone with Amazon/jungle, not just from the tecchie POV but cos i don't know them like you guys
I wouldn't trust anyone in the industry who charges less than $15/month (Carbonite's $5 is ludicrous) since I'm an expert in this field and Amazon is far and away the cheapest and least likely to go out of business doing it. Store photos somewhere cheaper at your own peril.
I actually posted about JungleDisk back in July here on a similar thread. Guess since im not Mike Lane, nobody took my advice or even acknowledged my post for that matter, after researching to find an answer for everyone. Not that my stuff is all golden, but still. It took a bit of effort.
Well, I wouldn't be interested at $100/month. But I wasn't thinking that Smugmug would store the RAW files either. Honestly, Amazon keeps multiple copies in different locations already. I'm just not that paranoid that I have to have Smugmug keep a copy too.
I was thinking that there would be a "download RAW version" link in the photo tools pulldown that would grab the file off Amazon and dump it on my HD. I'd pay a fee for the storage (Amazon's part) plus a fee for the link magic (smugmug's part) and most likely a bandwidth charge so that major up/downloading won't be commonplace.
If the cost for that is more than say $10-$20 per month, then I guess it wouldn't be feasible in my book.
PhotoShelter archives RAW
I'm surprised no one has mentioned PhotoShelter: they do support archiving RAW files. PhotoShelter is targetted more towards professional users and price by amount of storage (e.g., $50/mo for 100GB) used. However, they are a company dedicated to photo storing and selling (similar to SM) unlike JungleDisk. They store images in two geographically distributed data centers, if I recall correctly.
I gave them a trial in June but decided just to stick with my own external HD for now. Overall my experience with them was satisfactory but there were a few small issues that led me not to stick with them for now. One reason was that I found a bug in their use of ExifTool to process EXIF data from my 300D's CRW files; though they found the problem, it required an architectural change that was not deployed by the time my free trial expired. Another important note is that they did not associate RAW files with derivative or simultaneously captured JPGs. They also didn't offer an option to sort by EXIF date (even on JPGs). However, their customer service was pretty responsive (managed with a system that has trouble ticket numbers). They provided a Linux version of their uploader app (written in Java) when asked, which worked flawlessly for me.
Those of you interested in a real RAW backup solution at the price points being discussed in this thread may want to take a look. And for Don, presumably this company is making ends meet at this price point, so there must be some demand. :-)
I'm trying out a trial of Carbonite right now. I love how the software works. It just adds an item in the rightclick windows menu that says back this up. Is there any software outt ehre that would emulate this back up setup but let me specify where to back up the items? I really like the background operation of this, where any changes I make to the items selected for backup are automatically uploaded. It would eliminate the need for programs like WebDrive.
Just to be clear - my math suggests it'd have to *a lot* more than $100/year. Possibly even $100/month to do this and not lose money.
How many GBs of RAW do you have, for example? If it's 100GB, that would easily cost us more than $360/year in costs, leaving no profit for us.
I've been thinking about this proposition for awhile. I have about 200GB of RAW+JPEG files. I haven't sized the RAWs independent of the JPEGs, but they are probably at least 3/4 of it because I don't make JPEGs of everything and the JPEGs are a lot smaller. As I buy higher megapixels cameras, this is going to go up even faster and it's growing every day.
So, it looks like it's uneconomic for me to store everything in a high reliability, high availability outsourced storage facility.
But, at the same time, I still really need to find an automatic way to store all images off-site. If it's not day-to-day automatic, I just won't have a backup much of the time because I'll always be behind.
So, I'm imagining a compromise position. I've got no problem buying a 400GB external USB or Firewire hard drive that can hold everything I care about. I can from time to time make sure a full backup image is on that drive and I can store that drive at my sister's house (only a few blocks away). But, I'll probably only be good enough to keep this up-to-date every 3-6 months and I do not want to have the chance of losing 3-6 months worth of photos because the backup isn't up-to-date.
So, I'm wondering about a compromise service that automatically backs up up the most recent images I've shot or changed, but I rely on my own external hard drive for long term backup. Then, every few months (probably reminded when my online account starts to get full), I refresh the external backup and clear the online backup so it can start fresh. The best part about this for me is that within hours of downloading a shoot onto my hard disk (limited only by my upload speed), I'd have an external backup without me having to do anything. But, long term, I don't have to pay for high reliability, redundant external storage when I don't really need all those capabilities just to have a backup. I'm willing to take the risk that I won't lose the hard disk in both my sister's house and my house at the same time. I could probably make a service like this work with somewhere between 50-100GB of online storage depending upon how often I have to remember to refresh the external hard drive and clear the online account and how much I shoot in that time period.
I've been thinking about this proposition for awhile. I have about 200GB of RAW+JPEG files. I haven't sized the RAWs independent of the JPEGs, but they are probably at least 3/4 of it because I don't make JPEGs of everything and the JPEGs are a lot smaller. As I buy higher megapixels cameras, this is going to go up even faster and it's growing every day.
So, it looks like it's uneconomic for me to store everything in a high reliability, high availability outsourced storage facility.
But, at the same time, I still really need to find an automatic way to store all images off-site. If it's not day-to-day automatic, I just won't have a backup much of the time because I'll always be behind.
So, I'm imagining a compromise position. I've got no problem buying a 400GB external USB or Firewire hard drive that can hold everything I care about. I can from time to time make sure a full backup image is on that drive and I can store that drive at my sister's house (only a few blocks away). But, I'll probably only be good enough to keep this up-to-date every 3-6 months and I do not want to have the chance of losing 3-6 months worth of photos because the backup isn't up-to-date.
So, I'm wondering about a compromise service that automatically backs up up the most recent images I've shot or changed, but I rely on my own external hard drive for long term backup. Then, every few months (probably reminded when my online account starts to get full), I refresh the external backup and clear the online backup so it can start fresh. The best part about this for me is that within hours of downloading a shoot onto my hard disk (limited only by my upload speed), I'd have an external backup without me having to do anything. But, long term, I don't have to pay for high reliability, redundant external storage when I don't really need all those capabilities just to have a backup. I'm willing to take the risk that I won't lose the hard disk in both my sister's house and my house at the same time. I could probably make a service like this work with somewhere between 50-100GB of online storage depending upon how often I have to remember to refresh the external hard drive and clear the online account and how much I shoot in that time period.
If I'm understanding you right, it sounds like jungle disk is the right option for you. You would have your most recent 400GB (or whatever) stored on your external disk and when that gets full you could just upload all of that to jungle disk and start fresh on the external disk. My assumption is that the older a file gets the less likely you would be to need it so having it stored on S3 would be a good option since you wouldn't have much of a need for bandwidth. Or maybe even better, couple the S3 with a DVD archive for extra added robustness and you probably wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth at all. (except for the initial upload of course) Heck you could make the dvd and then simply mirror the dvd on s3.
Actually this sounds like just the right solution so I'll probably be doing something similar if I ever have the need.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
If I'm understanding you right, it sounds like jungle disk is the right option for you. You would have your most recent 400GB (or whatever) stored on your external disk and when that gets full you could just upload all of that to jungle disk and start fresh on the external disk. My assumption is that the older a file gets the less likely you would be to need it so having it stored on S3 would be a good option since you wouldn't have much of a need for bandwidth. Or maybe even better, couple the S3 with a DVD archive for extra added robustness and you probably wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth at all. (except for the initial upload of course) Heck you could make the dvd and then simply mirror the dvd on s3.
Actually this sounds like just the right solution so I'll probably be doing something similar if I ever have the need.
Actually, that isn't exactly what I was proposing - my idea was the other way around. JungleDisk seems a bit too expensive for me for 400GB of online storage ($65/mo) and part of the reason is that it offers way more than I really need (redundancy, high availability, lots of bandwidth, etc...). I can buy one good 400GB external drive for ~$250 which is only 4 months of JungleDisk monthly storage.
So, what I was proposing is that my manually-updated offsite, external hard disk would be the long term storage with most of the storage volume. I'd update it one every 3 months or so (retrieve it from the off-site location, plug it into my PC and update it, then put it off-site again) and I'd use JungleDisk for automatic daily backups of the data between manual updates of the hard disk so that everything was always backed up and the daily process was automatic. Then, whenever I update the hard disk and bring it current, I'd clear the storage on Jungledisk so it doesn't accumulate there and I keep the monthly storage fees low.
I have not found that DVDs work for me at all for backup. First, they just don't hold that much and are time consuming to burn, but more importantly, they don't last forever and I can't possibly spend the time to reburn old stuff. I do occasionally burn a DVD burn of a particularly important shoot right after the shoot just to make sure that no local catastrophe or mistake could lose everything before I've done something with the shoot, but I don't rely on them for long term backup.
For a RAW offering, we'd almost definitely have to move away from "unlimited" and into something metered like "100GB = $50/month". Note that I haven't calculated our real actual costs, I'm just ballparking it at this point.
Is there still interest, even at these price points?
Yes -- I think the metered approach is good, though with granularity similar to what S3 offers (e.g. based on the GB, or 10GB, something like that).
Perhaps you would be able to turn a profit by charging in blocks (so you win on unused space) as well as including some overhead over the Amazon price. Plus, shouldn't you get a better deal on the storage than a typical user? After all, you guys use of TBs of Amazon's space.
FYI, if you store stuff at Amazon yourself using JungleDisk or something else, it'll cost you $15/month for 100GB. So our costs will be higher than that, depending on what people end up wanting. Is it worth it for SmugMug integration?
Yes, because I don't just want to backup my originals -- I want to keep them organized and closely coupled to the processed JPGs which I use SM to share (SM's primary purpose).
Note 1: I wouldn't back up all my RAW images. Only the ones I really wouldn't want to lose. Too expensive to back things up which I'm reasonably ok with losing.
Note 2: I'm more interested in backing up my processed 16-bit ppRGB TIFs than RAWs in general (not that the format matters since we're only talking archival backup -- no processing, because I wouldn't want to pay SM to do that [don't need it -- I'll process them !]).
Another option for those of you looking for offsite backup is Mozy. I'm a paying customer. Their support has been great, and you can't beat the price ($5/mo for unlimited backup storage). Their software runs in the background, encrypting and backing up the files/folders you specify automatically. If you have a big starting dataset, the initial upload can take a while (1-2 GB per day for most broadband users).
Another option for those of you looking for offsite backup is Mozy. I'm a paying customer. Their support has been great, and you can't beat the price ($5/mo for unlimited backup storage). Their software runs in the background, encrypting and backing up the files/folders you specify automatically. If you have a big starting dataset, the initial upload can take a while (1-2 GB per day for most broadband users).
$5 a month sounds too good to be true. I have a feeling they would be upset if the amount one stored was too much in there eyes. I noticed on their "pro" version they charge $0.50 per GB (>3x S3). (http://mozy.com/pro/pricing)
Have you thought about a offline/nearline solution?
I would love a cheaper service then s3 that I could upload my data to but I'd have to wait 24 or 48 hours before I could get my data back if disaster strikes.
I work as a cg artist in the film industry, but my introduction to the industry was as a data wrangler. Someone who deals with the massive amount of data that is produced. we may be working with a few petabytes of data at once on very fast filers, but as shots get finished, we send them off line to tape.
Now this isn't a graveyard for old data to go to die, The tapes live inside a robot which can load them up and stick them into a bank of tape drives and load back whatever we need. The lag is anywhere from 30 min to a few hours. If a tape goes bad (it happens) the backup tape (one of 2 backups) comes in the next mornings delivery from the off site storage place.
It seems that this would be an excellent solution for the raw storage problem, It takes a fair bit of floor space and a bit of manpower The process is all automated to the point of the robot sticking in the head cleaning tape after so many thousand reads, but the queues need some prodding and there is a bit of tape management and maintenance.
The real advantages are that tape is cheap and requires almost nothing in the way of power and cooling, which as you know are the killer costs.
I know you are very happy with your sun gear, they also make great tape robots. talk to your sales rep about it.
I was wondering if someone would dig up my old thread. I would have done it, but I'm very lazy.
SmugVault looks pretty cool, I think you guys have added a lot of value on the front side. At first blush it looks like a well thought out feature.
[edit]Hey, now that I look back on my original post I am surprised that it is so close to what you eventually were able to do! I need to put my amazing predictive powers to work and go pick the winning lottery numbers or something!
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[edit]Hey, now that I look back on my original post I am surprised that it is so close to what you eventually were able to do! I need to put my amazing predictive powers to work and go pick the winning lottery numbers or something!
Maybe not predictive....but more like your wish was our command.
Maybe not predictive....but more like your wish was our command.
Point taken! I think this is a good example of why Smugmug doesn't generally announce what features you are working on. We started this discussion nearly 2 years ago. If you had said "Hey, great idea, we are working on it and will push it out soon" then you would be opening yourself up to all sorts of criticism. Instead, you internalized it and got it done when you could be sure it was done right.
Let me again thank you for all your hard work. As usual, Smugmug rocks!
Maybe not predictive....but more like your wish was our command.
One question... Any way you guys could implement something like Idee's TinEye technology to associate RAWs to JPGs via image content instead of filenames? My JPG names almost never match the original RAWs (date prepending or some such fun), so SmugVault as implemented (while su-weet) is a nonstarter for me at the moment. Keep up the innovation!
One question... Any way you guys could implement something like Idee's TinEye technology to associate RAWs to JPGs via image content instead of filenames? My JPG names almost never match the original RAWs (date prepending or some such fun), so SmugVault as implemented (while su-weet) is a nonstarter for me at the moment. Keep up the innovation!
One question... Any way you guys could implement something like Idee's TinEye technology to associate RAWs to JPGs via image content instead of filenames? My JPG names almost never match the original RAWs (date prepending or some such fun), so SmugVault as implemented (while su-weet) is a nonstarter for me at the moment. Keep up the innovation!
There is a metadata field for "original filename". If that field in the metadata is preserved in your workflow, it would not be hard for Smugmug to offer the ability to use it instead of the real filename. Then your JPEGs and RAWs would match.
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Oh well. Is this thing on? *tap tap tap*
I love Amazon (as evidenced by SmugMug's use of Amazon and my shouting about it from the rooftops every chance I get), but I think it's only fair to point out that Amazon is billions of dollars in debt and has trouble delivering profitable quarters. They're a public company - go check them out.
SmugMug's into it's 3rd profitable year and has zero debt.
Past performance is no guarantee of future performance - but our track record to date suggests we're unlikely to go bankrupt. I doubt Amazon will either - but that is a large pile of debt.
Don
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total RAW GB about 100GB but a lot of that's rubbish, so what I actually really need backed up would be a lot less. no idea how much til i go through it all
my REAL back up costs (to DVD) are 10GB monthly at most (currently) so- that's about, £1 a month. if i bought a HD to back up I guess it costs about £1 a GB at most? (uk, mac compatible prices)
I doubt it, from me, at the moment.
- whilst I'd love to have the facility It would be too expensive unless I was actually making enough money from photography to cover it (tax offsets).Obviously there will be those who are, --
-but a trial would be good
reliability has to be key - but what if the company goes down?(Amazon, that is, NOTHING is 100% safe) Would this still be a better option than DVDs or own HD as back up?
THAT is the only real attraction of this idea AFAIC
You need to keep pointing out the advantages to me (+people like me)as I am not up to speed with all this stuff. I think SM integration would be good - I w0ouldn't feel confident going it alone with Amazon/jungle, not just from the tecchie POV but cos i don't know them like you guys
makes sense, sound advice
Don[/QUOTE]
...pics..
next!
...pics..
I was thinking that there would be a "download RAW version" link in the photo tools pulldown that would grab the file off Amazon and dump it on my HD. I'd pay a fee for the storage (Amazon's part) plus a fee for the link magic (smugmug's part) and most likely a bandwidth charge so that major up/downloading won't be commonplace.
If the cost for that is more than say $10-$20 per month, then I guess it wouldn't be feasible in my book.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned PhotoShelter: they do support archiving RAW files. PhotoShelter is targetted more towards professional users and price by amount of storage (e.g., $50/mo for 100GB) used. However, they are a company dedicated to photo storing and selling (similar to SM) unlike JungleDisk. They store images in two geographically distributed data centers, if I recall correctly.
I gave them a trial in June but decided just to stick with my own external HD for now. Overall my experience with them was satisfactory but there were a few small issues that led me not to stick with them for now. One reason was that I found a bug in their use of ExifTool to process EXIF data from my 300D's CRW files; though they found the problem, it required an architectural change that was not deployed by the time my free trial expired. Another important note is that they did not associate RAW files with derivative or simultaneously captured JPGs. They also didn't offer an option to sort by EXIF date (even on JPGs). However, their customer service was pretty responsive (managed with a system that has trouble ticket numbers). They provided a Linux version of their uploader app (written in Java) when asked, which worked flawlessly for me.
Those of you interested in a real RAW backup solution at the price points being discussed in this thread may want to take a look. And for Don, presumably this company is making ends meet at this price point, so there must be some demand. :-)
I've been thinking about this proposition for awhile. I have about 200GB of RAW+JPEG files. I haven't sized the RAWs independent of the JPEGs, but they are probably at least 3/4 of it because I don't make JPEGs of everything and the JPEGs are a lot smaller. As I buy higher megapixels cameras, this is going to go up even faster and it's growing every day.
So, it looks like it's uneconomic for me to store everything in a high reliability, high availability outsourced storage facility.
But, at the same time, I still really need to find an automatic way to store all images off-site. If it's not day-to-day automatic, I just won't have a backup much of the time because I'll always be behind.
So, I'm imagining a compromise position. I've got no problem buying a 400GB external USB or Firewire hard drive that can hold everything I care about. I can from time to time make sure a full backup image is on that drive and I can store that drive at my sister's house (only a few blocks away). But, I'll probably only be good enough to keep this up-to-date every 3-6 months and I do not want to have the chance of losing 3-6 months worth of photos because the backup isn't up-to-date.
So, I'm wondering about a compromise service that automatically backs up up the most recent images I've shot or changed, but I rely on my own external hard drive for long term backup. Then, every few months (probably reminded when my online account starts to get full), I refresh the external backup and clear the online backup so it can start fresh. The best part about this for me is that within hours of downloading a shoot onto my hard disk (limited only by my upload speed), I'd have an external backup without me having to do anything. But, long term, I don't have to pay for high reliability, redundant external storage when I don't really need all those capabilities just to have a backup. I'm willing to take the risk that I won't lose the hard disk in both my sister's house and my house at the same time. I could probably make a service like this work with somewhere between 50-100GB of online storage depending upon how often I have to remember to refresh the external hard drive and clear the online account and how much I shoot in that time period.
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Actually this sounds like just the right solution so I'll probably be doing something similar if I ever have the need.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Actually, that isn't exactly what I was proposing - my idea was the other way around. JungleDisk seems a bit too expensive for me for 400GB of online storage ($65/mo) and part of the reason is that it offers way more than I really need (redundancy, high availability, lots of bandwidth, etc...). I can buy one good 400GB external drive for ~$250 which is only 4 months of JungleDisk monthly storage.
So, what I was proposing is that my manually-updated offsite, external hard disk would be the long term storage with most of the storage volume. I'd update it one every 3 months or so (retrieve it from the off-site location, plug it into my PC and update it, then put it off-site again) and I'd use JungleDisk for automatic daily backups of the data between manual updates of the hard disk so that everything was always backed up and the daily process was automatic. Then, whenever I update the hard disk and bring it current, I'd clear the storage on Jungledisk so it doesn't accumulate there and I keep the monthly storage fees low.
I have not found that DVDs work for me at all for backup. First, they just don't hold that much and are time consuming to burn, but more importantly, they don't last forever and I can't possibly spend the time to reburn old stuff. I do occasionally burn a DVD burn of a particularly important shoot right after the shoot just to make sure that no local catastrophe or mistake could lose everything before I've done something with the shoot, but I don't rely on them for long term backup.
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I found another online backup service ( http://www.protectmyphotos.com ).
The price is $40 !!!!!!!! for unlimited storage.
You download a software and manage your files like you were on Windows or OS. And then it uploads on the back.
Someone have tried, heard something about them?
It would be really nice to have the two services, galleries (smugmug) and backup service together.
Jonathan
Unfortunately, it is not $40 for unlimited storage. According to this page, it's $40/40GB.
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mmmm, you are right, I dont know where I saw unlimited.
Anyway, it would be very very nice to have some kind of fusion with the 2 kinds of services
They market it as "unlimited" as long as you don't use more than the average user (small print on purpose). It's somewhat deceptive marketing.
It would be nice to see some fusion, but it sounds like it's not the business Smugmug wants to be in.
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Yes -- I think the metered approach is good, though with granularity similar to what S3 offers (e.g. based on the GB, or 10GB, something like that).
Perhaps you would be able to turn a profit by charging in blocks (so you win on unused space) as well as including some overhead over the Amazon price. Plus, shouldn't you get a better deal on the storage than a typical user? After all, you guys use of TBs of Amazon's space.
Yes, because I don't just want to backup my originals -- I want to keep them organized and closely coupled to the processed JPGs which I use SM to share (SM's primary purpose).
Note 1: I wouldn't back up all my RAW images. Only the ones I really wouldn't want to lose. Too expensive to back things up which I'm reasonably ok with losing.
Note 2: I'm more interested in backing up my processed 16-bit ppRGB TIFs than RAWs in general (not that the format matters since we're only talking archival backup -- no processing, because I wouldn't want to pay SM to do that [don't need it -- I'll process them
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$5 a month sounds too good to be true. I have a feeling they would be upset if the amount one stored was too much in there eyes. I noticed on their "pro" version they charge $0.50 per GB (>3x S3). (http://mozy.com/pro/pricing)
Have you thought about a offline/nearline solution?
I would love a cheaper service then s3 that I could upload my data to but I'd have to wait 24 or 48 hours before I could get my data back if disaster strikes.
I work as a cg artist in the film industry, but my introduction to the industry was as a data wrangler. Someone who deals with the massive amount of data that is produced. we may be working with a few petabytes of data at once on very fast filers, but as shots get finished, we send them off line to tape.
Now this isn't a graveyard for old data to go to die, The tapes live inside a robot which can load them up and stick them into a bank of tape drives and load back whatever we need. The lag is anywhere from 30 min to a few hours. If a tape goes bad (it happens) the backup tape (one of 2 backups) comes in the next mornings delivery from the off site storage place.
It seems that this would be an excellent solution for the raw storage problem, It takes a fair bit of floor space and a bit of manpower The process is all automated to the point of the robot sticking in the head cleaning tape after so many thousand reads, but the queues need some prodding and there is a bit of tape management and maintenance.
The real advantages are that tape is cheap and requires almost nothing in the way of power and cooling, which as you know are the killer costs.
I know you are very happy with your sun gear, they also make great tape robots. talk to your sales rep about it.
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SmugVault looks pretty cool, I think you guys have added a lot of value on the front side. At first blush it looks like a well thought out feature.
[edit]Hey, now that I look back on my original post I am surprised that it is so close to what you eventually were able to do! I need to put my amazing predictive powers to work and go pick the winning lottery numbers or something!
Let me again thank you for all your hard work.
One question... Any way you guys could implement something like Idee's TinEye technology to associate RAWs to JPGs via image content instead of filenames? My JPG names almost never match the original RAWs (date prepending or some such fun), so SmugVault as implemented (while su-weet) is a nonstarter for me at the moment. Keep up the innovation!
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There is a metadata field for "original filename". If that field in the metadata is preserved in your workflow, it would not be hard for Smugmug to offer the ability to use it instead of the real filename. Then your JPEGs and RAWs would match.
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