[tobster]

Hi all,

I've been managing the computers for a photo studio for quite some time (and occasionally sweeping the floors, although I don't tell the ladies that ). We went to digital quite early on and quickly noticed that storage would be our problem for the future. We have since set up quite an extensive system with quite a big storage capacity. The biggest problem has been setting up the workflow so that storage for active projects is separate from that which holds final and finished projects. The latter is only used for archival purposes in case the client should need a photo later and of course for the photographers to access when needed. All of this is hooked up via gigabit ethernet. Data storage capacity is now totaling at about 11 TB (for active and finished projects) along with 1 TB for the workstation in the studio (for shooting directly to the hard drive). Basically the workflow is something like this:



We are pretty happy with this whole system but we are still vulnerable for a few things. The final/finished projects storage (the last in the stage) is mirrored to an old G4 in case any hard drives fail. However, we are quite worried that if there were, for example, a fire in-house all those old projects would be lost. I would ideally like to put all these on DVD disks and store them in some fireproof place elsewhere (safety deposit box for example). And finally I get to my question...

What options are there to make backups to DVD from an increasing amount of data (currently at approximately 1 TB)? It would take some effort to start up but then be done periodically (every two weeks or so) after that for whatever additions or changes there are to the final/finished projects. The system would need to accommodate some kind of cataloging of the DVDs so it would be possibly to see what is on each disk on a simple index.

I have been searching quite a bit on the net for something like this but can't really find anything suitable. So I thought I'd be best off checking here and seeing if anyone had already implemented a solution for a similar setup.

I appreciate any help or comments. If any of the above needs further explaining, please let me know...

- tobbi

[besson3c]

I don't know much about multidisc DVD burners and the hardware that would be involved to keep a queue of blank DVDs, but what you could do is create a database that stores timestamped directory readouts of some sort of burn watch directory. In this database, you could store an auto-incrementing key/integer that you could use to match up DVDs to their contents... IOW, your "27" database table would store all of the filenames for DVD #27.

Does this make sense?