Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

Yes, PLEASE. We run a wedding photography business, and our numbers are something like this:

- 40-60gigs shot in a weekend, need to offsite the RAWs as soon as possible. In six or seven years we've never needed offsite retrieval. Fine for it to be slow.

- Only need around 100-200g of raws locally for jobs in progress

- Once processed into final jpgs files are approx 8-10x smaller. Offsite these as well, and need access to last 1-2 yrs of jpgs randomly/sparsely w/in 1-2 days of a print order coming in

I definitely think some well thought out service that uses maybe a hybrid of glacier and S3 could be really awesome. Especially if the pain is taken out of getting the bolus 40-50g of photos "uploaded" in the first place.. We'd happily pay for a service that just sends us an external drive and a postage-paid box.. we drop it in the mail after a job and get another drive sent to us right away.

[EDIT: Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today. Today we get home, and immediately back up onto an 8-bay Drobo Pro (http://bit.ly/1diZUHD). It's a fancy proprietary RAID-like system. I think ours has 7 1TB Drives in it currently, and it's at about 70% capacity. Then we back up the same jobs to an external hard drive which gets driven offsite (used to be my office, but now that I work at home it's the in-laws place) and copied to a hard drive for permanent offsite storage. Once that happens, the cards from the camera can be cleared. After processing, the final JPGs get copied to the drobo and make it into the sneakernet offsite process as well.]

This thread is becoming great customer research for people to build this app. :)

You can all go home. I've already started.

Seriously? Got a repo we can watch? Or a blog we can follow?

[Too late to edit]

EXTRA CREDIT: Anyone who considers tackling this and finds themselves interested in the niche of wedding/event photographer should look at combining this service with shopping-cart/gallery solutions that currently exist. The marketplace for those is fucking awful. Feel free to email me, but googling will get you the big players. I just don't wanna bash them by name in a public forum. All well meaning folks I'm sure, but every one of them are terrible flash-based, no-mobile software. Do backup and gallery/print-ordering management correctly and we're a customer at four figures per year.

I appreciate the spirit of your suggestion, but might I suggest that this would be the exact wrong move for someone trying to build the ultimate long-term cold storage for photos?

Simply, they are two radically different businesses with entirely different feature sets. You might very well need both.

It would be great to build the backend and API that supports the ultimate long-term cold storage, and then use it to make the ultimate wedding photography business application.

They're not radically different—one just uses the other. You could easily do both and continue to expand the use of the backend to enable useful applications. It's ridiculous to shun this specific consumer model just because it happens to be only one way you might use the original idea.

Yes, this. Makes crazy amounts of sense. Can be two vendors, I don't care.. but whoever does cold-storage exposing an API and having a business model that supports enough margin for the other business is great, and seems totally feasible.

How much would you be willing to pay to permanently archive that 40-60 GB, assuming the system provided adequate access?

Do you want a one-time fee, or some yearly fee?

Good questions. So today, the way the math works out is we can maybe fit 25 weddings on a 1TB we pick up for 80 bucks.. so that's about three bucks, six to do it twice. We think of it as a part of the cost of a particular wedding. You could charge me 10 or 20 bucks to archive before I'd even do the math. We likely spend more in gas for most weddings. Hell, I think each wedding costs us four dollars in business cards.

If you could get me to _really_ trust your service, I'd consider up-selling permanent archives to our clients. Lots of our clients would pay 50-200 bucks for the re-assurance, I'm sure. I don't know that I'd want the ever-growing liability though (right now we contract for 1yr of backup/online-gallery, but keep everything permanently without committing to doing so).

One time or yearly fee doesn't make a ton of difference to me, but with other services we've definitely been tempted into fixed "Unlimited" pricing so that we don't have to think hard about math, or end up tempted into picking and choosing what we backup. Simpler is better.. Managing a store of assets where some are backed up and some aren't sounds like a really bad accident waiting to happen.

Unfortunately, that math doesn't work out very well. If you were to implement it yourself, those numbers sound great. But to do it as a business, I think the math there is too cut-throat.

4 TB of usable space divided by 60 GB times $20 is $1,365. That's the kind of thing a consumer or prosumer could do on their own, but it would be pretty hard to make a real business out of it...

> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today

I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up to 32 TB).

Interestingly, because these are all direct attached, BackBlaze will happily back them up offsite at ridiculously low cost if that's your thing. Initial backup of several terabytes will take several months, though.

For fast cheap offsite backups, partner with a colleague with similar storage needs who uses the same ISP via the same head end. Just backup to each other. You can enjoy near LAN latencies at maxed out link speeds. This trick will save you both time and headaches.

Finally consider a product like the CyberPower OR2220PFCRT2U (this one also blends nicely in an AV cabinet) to keep an Airport Extreme and Mac Mini along with all that storage running for about 80 minutes of power outage.

The idea of partnering w/ someone using the same ISP is interesting. It's really offsite that's the whole challenge. If it takes three days to get 60g uploaded (setting aside the nuisance of saturating our bandwidth for doing things like making Skype calls), then I effectively have close to no solution.. because during a busy season I have at least one job exposed for half of most weeks. House burns down, and I lose recent work.. which is the most important work since it hasn't been delivered.

Really, I need something that gets a copy of the images away from my home within a day to have something I'd be comfortable with.

Sounds like you need something based on mailing drives.

Or Google Fiber!!

Really, I think it makes sense for someone to prepare for the future and assume this will be feasible for upload in the not-crazy future.. unless more hobbyists keep deciding we need exponentially larger RAW files.. It's a crazy race :|

Would it be feasible to simply dupe the drive and find a secure off-site place within driving distance to store it or a storage machine, and then mail drives to glacier (Amazon will import a HDD via mail for around 100USD) as the storage machine fills?

effectively this is already what I do, except that you added a step of sending the data to AZN which doesn't help me any if the data is already offsite. Once I've driven somewhere, we're done.

I worked at a wedding photography/videography place a few years ago and we did a lower tech version of this. The owner had a storage array at the office and at home, and he'd cart an external back and forth daily. This way there were two copies of all work, and three of the most recent: one at the office, one at his home, and the most recent work (that which hasn't been delivered) on the portable drive.

If you're using a newer MacBook Pro I've seen some people swap out the disk drive bay for a 2nd SSD. This doesn't sound like much but that allows them to run a RAID 1 setup on their laptop (1 drive with a mirrored second drive).

These guys talk about doing that with a RAID 0 setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaXZVHcdGM

I import from cameras to a couple NEXTODIs on the road, then from the NEXTODI to the SSD. I don't delete from the NEXTODIs until images are all the way through to offsite backup. The SSD is not RAID, and worse, the Velociraptor runs in RAID0 for raw (pardon the pun) throughput, but I always have at least two copies on diverse systems.

I used to do that, albeit RAID 0. :) best $1200 I ever spent on 160GB hah. http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

I think your strategy has a huge flaw -

The Joplin, Missouri tornado, Moore, Oklahoma tornado, Hurricane Sandy and Katrina.

I don't think you should rely on someone who MERELY uses the same ISP. I think you need to be a thousand miles away from each other.

Until Backblaze changes their policy for direct attached storage, I'm covered as they have all my RAWs.

I also store full "originals" (JPEG only, not RAW, but at least its something) on an unlimited Pro Flickr account, again, until their policy changes.

The idea of a P2P backup solution is interesting, more so if you can hook up strangers into a massive backup network.

Of course, the challenge is to make sure the peers are online when you need the files, and for this reason the network may need 5-10gb of storage for 1gb of data to duplicate the content across multiple users.

Wuala tried to do that, but I think they have since switched to a centralized solution.

The difficulty is ensuring enough clients have a copy of the file that it won't disappear, especially with people connecting and disconnecting a lot.

Most (serious) safes are capable of withstanding a fire or a flood.

I don't have near the volume of pictures that you have (around 1.5 TB) but here's my setup: - one disk attached to the Lightroom computer, with all images on it; it's local, so it's fast - one NAS (NAS1) with a 4-disk RAID that backs up this drive (3 TB capacity) - another NAS (NAS2) with just one 3 TB disk that backs up the other NAS

On NAS2 I rotate disks; disk A is in the safe when disk B is in the NAS.

I think my setup is quite similar to yours, except driving is replaced by "going to the safe in the basement".

If a disaster happen I should have at least the disk in the safe intact, which holds the data since the last rotation; and since backups from NAS1 to NAS2 are quite fast I try to have both disks pretty much in sync (after an important shoot I back up to disk A AND disk B).

Of course I won't know if this setup is good until my house does burn down (I hope I'll never know!) but it does give me peace of mind, which is at least something ;-)

Would http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ work?

Yeah, probly. But I want a company to wrap all of it up in a nice predictable package. Dealing with understanding AWS pricing complexity alone is enough of a service to spawn healthy-margin companies.

Your happens today is very similar to mine. I'd say that I need additional offload of the RAID array (drobo in your case), while little is needed to be changed on my processing laptop

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