The glitz and glamour of covering Weddings and Events is exciting and delivers a great rush the day of...but after the cake has been eaten, the whiskey has been drunk and the thunderous DJ bass booms have gone quiet all that's left is the Photog and his full CF memory cards. What happens next is just as important as the moment you compose the frame and press the shutter. File management and more importantly the back up of the files can be pretty complex and expensive, but more on that later. I have read a lot of articles online and adopted a pretty simple straightforward system which has worked for me for the past 2 seasons. Thanks to all the folks who shared their knowledge online and I hope this post can help someone out there.
Here's a gear list of what I work with in terms of file storage.
Nikon D700s
Sandisk 16gb 60MB/s Cards (4) If I need more than this I have (4) 8gb 60MB/s Card
iMac 27" w/ 1TB Hard Drive and 16GB RAM
Vantec NexStar MX Dual External Enclosure
(2) 1.5TB 3.5" Hard Drives
(2) 1TB 3.5" Hard Drives
Western Digital My Book Live 1TB
Zenfolio (Use my Referral Code :^D : UJE-8PS-P8Z )
I currently cover between 50-60 jobs a year so I haven't needed a bigger setup than this. However, I think after this season I've outgrown it and have already found some solutions that will work when I update. This is a general and quick overview of what I use and what I do. I will make a more detailed breakdown if the masses request it :^D.
Here are some images of the enclosure when closed.
Here's the enclosure open with 2 drives from 2011 that I removed. I installed new drives for 2012. Notice the Firewire 800 port. They don't seem to make this anymore. Weird. It's pretty fast but after this season I'm going Thunderbolt.
The EZ-Dock 2 will house 2010 & 2011 drives. Their backup drives are already stored away and the files are all backup to cloud storage in case I lose both drives. This drive is USB 2.0. It's slower than FW800 but it's not my main working drive so it's OK.
I used to use this drive before I got the 2. I've regulated this one to 2.5" backup duty.
I picked up this nifty little NewerTech Storadrive Case from OWC. Pretty neat for keeping things organized on your desk.
I use the WD My Book Live to back up my iMac w/ Time Machine. I set it up once and never touched it again. I got it because it's Ethernet connected and it's easy to transfer files from PC to Mac. I've ditched the PC though so now it's just a backup drive. It's cool because it backs up my main iMac drive and the space matches but I don't like that you can't partition the drive. I also backup my iMac to a cloud.
Here's the full setup behind my iMac. Yes, there's 6 drives in total. The main drives are the most important to me now. I've gradually grown into this system but by the end of this year I'm getting a 6 Bay Thunderbolt Tower to house all the drives in 1 spot. They won't be RAID, they'll work as JBOD and 3 will mirror each other.
Looks kinda messy back there but the new iMac's keep everything neat in front. I can't wait until there are drives with no wires.
So, here's the system I use after I get home from a gig.
I think that's pretty much it. I could go into further detail but that's a story for another day. As I said so far it's worked well and the combination of my backup drives and Zenfolio have already recovered some files for me. I'm anxious and curious to see how the Thunderbolt drives will work. I'm reading their gonna be super fast which means image rendering and transfers will be faster. Speed = time & we know that time = money and sanity in in this world.
Thanks for reading this and let me know what you think of my system or if you have any questions.
John & JargaPix