Digital Asset Management

Digital Asset Management is a major issue for the modern photographer. Whether you're a full time professional or a complete amateur, the images we make have real value, whether it be financial or sentimental. Anyone serious about protecting their investment should have a well considered digital asset management policy in place.

Don't say it won't happen to you! Learn from the example of Olgas Truchanas, one of Australia's most famous 20th century photographers, who lost the bulk of his images to bushfire in 1967 - a lifetime's work lost in minutes.

Given any luck, bushfire won't be an issue in your life - but almost everyone these day will be effected by media failure at some point - whether it's the all too common dead hard drive, a virus infection, or simply cheap burned CDs that start to rot away after just a few years, it will almost certainly happen to you at some point. So if you value your images, a sensible storage strategy is imperative.

A good digital asset management system will have four features :

  1. It must be safe
  2. It must be easy to use or you won't use it
  3. It must offer fast access to your files when you're working on them, and if you need them again several years down the track must not be hard
  4. It must be affordable

Possible D.A.M. strategies

At the moment, their are 5 basic, commonly used Digital Asset Management strategies - each with their own pros and cons. Here's a quick summary of the major options:

  1. Tape Drives - The classic corporate approach to data backup is to use tape drives. Old, slow, and notoriously unreliable over time, this is generally a bad idea these days. It can take ages - hours and hours of tape spooling - to retrieve a specific file you have lost. Not recommended.

  2. Removable Hard Drives - These are fast, and can actually be a surprisingly cheap option in the long term. However, they're based on moving parts, and MTBFs (Mean Time Between Failure) for single hard drives is measured in years, not decades. Leaving hard drives unused for long periods of time tends to increase the unreliability. Not recommended.

  3. Multiple disk based servers (often called RAID machines) - Can be effective, fast and relatively cheap. But it can also be complex. However modern system like the Drobo can now offer ease of use, excellent data reliability, very high storage capacities and fast access. This is our recommendation for your primary day to day storage system.

  4. Online Storage - This is in many ways an ideal solution to the problem of backup. Keep a local copy, and upload another copy to the other side of the world, for storage on a massively backed up, highly redundant disk farm. Problem is, it's *very* expensive - the bandwidth and storage costs are fine if you're just backing up a few word documents, but hundreds of megabytes of image data just costs too much. Not recommended except for your most essential files - it's just too expensive and slow for an image library

  5. Burnable Media - Probably still the best option for longer term storage. Very cheap, and easy. Burn multiple copies and store in multiple locations. The major issue here is media quality. Cheap CD and DVD media will often only last for a year or two (much like cheap inkjet paper!). However, high quality media should last upwards of 100 years. Select a good brand of media, and be a bit disciplined with your processes, and it should be easy to implement a highly safe, inexpensive, easy to use back up system. Combined with a Drobo as your primary system , you would have the best of all worlds - speed, convenience, and very high levels of safety. This is our recommendation for your longer term secondary storage system.

Our Recommended Approach

Option 3 above (the Drobo) is the best for day to day access to a large image library. It's fast, safe, and relatively inexpensive - certainly much cheaper than having a data recovery specialist try and retrieve data off a single dead hard drive. With one terabyte hard drives now only costing a few hundred dollars, for a total investment below $2000 you can add four terabytes of safe storage to your system - and that is a LOT of space!. If you like you can start off with just two drives and add more as you need it, so a simple system will cost only around $1200 and give you a huge leap forward in terms of capacity, data safety and accessibility of your image library.

However, no single electronic device can be considered completely trustworthy - you should still have a longer term strategy of backup to reliable media from Taiyo Yuden. You should burn *at least* one copy and preferably two, one of which you should store at a separate location (a friend or colleague's house is a good idea). This way, in the event of something disastrous like a fire or electrical spike that kills all your electrical appliances, you will have a reliable off-site backup of all your hard work. Just get in the habit of burning as you go and then taking the discs on regular basis to the second site - it's very easy once you start!

With these two systems in place, it is next to impossible to lose files - in seven years and terabyte upon terabyte of data, some 20000 plus files, we have never lost a single file using this approach. It is inexpensive (relative to lost time!), and very very effective.