Backing up photos
Posted: 10 Feb 2008, 14:01
I have a digital camera - well, who doesn't. Of course this means that I have over 10GBytes of photos!
I have backups on DVDs that I make every now and then just in case...
But, what happens if something really bad happens like the house burns down?
I have a "fireproof" safe that I keep some backups in, but I don't really believe that DVDs stored in it would still be readable after a major fire (it is designed to keep documents such as passports safe rather than for such temperature sensitive items as DVDs).
My important personal files, and some work ones, get off-site backed up using Mozy - but this is only suitable for smallish amounts.
Well, I have now found a solution. I have written a simple shell script that can be run as a cron job overnight.
This script uses epeg to create smaller, lower quality, copies of each photo. I use --max 800 so the images are reduced such that their maximum dimension is 800 pixels. These images are not wonderful, but they are good enough for a 6" x 4" print. And more importantly they are about 10% of the size on disc. Using epeg means it only takes about 5 seconds per image - I tried ImageMagick and it took nearly an hour each image (and the quality was not significantly better)! What does that program do? They are both based on libjpeg!
The directory structure of the photo storage is duplicated in the backup set, so /Photos/2006/April/IMG_123.JPG gets backed up to /backup/Photos/2006/April/IMG_123.JPG and I just set Mozy to back up /backup rather than /Photos.
My photo backup set is now about 1Gb which is quite manageable.
I have backups on DVDs that I make every now and then just in case...
But, what happens if something really bad happens like the house burns down?
I have a "fireproof" safe that I keep some backups in, but I don't really believe that DVDs stored in it would still be readable after a major fire (it is designed to keep documents such as passports safe rather than for such temperature sensitive items as DVDs).
My important personal files, and some work ones, get off-site backed up using Mozy - but this is only suitable for smallish amounts.
Well, I have now found a solution. I have written a simple shell script that can be run as a cron job overnight.
This script uses epeg to create smaller, lower quality, copies of each photo. I use --max 800 so the images are reduced such that their maximum dimension is 800 pixels. These images are not wonderful, but they are good enough for a 6" x 4" print. And more importantly they are about 10% of the size on disc. Using epeg means it only takes about 5 seconds per image - I tried ImageMagick and it took nearly an hour each image (and the quality was not significantly better)! What does that program do? They are both based on libjpeg!
The directory structure of the photo storage is duplicated in the backup set, so /Photos/2006/April/IMG_123.JPG gets backed up to /backup/Photos/2006/April/IMG_123.JPG and I just set Mozy to back up /backup rather than /Photos.
My photo backup set is now about 1Gb which is quite manageable.