I'm the SO of a professional newborn photographer who generated somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30TB of RAW photos, backups, LR xmp sidecars, etc in the last year. JPEGs don't even register. High end DSLR RAWs are gigantic!
I'm the technical support for overall workflow, storage & backup engineer, etc, etc. I wear many hats.
Right now I've got a backup on import to a FreeNAS (BSD) filer running on a HP Micro Server. Lightroom backups go to the same filer and are synced as well. My local server rsyncs the delta every night to an identical machine at a friends' house.
This isn't perfect. The one place that isn't 100% backed up is current projects in post-production. That's an acceptable trade off for now.
The most important thing to note is that there are two kinds of photographers: Those who never lost data, and those who care about backups. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, converting members of Group A into Group B is a tough sell. Video testimonials might be a good option.
A storage service for photographers MUST be invisible to their workflow. Make it as easy to use as an egg timer. At the MOST, an addition of a single screen with sensible defaults (just click next) on photo import.
Ignoring error messages that get in their way is to be expected. Care more about their backups than they do. Send me (tech support guy) an email to notify if there haven't been backups added in X days, along with weekly reports of data usage per day -- how many photos, how large, what root folders, usage trends, etc.
An ideal installation would be automatic detection of what program they're using, what places files are stored (hint: It's not just on a local drive). Detect new file locations and back those up too.
An inexpensive (<$25) option of "only backup current projects I'm working on and anything I shot in the last month", that actually works... I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
I'm the technical support for overall workflow, storage & backup engineer, etc, etc. I wear many hats.
Right now I've got a backup on import to a FreeNAS (BSD) filer running on a HP Micro Server. Lightroom backups go to the same filer and are synced as well. My local server rsyncs the delta every night to an identical machine at a friends' house.
This isn't perfect. The one place that isn't 100% backed up is current projects in post-production. That's an acceptable trade off for now.
The most important thing to note is that there are two kinds of photographers: Those who never lost data, and those who care about backups. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, converting members of Group A into Group B is a tough sell. Video testimonials might be a good option.
A storage service for photographers MUST be invisible to their workflow. Make it as easy to use as an egg timer. At the MOST, an addition of a single screen with sensible defaults (just click next) on photo import.
Ignoring error messages that get in their way is to be expected. Care more about their backups than they do. Send me (tech support guy) an email to notify if there haven't been backups added in X days, along with weekly reports of data usage per day -- how many photos, how large, what root folders, usage trends, etc.
An ideal installation would be automatic detection of what program they're using, what places files are stored (hint: It's not just on a local drive). Detect new file locations and back those up too.
An inexpensive (<$25) option of "only backup current projects I'm working on and anything I shot in the last month", that actually works... I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
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