Where do you store your digital photo’s?

Do you burn them to cd or dvd? These media are doomed to fail one time or another.
Do you you store them on a usb disk or a nas? More safe but at one point or another even these harddisks will fail.
Do you run your nas in RAID? If anything goes wrong “fire” you will lose all photos anyway

So you can either copy all of the digital photos regularly to a harddisk which you place at your relatives which live far far away or you store your digital pics at a 3rd party via an upload mechanism.

There are countless providers for storing your digital pictures, to name a few: www.flickr.com 9/55K, www.zoomr.com 0/37, www.fotki.com 2/109, www.picasa.com Submit, www.fotolog.com 8/1,101, www.smugmug.com     141K , etc… etc… millions of possible options. Some have unlimited storage for free, other charge either for storage space (like Google) or bandwidth. It’s even hard to find a social 2.0 site these days which doesn’t offer free photo storage…

I have stored many of my pics at Picasa, Flickr (pro), and quite a set of other sites but I have changed my mind a while ago. Since digital pics are such a personal asset I want to have complete control over them. I also want to use FTP to upload them automatically (which is not possible with flickr or picasa) to my hosting party and sync the collection with the collection stored on my NAS. On top of that physical layer I have a simple web interface (ZEN Photo) which allows users to view photo’s. (and, since the repository is fixed, can be replaced by any other web photo package).

In this way I can work locally on my NAS and transparently a complete synchronized backup is kept at my own webhosting company of which I have complete control.

I keep all of my photo’s on my NAS on the /photo share. Under this share I have directories named “2006”, “2007, “2008”, …

Many NAS boxes offer NSLU2 3/4,162 packages to be installed. So I installed SCREEN Submit and LSFTP Submit. With those two packages it is easy to run an unattended synchronization of my photo directories.

I wrote this simple script (sync2008.sh):

#!/bin/ash
SOURCE=/volume1/photo/2008
BACKUPDIR=/domains/leau.net/html/gallery/albums
lftp -u USERNAME,PASSWORD ftp.ftpserver.com Submit << EOF
mirror -R -n -I *.jpg -I *.JPG -X Collage/ -X ‘whatever/’ -X .piccache/ -X .recent/ -X Originals/ -X *.Db -X ‘@eaDir/’ $SOURCE $BACKUPDIR/
quit

which mirrors, in this case, the 2008 photo directory with my online ftp server. As you can see it only includes JPG’s and does not mirror the directory “whatever”, it does not mirror picasa directories (“piccache”, “.recent”, “Orginals”’), it does not mirror Irfanview stuff “.Db” and it does not mirror my synology photo thumbs “@eaDir Submit”.

Now I can just run “screen sync2008.sh” and close my terminal connection to the box and it will happily sync my photo collection via the NAS box and automatically close when it finishes.

Ofcourse it is easy to schedule also, so that, completely unattended, there is always a copy of my digital pics online.

I discovered "screen" was also available in the NLSU2 feed.It can be installed via the IPKG system. Nice that it is available.

With screen you can start up multiple sessions not directly attached to the terminal you are logged in with.

Meaning: if you have a certain task or script running and you close your terminal window then normally the process will also stop, which can be quite unhandy e.g. during an ftp upload session.

With screen you simply start your process via "screen process", then close your computer and go to bed

Later on you log in again and via the screen -ls command you can view all the running screens and via screen -r <screenname> you can then re-attach to a screen to see the status.

Obviously there is a lot more to it, see the man pages here 0/122. (I don’t know if the nlsu2 version support everything).

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/09/27/a-guide-to-gnu-screen/ 1/1,556