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, www.zoomr.com, www.fotki.com, www.picasa.com, www.fotolog.com, www.smugmug.com , 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 packages to be installed. So I installed SCREEN and LSFTP. 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 << 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”.
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.
