Image Data Storage.

[Tandum (Robin)]

I'm wondering how others are approaching the storage of image data on their computers. I initially started out keeping data based on date followed by the object captured. Now I have more than one camera and multiple exposure times and ISO's. It's all getting a little complex when lights, darks and bias data need to be concidered as well.

A cooled camera would solve a lot of these logistical problems but buying one may cause marital problems instead

How do you keep track of each imaging sessions data and store it so you can go back to it for reprocessing or adding it to a subsequent run. I spent many years as a programmer and was concidering running up some sort of a database to manage this sort of thing. Is it worth the effort?

[h0ughy (David)]

backup hard drive, dvds, date labelling and target label, a wing and a prayer

[Matty P (Matt)]

Hi Robin,

What I do is store all my images on an external hard drive. I capture all the necessary data and store it on the laptop's hard drive while I am in the field and then move it all over to the external hard drive when I return inside. This way I don't have to worry about filling up the laptop's hard drive and it makes it easier to archive all of your images.

You can purchase a 1TB external HDD for $200 these days.

[GrampianStars (Rob)]

yep I concur
B/Up, B/Up, B/Up
I just got a Dlink 1 TeraGig raid NAS box due to a lappy failure It's fantastic !

[Ian Robinson]

Wouldn't be easiest to keep all files associated with one image in it's own subfolder on the DVD , CD or HDD. , all linked in database or spreadsheet so it can accessed and found quickly .

[Ian Robinson]

How big a HDD does XP Pro SP2 support ?

I'm looking for external storage, a 1 Tb ext HDD would be super.

[sheeny (Al)]

I have a pretty simple approach... don't know if it will help at all.

I capture on either my lappy or dslr.

All photos get transferred to my desktop PC (screen shot of file structure attached) to avoid clogging the lappy and dslr.

My astronomy photo directory structure is organised by year, then the child directory is names by date and target. All the images from that session are in that directory. That said, I don't keep my raw avi files from the web cam on the PC. I burn them to DVD. I figure if I lose the raw avi on the dvd I still have the stacked images, etc on the PC and backup disk. Not ideal I know, but the avis quickly occupy a lot of drive space.

I guess you could adapt this directory naming structure to work with different cameras, but it sounds like that's what you're already doing, so not sure my system will help you...

I guess I'm lucky since i haven't gotten heavily into archives of darks and flats, etc. (yet...)

All this is backed up onto an external HDD by SecondCopy every time my PC shuts down.

Al.

[multiweb (Marc)]

I try to burn all the raws on DVDs once I have enough to fill one and get them off the hard drives. All in directories in the format YYYYMMDD. It's very easy to sort this way. They take room and if anything goes wrong with the processed data you need to go back to the source. I name the raws <object>_xxx.fits. The date information is in the directory not the files. So I can mix files within the same folder and I drop darks/flats/bias in the same directory. I never get more than 20-30 files per folder.

[Tandum (Robin)]

Originally Posted by Ian Robinson

How big a HDD does XP Pro SP2 support ?

I'm looking for external storage, a 1 Tb ext HDD would be super.

It is the motherboard not the operating system that provides support for big drives and it should work fine anyway as it's a usb device. I see a Western Digital brand that seems to be about $200 for 1TB, all the others are closer to $300 or more. Still it's not a raid device so all your eggs are on one hard drive still.

Looks like everyone is doing a similar dance with the data. I just have no easy way to see what has been shot so more data can be added later. Not to mention a bucket load of calibration files for each shoot. I think a simple little data base will fix that.