Big Computer 3 is one year old!
Big Computer 3 is one year old this month and we thought it was timely to
give you an update on how it is performing. It is a good time to ponder
because the hard drives are bulging and something is going to have to be
done very soon. It is also the completion of 12 months of hard labour under
the yoke of Windows Vista, and still we are ranting about it. To be fair we
have stuck with it and have not been forced back to XP or over to Mac (many
have!). By the same token, many things are still not functioning and we
remain something of a curiosity amongst serious IT professionals. We have
yet to visit a professionally managed organisation that has migrated to
Vista although we know of a few that have washed their hands with Windows
altogether and joined Mrs Editor playing with Linux and Open Office.
In terms of machine performance, Photoshop CS4 64-bit still reopens in 4
seconds and opens from cold in 5.7 seconds, a tiny bit longer perhaps, but
hardly noticeable. Windows itself now takes a grinding 3m 10s to start up,
whereas it used to take 2m 6s but this is presumably due to additional
services that have been added over the year. The 64-bit version of Photoshop
remains hugely faster than the 32-bit version
kitchen work surface down the six steps of their back door entrance – it was
in several pieces at the bottom! Another vulnerability of laptops is water (aka
coffee or tea). If you spill half a pint onto a laptop it is highly likely
to stop working; the same catastrophe with a separate keyboard has lesser
consequences as you only need to replace/repair the keyboard to get up and
running again.
Similar arguments apply to USB or Firewire-connected external hard drives.
They are vulnerable to being dropped or stolen. They also suffer from a risk
of failure during routine data transfer (tripping over wires, power outages,
etc). In our experience this can cause the entire drive to fail to be
recognised by Windows. At McNamee Towers we are the proud owners of LaCie
Big Drive (aka doorstop) that cost £500 and never did a day's work in its
life. It failed during the first testing, was never trusted, failed another
attempt a year later and then also failed when the hard drives were replaced
– would you commit important data to a device like that, we never did? Our
experience with dismountable USB or Firewire hard drives has not been good
with Windows, you can run into trouble with things like auto-renaming. The
downside of these devices is that, if they fail, you lose the backup from
many shoots not just the one you are currently working on. The upside is
that they are inexpensive, easy to store and (mainly) easy to use.
It is against this backdrop that computers for mission-critical applications
are designed. They also carry the burden of 'availability'. A computer
failure when preparing a wedding album is a different type of crisis to a
computer failure in the middle of a stock-market transaction or a satellite
launch. Availability issues are normally tackled with 'redundancy' so that
system failure is barely noticed by the user; this moves us into the
territory of RAID systems and remote location of servers.
For the wedding photographer (and for this read any shooting that cannot be
easily repeated) loss of a set of files carries greater consequences early
on in the process. If you lose your computer totally after an album has been
delivered this is a less serious issue than the same problem before the
album has been made. In this failure scenario you are at the same
vulnerability as we were when weddings were shot on film. Similarly if you
lose a CF card early in a wedding shoot you have at least the opportunity to
do some re-shooting, even it is not ideal. The journey home is probably the
most vulnerable time for such data. The wedding is complete, you are on the
way home and a road traffic accident burns out your car with your kit in the
boot. Assuming you have survived the RTA you have a problem; if you have
not, somebody else has the problem!
For many people, having their wedding shoot on two hard drives is as secure
as they wish (or are prepared) to be. However, a backup on two discrete hard
drives plus DVD backup is more comforting. Here is a suitable workflow that
would suit most photographers.
1. Shoot on a number of CompactFlash cards; then loss of one card is not a
total loss. Forty images per card is not a bad point to aim for.
2. Download the CF cards to a hard drive, as soon as you arrive home.
3. Copy these (RAW or JPEG) source files to another drive, preferably to
a drive in another machine but certainly to another discrete drive, not a
partition.
4. Do not leave any files on your Windows Desktop. Any operating system
corruption will almost certainly lose those files for good. 5. Make two sets
of DVDs of the source files. Both sets should be carefully stored in dry,
dark conditions. Do not leave them around on the bench. Ideally one set
should be in another location (eg your mother's house) so that in the event
of fire or burglary you do not lose your livelihood as well as your
studio/home. A fire-proof safe is another option.
6. At this point you are safe to format your CF cards ready for your next
assignment.
You are securely backed up but you have not addressed the availability
issue. Your next move is to grade, retouch, process the files and make them
ready for album use. Once you have completed as much work (and time) as you
are prepared to risk, you should make secure backups of this stage of the
work. This is best on hard drives so that you have both the worked files and
the originals available easily and so that you can make progressive backups
as you go. For a wedding, although it would be painful to rework your source
files totally in the event of loss, it would not be a business killer.
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