Quote:
Originally Posted by auraevans
hahaha...........
i am surfing mac's stuff right now.
mac book air is a beautiful thing.
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Hi Audra,
I do a lot of photography also, thought I'd maybe chime in with my system experiences. I'm also thinking more about the "lifecycle of the photo." I hope maybe useful input for you?
For my photography, I manage well with two MacBooks. One is sort of a "main" machine, and the other one I take directly to the studio, or on location. I actually very much prefer the dual-redundancy of two computers, compared to having all my stuff on one machine. On each of them I have licenses for LightZone, Noise Ninja, Pixelmator, and RAWDeveloper. Then on the "main" machine, I run Adobe CS3, and also Aperture. I'll probably get a second copy of Aperture eventually.
My photo content is always archived on
external media, and not either machine. I use disk on either machine only as working storage, e.g. while engaged on particular photo projects. So far I have approximately 0.6 million belly dance photos that I want to archive in perpetuity, plus a need for capacity for the future.
My "Unified Belly Dance Photo Archive" at present consists of (4) 1TB drives. I'm not using RAID techniques, but my archival storage has fault-tolerance through multiple redundancy. So, all of the photos are backed up on external media, on more than one physical drive. Except for in-process project storage,
zero photos are stored on a working machine. There is no single point of failure militating against the integrity of the data long term.
I'll offer my possibly useful insight that the MTBF for hard disk hardware in this solution has to be higher than for the case where your main drives are in your machine ... in my case, the backup volumes aren't spinning, nor even powered on. They have extremely low duty cycle. I intuited this solution after really walking though the ramifications of setting up an image server farm years ago. It appears to be far more reliable to use less heat with more drives that are used less often, than to have drives that are always on. Esp. in a case where there is a single point of failure.
And the nice thing is, while machines can (and do fail), if that happens argh, I'll curse, but then just run out to the Apple Store to buy a new one.
But the photo data is priceless. Hosted on external drives, the photos are transportable irrespective of machines, which can even be upgraded separately.
So, I was thinking wrt your new machine, whether you get a tower or iMac, that internal storage bays are not likely to be sufficient, and IMHO there are some policy issues for data management for the seriously long term. In this context, I'm also thinking about data reliability, in addition to machine reliability, 5 and 10 years out (soft media like DVDs are insufficient).
Good luck with your new gear, when you decide what you want, and hope you have great fun with it!
Wish you well!