It seems like it was just yesterday that I was penning the annual “Urbi et Orbi” post welcoming 2022 amongst us and here we are giving 2022 a solid kick in the kiester in favour of a hopefully happy 2023.
Certainly this year had more than it’s fair share of upheaval, mayhem, and just downright awfulness.
We haven’t forgotten the ongoing war in Ukraine where the Ukrainians have bravely resisted the Russian invasion and indeed have actually retaken territories that were lost to the initial Russian blitzkrieg. As long as the Ukrainian people can not only tell a Russian warship what to go do with it but then follow it up by sinking said frigate and having an unarmed woman go up to a heavily armed and armoured soldier and give him sunflower seeds as a suggestion that he’d be more useful as fertilizer for the resulting flowers, the Ukrainians will eventually prevail.
The universe couldn’t possibly allow otherwise in the face of such courage in the defiance of tyranny.
And there’s the big elephant in the room in the midst of the musical chairs of inhabitants of Number 10 Downing Street that saw the only sovereign on the throne of the United Kingdom that most of the world ever knew finally pass away a couple of days after kissing hands with the ill-fated Liz Truss as her new and final Prime Minister of her record long reign.
God save the Queen!
It’s taken a bit of getting used to having Charles III wearing the crown that HM The Queen wore with such dignity and grace for 70 years and 214 days.
So far he seems to be doing well enough in the job. He ought to considering how long he’s been trained up to take over upon HM The Queen’s passing as the longest serving Prince of Wales in history. I genuinely hope and wish that he finds within himself the grace by which she was a just and fair sovereign for her people. Time will tell if that wish should come to be.
What I’d like to talk about today is some thoughts that have occurred to me as I’m dealing with what might consider the more mundane and prosaic tasks for the year’s end: doing several backups and cleaning up the terabytes of photos taken during the previous year and archiving older ones to make room for a new year’s worth of memories.
The normal workflow sees the photos or videos get loaded into a local drive on the laptop and synchronised to the cloud so that I can use the iPad Pro to sift through them and export, upload, or print them as need be. All of the editing (if any) happens on that local SSD drive and will often stay there for a few months until space gets a bit tight and they need to move to larger and longer-term storage.
This laptop has a massive amount of disk space available in a couple of external hard disk enclosures. By my count, Maleficent has 48TB of attached storage available not counting the 2.25 terabytes of SSD storage in the laptop itself.
And I remember when having a 20 megabyte hard drive was having far more space than we’d ever imagined we’d ever need!
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see holographic storage come about in my lifetime where the current 50TB I’m playing with now would be as insignificant in size as that first hard drive was so many years ago!
The bigger enclosure contains eight 4TB Western Digital RED drives split into two groups of four drives in a RAID-5 configuration. RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks and is a technique of making multiple drives appear as one massive drive. RAID-5 stripes the data across the drives in the array with one disk serving as a parity check against the other disks…whilst writing and reading is slower to a RAID-5 array, it has the advantage of being able to continue working even if an individual drive in the array fails. The drive gets replaced and is rebuilt from the others in the array and all is then well with the world.
The bulk of recent photos lives on two RAID-5 arrays of four 4TB disks each for 12TB of effective available storage on each drive. One drive array is available for backing up data from the SSD on the laptop every so often with the second array being a hot backup mirror of the first for redundancy built upon redundancy.
You’d think that’d be all we need for space but in the past year I’ve been shooting photos in the Nikon RAW format.
The Nikon D850 is equipped with a 48 megapixel sensor giving it nearly the resolution of medium-format film and each photo that survives the culling and editing weighs in at about 50MB per file.
RAW is exactly what it sounds like…every pixel the sensor detected is saved with very little in-camera processing so the file represents what the sensor actually saw when the shutter was depressed.
The image you see on the screen after taking a shot is what the image looks like after the camera has done all of it’s technical and fiddly things to it and often that’s good enough to drop it on Google Drive and let your client have at it. But the point of shooting RAW is that it gives you the chance to do all of the post-processing yourself and potentially recover detail that might be missed or lost by the camera’s processing but that flexibility comes at the price of having massive files.
It’s rather shocking how quickly 12TB can fill up when you’ve been shooting RAW!
There’s a smaller five-bay enclosure containing five hard drives, two 6TB RED drives and three 4TB RED drives as individual drives (also known as JBOD or just a bunch of disks).
This is where the photos and videos move to when space is needed on the big RAID-5 drive arrays. They’re still close at hand and easily accessible but the reality of photography is that the older photos don’t tend to get accessed as often as those more recent shots.
At some point in the future, the next step is to archive the photos and videos from that smaller enclosure to a massive hard drive that is attached just long enough to make a backup and is then put away in a safe place. We’ve not made it quite to that point yet but it’s coming awfully fast!
I’m not going to lie to you…schlepping many terabytes of photos from drive to drive is hors categorie tedious with a capital “just shoot me now!” If the non-nerds amongst those reading this post have made it this far and have remained conscious…congratulations! I’m *TRULY* impressed at your stamina!
I describe the process rigourously because it often takes hours and sometimes days of painstaking work to ensure that the photos end up where they ought to safely.
There’s a reason I take that responsibility very seriously as every photo and video that I shoot is priceless to me and not just because doing a photo shoot is something that I do from time to time.
It is a cherished memory of a time and place never seen before and never to be seen exactly in the same way again.
We can try our darnedest to recreate the scene and the lighting but time and light being what they are, it would only be an approximation and not the exact reality.
Overseeing this glacial migration of photos from laptop to a massive redundant disk array to smaller disks and eventually aged out of the system is a piece of software I truly could not live without: Adobe Lightroom Classic.
No matter what disk in this system the photos end up on, Lightroom is the database that keeps track of everything about a given photograph: where it’s located on the many disks attached to this computer, comments and keywords about the photo, and the massive trove of metadata captured from the camera such as the model of the camera that took the photo, the settings that were in play at the time the shutter is clicked, and a whole host of other data tidbits.
The job of knowing all and seeing all is certainly not a trivial one…last time I checked, there were 559,736 photographs in the Lightroom catalogue spread amongst the various disks.
Today’s exercise was moving about 250,000 of them from the big arrays to a JBOD disk to prepare for the 2022 photos to move from the laptop to the RAID-5 arrays. As I was moving one particularly large group of 110,000 photos to the JBOD archive disk (drive “R” in case you were curious…”R” for “aRchive”, get it? 🙂 ), I couldn’t help but think about how much joy shooting all of those photos was at the time.
Every photo and collection in that catalogue has a special meaning and place in my heart even if it’s moving off the big RAID-5 arrays to a new home.
Whether it was a photo I took during someone’s wedding or a shot done during a dress rehearsal at a theatre in Fayetteville or capturing the joy of dancers on stage during a recital or competition…every photo in that catalogue has an emotional attachment and memory that defies being easily put into words.
That catalogue represents every digital photo I’ve ever taken and some of my photos that were shot on film where I scanned the negatives. Even the photos I didn’t take personally such as the nearly two-thousand slides I recovered from my father’s rather humid garage in Florida where they’d sat for many years and yet remarkably they were beautiful when captured using the D7000 and a slide adapter on a macro lens bringing back not only some memories from long ago but also family memories from well before I was even born that had such stories to tell.
I guess that’s why ensuring these photos are properly preserved for eternity is such a passion even if it means the end of the year is an endless series of backups and messing about with the Lightroom catalogue so that it can catch up to where the photos have moved.
Every photo in that catalogue has the proverbial story of a thousand words to tell and even if I don’t have enough years to tell them all myself, they’re at least there to perhaps remind those who come after us of the stories of our life.
The tales of happiness and joy, the occasional bits of sadness, and the art of the photo and the story for all of the moments in between captured in patterns of data in Lightroom and spread across the magnetic fields of several hard disks.
As long as the photos and stories are there, so shall our soul be as well.
And just because a photo isn’t immediately in front of me on the laptop or readily available on one of the two hard disk farms doesn’t mean that it’s any less important or something worthy of caring about.
There’s something to be learned about life with that thought. I’ve got friends and family I’ve not seen in over a decade or longer other than via Facebook as well as those I saw yesterday afternoon and the passage of time has nothing to do with how cherished and loved they are to me.
As the activities that my kids have participated in over time have changed, so has what I’ve captured through the lens as “that parent” with a honkin’ huge Nikon telephoto. But that doesn’t mean that those times and activities are any less loved now as they were when we were schlepping ourselves all over Raleigh and points beyond for a class or a horseback ride or some sort of competition.
And the nice thing about having a massive treasure trove of photos at hand is that you never know when you might need one you shot several years ago or have some time to go through the memories and just enjoy the ride. Sometimes that means looking at those old photos compared to the later ones you shot for that event or client and going “what in the world was I thinking?!?” but more often than not I smile at just how much my technique and perspective changed through the years and dream of what else there is to learn to bring beauty and art to life with a camera and a lens at hand with whatever light I have available to use.
No matter what else the new year may bring to me, constantly learning and challenging myself and remembering to love all those who may cross my path from time to time and remember fondly those I’ve not seen in a while is a goal worth having.
Once all of the photos have moved to where they belong and Lightroom knows where they live now, the last task is to create the folders that represent the new year that will collect the photos yet to be taken and memories to be savoured and shared.
Those new folders represent the hope of a better and happier year and clearing the decks so that we may be able to be in the right place and time to capture them.
I guess we’ll discover next New Year’s Eve if that wish was granted.
Until then, may you have a peaceful rest of your festive season and wishes for a joyous and prosperous New Year. 🙂