Living in the cloud.
Modern photography results in enormous amounts of digital data being produced. This runs the full range from the RAW image files themselves through edited versions through catalog and database information and more. As you accumulate more and more photographs, you need a safe and secure method of storing them. This applies to those who produce photography for a living, those who do it as a hobby and also those who simply want a few snapshots to remember a holiday or birthday party. I’ve looked at the basics of digital asset management (DAM) previously and so today am going to discuss it a bit more by way of a review of the newest publication from X Equals – “Living In The Cloud”.
Before we get into it, I want to remind you about Selina Maitreya’s The View From Here. Selina brings 3 decades of portfolio consultancy experience and wisdom to this MP3 series that’s a must-have for anyone either contemplating becoming a working photographer or professionals looking for a little extra inspiration. Normally $199, it’s available at a 50% discount using the code FOSCFI.
Cloud computing is essentially internet based computing. Instead of needing to own and maintain servers, hard drives and other gear, cloud computing allows secure, redundant sharing of resources, storage space and data by way of remote systems.
Living In The Cloud features five parts that guide you through the whole process of setting up and using cloud-based storage. The chapters in this publication are
- Cloud Storage
- Setup
- Configuration
- Deployment
- Final Thoughts
The first chapter introduces the general concept of cloud computing. Amazon S3 is the vendor of choice in this guide, although the authors make the point early that it’s not the only player on the scene. The chapter continues by answering questions about data transfer, total cost of ownership and service level agreements.
Chapter 2 gets into the details of getting started. For most people, cloud computing is a new concept, and here the X= team guide you through a step by step process for getting yourself setup. Screenshots of the setup process with Amazon S3 are included with helpful explanations about the various steps involved. Once sign up with Amazon is done, it’s time to set up an account at a client side service to enable the easy transfer of files. Jungle Disk Desktop is the service of choice here, and step by step instructions for creating an account are included.
Configuration is next and once again helpful screenshots and explanations are included to assist you in setting up your Amazon S3 “bucket” or online disk. This is done through the aforementioned Jungle Disk. You can configure things such as encryption, local drive mapping, backup and more.
Moving on, we come to deployment. This is where you manage your production data and archival data by way of backup vaults. You can choose what to backup and when to do it. You have the ability to make scheduled automatic backups. There’s the ability to have backup reports emailed to you or have them sent via RSS feed. Backups, while necessary for data safety and peace of mind are only really useful if you can then access that data. The guide also takes you through the steps for doing a “Restore” which gives you an interface to move your backed up data from the cloud to your computer.
Final thoughts rounds things off with a few additional pointers as well as some extra cloud storage resources if you want an alternative to Amazon S3.
Living in the Cloud is a very useful eBook that I can recommend to any photograph looking for data redundancy. I keep multiple backups of my data, but with the exception of the images that are in my Photoshelter archive, I haven’t taken advantage of cloud storage yet. As I’ve had one hard drive failure already this year, and recently while upgrading some computer gear I saw two of my backup Lightroom catalogs become corrupted – fortunately I had a third backup that was okay – some form of cloud storage is very attractive to me and with the steps detailed in Living in the Cloud, it’s very easy to get started.
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