While I've had some time off I've been trying to get my data sorted out, as in pictures, music, videos (camcorder) and movies, something I've been meaning to do since I got my NAS delivered, however the task is way bigger than I thought initially and has a lot more to do with design and planning than actual action and moving stuff around, in fact I've finally realised that I need to approach this with some of the old System Engineer skills I built up over time before doing what I do now, why? Because although the quantities are different I realised after a couple of failed attempts that I need to take account of the requirements of ALL users before finalising a plan, and then figuring out how to achieve it.
I may be on the early adopter edge here buying a small business NAS for storage needs, but as megapixels grow in devices then so do file sizes, VOD means more digital movies etc, anyway everyone's needs are growing and proper planning is essential it seems....
Some lessons I've learned while I've been trying to sort this out...
Having a lot of storage to hand solves nothing, just dumping everything there means it's there but how do you expect to use it?
I've discovered that whilst I want to use 'modern tools' my wife wants to use old ones, I'm using Aperture to catalogue the photos, will get round to tagging them, putting in to projects, sorting, arranging etc, my wife insists on using Windows Explorer and manually creating folders and moving them (incidentally this also seems to have created HUGE duplication, when I copied over the 'My Pictures' folder from her computer it weighed in at 47GB, I knew that was wrong and after a LOT of sorting through it, assuming I didn't delete anything I shouldn't have, it's now a more respectable 17GB.
I tried to use automatic methods to sort out the mess but in the end the reality is that doing it by hand, manually comparing was the only way, I found using my Mac easier for that by using Spotlight, I tried Singular but it crashed every time until I reduced the amount of files significantly, and then once it did run I still had to manually decide on every file by ticking a box, that was going to be about 17,000+ clicks - ouch !
The other problem is that lots of different devices have been used so I had:
SAME pictures with DIFFERENT names (manually and automatically renamed versions)
DIFFERENT pictures with SAME names (DSC0001 for example)
So I couldn't even just select files with the same name using a script and delete them.... I'm still not sure I've got it right and making sure is going to take a long time... for now I've backed up the full 47GB in case it's ever needed (one day my wife will say 1 picture is missing and I'll have to find it.....) and I've made further copies of the reduced set on spare physical disks that I'm going to store offsite somewhere. The reduced set is also on the NAS and is in PhotoStation which is a built in feature that creates a web based photo gallery, i may use this in future to show off whole sets of photos to family etc and just use Flickr for one off stuff (oh and the PhotoStation also supports video which I may use for the increasing number of Mobile Phone footage I'm getting)
So note to self, whenever I get a new camera of any sort go in to options and change the file prefix to the device name (and a version number I think too)
Get better at deleting 'rejects' since right now we keep everything we shoot, especially true with the Panorama shots
So that's photos for now
The next big problem I've had is music, not so much duplication other than the Greatest Hits problem, can't decide what to do on that one yet, keep all or delete duplicates from the Greatest Hits albums? The other issue is the size of the library and how it is slowing iTunes down. Then there's the amount of time it takes to do an operation once you've decided on a plan of action. I reckon I need to upgrade my home network to Gigabit as the transfer of 120GB worth of 20K+ files takes several hours, and the indexing of it on both the NAS and then in iTunes is about a day in total so you don't want to do it too often
Another complication is the bizarre fact that my USB disc I'm using only works on my Macbook if I plug it in to the keyboard port (that is plugged in to hub in my screen that is then plugged in to my macbook) and does nothing when plugged in directly, this makes it slow as hell since the Apple keyboard ports are 1.1 only (which may be what makes it work)
My NAS has a built in iTunes server that I want to use as it means any iTunes client can access all the music through the share, this does mean that all the music has to be in that one share, I was hoping to split it up to increase performance. I'm toying with the idea of putting only some of it on the share and the rest on the NAS but not shared but still accessible if I want, however that's a pain too, especially as I'd have to keep multiple iTunes libraries to manage it probably.
Then there's the fact that I have to have a simple system so that my wife and kids can use it and especially so that my wife can easily burn a CD if needed and me and my Macbook are not around to do it, more importantly is the iPods we use, you can't sync with a share which means in order to get the music on I also have to import all the tracks to an iTunes client, this again takes hours and iTunes insists on determining gapless playback for a few extra hours too !!
I'm sticking with one big library on the NAS, shared through iTunes server and also imported to iTunes on my Macbook for now but there is still issues with speed and iPod syncing when my machine isn't here, be nice if I could plug the iPod in to the USB on the NAS and direct sync I guess.
That's where I've got so far, several hours of metadata tidying to do and I'm trying to decide also what to do about the kids movies, I only ever let them have copies of the original discs as they get trashed easily, I got half way through building a media server that had them all as xvid but then decided not to, now I'm thinking I might just store uncompressed VIDEO_TS folders on the NAS so I can make a new copy whenever I want....
decisions are the hardest, the actions are easy assuming nothing odd goes wrong !
