Photos: Managing crucial files? Directory structure?

[oguruma]

I have a few TB of photos, when measured by total size, they're mostly raw files (20-30MB per photo).

My typical workflow is to import the photos onto the workstation's local drive, cull them to remove the photos I know I can't use, then move the "keepers" to the NAS. I then do the edits of my favorites, and usually export them to jpeg.

As it is now, the directory structure is /year/month/day (of when the photo was taken).

I currently back up the NAS to another NAS that's onsite, and I have a pair of offline HDDs that I back up to every month or so (and periodically swap out with on in the bank's safe deposit box).

I'd like to add a backup of the photos that I couldn't stand to lose to backup to S3/Wasabi/whatever.

The problem is that I can't come up with a good way to designate the photos that I'd backup other than putting them in their own directory (/tank/critical) and have that dataset backed up to S3...

 

[Arwen]

One option is to make hard links in the same dataset, but different directory tree. Thus, you review your photos and keepers are cross linked for separate backup. With the keepers in a separate directory tree, it makes it easy to designate that for separate backups.


Another method is to add a separate file with the same name, but different file extension. Like;

photo.jpg
photo.keep

Then a backup software looks for all files ending in ".keep", takes the base file name, (without the ".keep"), and adds that photo to the separate backup. Note that the ".keep" files don't have to contain anything, they can be empty. But, you could put in a note why you want to keep that specific file.


Obviously any scheme you come up with is a manual one. Prone to human error. So review the keep & non-keep photo list every now and then.