photo and video storage

[Cazale]

What to do with photos and videos?

 

3 schools, full drives at all of them! Did a windirstat on them and the problem (WSUS excepted) is photos and videos. It seems, certainly since the recent uptake of tablets, that every teacher sees the need to store 10,000,000,000,000 photos every day!

 

I've little doubt 99.999999% of these photos will never be looked at again by another living human being. I'd love nothing more than to stick them all in the cloud (probably Google, as they get it free), but you know... photos of (young - primary aged) kids.. so erm, I ain't uploading anything anywhere unless I'm specifically told to!

 

What do you do to keep media from clogging up your systems?

 

I've been fighting this for too long (as in, trying to make room for ever expanding staff user folders). I was thinking I might just ask the schools to buy a 1tb drive each and just cut and paste the photos/movies directories from the user dirs onto it, then stash it somewhere safe (I bet nobody asks for a single photo! Especially with a new academic year starting). Anyone do anything different?

Edited August 24, 2016 by Cazale

[rogerdnixon]

We have a shared folder for school photos on Google Drive - so unlimited storage. Read only for most staff (link on the staff site) - a couple keep it tidy and people just share new stuff with them. For stuff on the website we use Flickr Pro as its easy to embed galleries - but might move to Google Photos soon.

[Sagima]

For a long while we were told just to keep buying more storage and although the delete nothing rule still applies we now buy a 1tb usb drive each year and archive the oldest stuff off onto it. We leave it connected for a few months in case anyone notices it is gone and then it gets stored in a drawer.

 

even after that about a third of our 8tb fileserver is just pictures. more annoyng is the reallay descriptive names they give them taking them past the 260 character limit

[3s-gtech]

Compress them in batch. Typically, Handbrake for videos, variety of tools for photos. No need for 18MP+ images of anything other than perhaps artwork (and that's debatable).

[Cazale]

We have a shared folder for school photos on Google Drive

 

How can you be sure your data doesn't leave the EU? (to comply with the Data Protection Directive). Presumably it just goes to a global or US server farm?

[Cazale]

Compress them in batch. Typically, Handbrake for videos, variety of tools for photos. No need for 18MP+ images of anything other than perhaps artwork (and that's debatable).

 

I thought photos and videos were already compressed? (so not much extra compression available), do you see any savings?

[3s-gtech]

If you chop the resolution down, there's loads to gain. Full HD videos of lessons/PE/presentation evenings and super high resolution photos of cakes/handstands/assemblies are rarely necessary.

[SHimmer45]

photoresizer is what we use to resize MASSIVE images down to more sensible sizes, run a search and then drag the results in the program and off it goes.

[jdoyle]

Whilst I realise you're looking for a technical solution, I'd start off by questioning :

 

a. what photo and video permissions in place

b. how does each school view the Data Protection Act (photos and videos taken without a clear purpose, policy re storage/safety/removal etc are a potential breach of the Act)

c. what is the awareness amongst staff of Court Orders re students

d. what devices are being used to take the photos and videos ie school owned, staff owned, mix of ownership

[FN-GM]

How can you be sure your data doesn't leave the EU? (to comply with the Data Protection Directive). Presumably it just goes to a global or US server farm?

 

Google has an agreement with the EU so you can store stuff on that platform ok.

 

Also have a look at this, both Google and Office 365 are on here - https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/526825/Cloud-services-software.pdf

[Stuajnht]

If the files are stored on Server 2012 onwards, have you looked at data deduplication:

• https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2012/05/20/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012/
  
• https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh769303(v=vs.85).aspx
  
• https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831700(v=ws.11).aspx
  

 

We had to keep expanding our storage capacity each term and shrinking down images and videos until we turned it on, now haven't had to do it for a while.

 

Possible risks to be aware of:

• Files reference a single chunk of a file. If this becomes corrupted, all files referencing it will be damaged
  
• Your initial backup after enabling this will be quite large, due to most of the data on the disk changing
  
• It can't be enabled on the boot volume, so hopefully the files are stored on another drive
  

[Cazale]

Google has an agreement with the EU so you can store stuff on that platform ok

 

Thanks for that, that's one part of the equation, my other concern might be best addressed by encryption. Do you (or anyone else here) know of a way to create an encrypted container (or alternatively, on the fly encryption) for Google Drive?

[rogerdnixon]

Google Drive stuff is encrypted at rest and in transit by default. You can also block downloading of files, re sharing etc if you want to. This all assumes you are using GAFE.

[FN-GM]

The above is true, but you could use this if you wanted - https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/