Seagate Helps Online Project Rescue Long-Lost Photos
Network-attached storage technology from Seagate is helping to bring new life to thousands of never-before-seen images from the past.
The Rescued Film Project, which obtains and develops unclaimed film rolls from the 1930s through the 1990s and posts them online, turned to Seagate when its team needed a storage solution for easily managing its rapidly growing collection of photos.
“When I first started, I just had one scanner and I’d store everything on external hard drives,” says Levi Bettwieser, a Boise, Idaho-based commercial photographer and the Project’s founder. “As the Project grew, (this system) became too much of a headache for data management and backup. I couldn’t figure out which drive my files were stored on and I was constantly duplicating files.”
How to restore 31 rolls of film shot by an American soldier during World War II
Helping to ramp up the project’s workload was a viral video that documented Bettwieser’s painstaking efforts to restore 31 rolls of film shot by an American soldier during World War II. Bettwieser discovered the film at an auction in Ohio last year. Since that video was released, the Project has been deluged with hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film sent from all over the world.
Working with Seagate, Bettwieser ditched his collection of external drives for a 20TB Seagate NAS Pro server. The robust system enables him to share data with multiple computers, quickly transfer large files from his computer and centralize his photo storage.
Photos and Project Continually Backed Up, and Reachable from Anywhere
The NAS Pro’s four 5TB drives are RAID-configured, so if one drive fails the files are safely backed up on the other three drives. And the Project’s many offsite volunteers can securely access files stored on the NAS, using Seagate’s Sdrive™ app, which works with any smartphone or computer.
Thanks to Seagate’s solution, Bettwieser and his team are processing film much faster than before, enabling them to tackle an enormous backlog of film and scale the scope of the Project’s work. The team’s mission: to share important moments that Bettwieser says “deserve to be seen” before those images are gone forever.
“Seagate has made it possible for me to preserve thousands of lost and forgotten moments that otherwise would have faded away with time, never to be seen by anyone,” says Bettwieser.
Read more about Seagate and the Rescued Film Project here.
In our video, watch Levi Bettwieser talk about how Seagate has simplified his workflow:
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Seagate creates space for the human experience by innovating how data is stored, shared and used. Learn more at www.seagate.com.
