Storage woes. MP Finally caught up with me.

Brownie

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Even my puny 33 and 42 MP cameras have finally caused me to start looking at storage options. After downloading Affinity V2 the other day I was presented with the message that I was about out of space, with less than 1G left in my 1TB hard drive. Of course, the vast majority of it is photos with video running a distant second. I was able to delete some culled photos and get just over a couple of gig of free space, but am now faced with long term external storage.

I have a 1T and a 2T external drive so short term is covered. But I wonder, if you have photos that are near and dear, like family shots, etc., do you store them on two backups just in case, or just one? My 1T is used to back up my computer, the 2T was recently acquired and I was planning to use it for photos only. However, once I transfer what I have it will be about 1/3 full.

What do you suggest for good quality external drives? What's a decent size? 3T? 4? FYI, I am not in love with the cloud or paying a monthly fee for storage, I'd rather buy something and be done with it.
 
Even my puny 33 and 42 MP cameras have finally caused me to start looking at storage options. After downloading Affinity V2 the other day I was presented with the message that I was about out of space, with less than 1G left in my 1TB hard drive. Of course, the vast majority of it is photos with video running a distant second. I was able to delete some culled photos and get just over a couple of gig of free space, but am now faced with long term external storage.

I have a 1T and a 2T external drive so short term is covered. But I wonder, if you have photos that are near and dear, like family shots, etc., do you store them on two backups just in case, or just one? My 1T is used to back up my computer, the 2T was recently acquired and I was planning to use it for photos only. However, once I transfer what I have it will be about 1/3 full.

What do you suggest for good quality external drives? What's a decent size? 3T? 4? FYI, I am not in love with the cloud or paying a monthly fee for storage, I'd rather buy something and be done with it.
Well Tim I never empty a memory cards, I keep them all, I back up to 2 different hard drives and have an old laptop with huge storage and back up on that as well, so belt and braces for me, I have a Toshiba hard drive and a 4tb western digital hard drive. I had a friend that lost all is images, so I have to take it seriously
 
Well Tim I never empty a memory cards, I keep them all, I back up to 2 different hard drives and have an old laptop with huge storage and back up on that as well, so belt and braces for me, I have a Toshiba hard drive and a 4tb western digital hard drive. I had a friend that lost all is images, so I have to take it seriously
Interesting, but if I were to never empty a card I'd be buying a new set every trip to the drag strip. I spoke with some of our SCADA programmers at work today and they suggested a Buffalo linkstation. They said to get one with two drives that can write to both simultaneously and duplicate the files so both have the same info. That way if one fails the other is still viable. You can hook it up to your home network and just let it run, and some come with cloud storage for sharing. For $2-300, might be the way to go.

 
I've been looking at a NAS system too, now that Amazon are stopping the Photo service, but I also back up to plug in Hard Drives too. I have several 4 and 5 tb drives as I share with my other half.
 
Interesting, but if I were to never empty a card I'd be buying a new set every trip to the drag strip. I spoke with some of our SCADA programmers at work today and they suggested a Buffalo linkstation. They said to get one with two drives that can write to both simultaneously and duplicate the files so both have the same info. That way if one fails the other is still viable. You can hook it up to your home network and just let it run, and some come with cloud storage for sharing. For $2-300, might be the way to go.

Tim, I feel I should expand on the reason I do not empty memory cards; it is because my mate lost is images due to a robbery, is cameras, computers, and hard drives were all taken; hence I don't empty cards back up to 2 hard drives and an old laptop
 
I have got my bird photo's backed up on 2 external Harddrives and one is a 10 terabyte which need a power supply and this is close to half full with just bird photos. I have got family and other things on two 4tb Harddrives and I know I have to move one copy out of the house for extra safety. Who knows if your house burns down or some one breaks in and and takes all they can find. With one copy no where near it is a far safer option and I think this is what many others say t do as well. I think back up is just as important as the photo taking itself.
 
Tim, I feel I should expand on the reason I do not empty memory cards; it is because my mate lost is images due to a robbery, is cameras, computers, and hard drives were all taken; hence I don't empty cards back up to 2 hard drives and an old laptop
Still not clear on what not emptying cards has to do with it. Do you store them separately in case of a robbery?
I know I have to move one copy out of the house for extra safety. Who knows if your house burns down or some one breaks in and and takes all they can find. With one copy no where near it is a far safer option and I think this is what many others say t do as well. I think back up is just as important as the photo taking itself.
This is an excellent point, Ralph. When I digitized my parents' old 8mm movies I uploaded them to Dropbox, not only to share but to have family members download to their own computers. The files were small enough that a 16G flash drive would hold them, and several people stored them on drives. The movies are safely stored in Utah, Florida, California, several homes here in Michigan, and probably in a few other states. As for my own storage, I have two large 'fireproof' safes. My backup drives and important flash drives are kept in one of them. I would highly recommend everyone get a small safe for important documents.
 
Just had another idea. I have an old desktop I was going to toss out. It still works, just got old. It has a 500G HD in it, I can pick up a 4 T drive, gut everything I don't need and use it for storage. A 4T drive is about $70. Then I can use my portable drives to back up the files and put them in the safe.
 
So, I've been going through folders and getting rid of shots I didn't deem worth processing back when I took them, but was too lazy to cull at the time. Hard Drive space is back up to 250G, so I'm out of the woods short-term. Still backed everything up to my 2T portable just to make sure, will need to do it again when I'm done.
 
Still not clear on what not emptying cards has to do with it. Do you store them separately in case of a robbery?

This is an excellent point, Ralph. When I digitized my parents' old 8mm movies I uploaded them to Dropbox, not only to share but to have family members download to their own computers. The files were small enough that a 16G flash drive would hold them, and several people stored them on drives. The movies are safely stored in Utah, Florida, California, several homes here in Michigan, and probably in a few other states. As for my own storage, I have two large 'fireproof' safes. My backup drives and important flash drives are kept in one of them. I would highly recommend everyone get a small safe for important docume

So, I've been going through folders and getting rid of shots I didn't deem worth processing back when I took them, but was too lazy to cull at the time. Hard Drive space is back up to 250G, so I'm out of the woods short-term. Still backed everything up to my 2T portable just to make sure, will need to do it again when I'm done.
Tim, I do store the cards in the safe, so far, I haven't bought high end cards and I do not shoot many bursts or large numbers of shots. But clearly going forward that will probably change when I no longer have a 24-meg camera. like you I am going to go through the hard drives and laptops and dump the useless.
 
With a few large folders left to go the drive now has over 300G of available space. I also realized that I do not want a backup system, I want a storage system. With a backup system it will automatically delete from the storage device anything I delete from the computer. My goal is to move old folders from the computer to storage only.

Once I get through these last folders I'm going to put everything on both drives for safekeeping, then remove a lot of the older stuff from the computer to free up even more space. There should be enough space on these two drives to hold me for another couple of years.
 
I thought I had replied in this thread the other day but now that I recall things, I was reading the thread at right about the time I received a phone call and probably closed out of this forum and then afterward never got back to this thread. Anyway, I am a firm believer in backups and my routine is to back up everything on external SSDs (plus I have older HDDs for archival purposes). Each month I take a set of external SSDs to the bank, stick them into my safe deposit box and bring home the set which has been in there for the past month. I also tend to back up things at home redundantly as well, anyway, so I have at least two sets at home plus the set that is away from home.

When I am shooting, if the project is a macro one and I don't have a lot of images, once I've reviewed and culled the ones I know I won't ever be interested in editing, I simply take care of editing the ones I do want to keep and discard the culled files. With a situation where I've shot a lot of images, say 1300 or more, which can happen when I'm shooting wildlife, I again cull through everything, which takes a while, and then work with the images that seem worth editing. The problem is getting to actually doing that culling......I have the bad habit of simply looking through a file of recently-shot images, picking out a few that catch my eye immediately, and then setting aside the rest for further evaluation "later." Eh........ On one of my external SSDs I've now got a bunch of folders of RAW files which need to be reviewed and culled and that just keeps growing and growing.

My current 2018 15" MacBook Pro has a 1 TB SSD, and I am already planning to increase that storage capacity to an on-board 2 TB SSD when I buy my next Mac, which will be sometime within the next few months, probably sooner rather than later. After I have edited images, I retain the current year's files on the machine, plus other bits and bobs, and especially as the end of the year approaches it is increasingly clear that when I'm using cameras which have high resolution sensors anyway, that I really need to increase my storage capacity on my primary computer. External drives save the day but it can be frustrating, too, to have to offload files just so I can work with new material.

At some point, too, I really need to go through all the files on the archival drives, as I'm sure there is a lot of dreck on there which can be deleted and that will make space to add files from more current years. That's a project I've had in mind for the past several winters, though, and somehow I never do seem to quite get to it!
 
At some point, too, I really need to go through all the files on the archival drives, as I'm sure there is a lot of dreck on there which can be deleted and that will make space to add files from more current years. That's a project I've had in mind for the past several winters, though, and somehow I never do seem to quite get to it!
It's a drudge, for sure. I found hundreds of photos from museum outings and photo walks that were never going to get processed. Duplicates and poor exposures, OOF, etc. My last two trips to big events at the drag strip resulted in a lot of space back. I had separated them out to delete and just never did it. The problem is all of these old files from years and years ago. I must make myself delete right there on the spot.
 
External 12TB disk drives don't cost much for storage, only power them up when you want to use them so there is minimal wear and tear. External SSD drives for working cost a lot more but can be added as you need more. At the moment for my laptop I have 4TB SSD internal and 10TB SSD external as working drives, with 2 x 12TB disk drives for storage/backup. Just keep adding external 12TB disk drives as you need more.
 
External 12TB disk drives don't cost much for storage, only power them up when you want to use them so there is minimal wear and tear. External SSD drives for working cost a lot more but can be added as you need more. At the moment for my laptop I have 4TB SSD internal and 10TB SSD external as working drives, with 2 x 12TB disk drives for storage/backup. Just keep adding external 12TB disk drives as you need more.
When you said 12TB I thought you were nuts, then I went and looked. Amazing how low priced they actually are as compared to a 2TB or 4TB drive.
 
With a backup system it will automatically delete from the storage device anything I delete from the computer.
While some platforms do that, that's not the actual definition of backups.

I find the general rule of 3-2-1 backups to be a good guideline when taking care of your data. At least 3 copies, in 2 different types of media, and one offsite.

NAS systems are great; Synology are actually quite powerful and really easy to use, but I think they may be out of the desired budget. I usually use an old laptop, set Linux up and use it as NAS/media server/home server/etc. (usually the ones with low-power CPUs, as I keep them on 24/7).

12TB drives seem to be your ideal choice.
 
While some platforms do that, that's not the actual definition of backups.

I find the general rule of 3-2-1 backups to be a good guideline when taking care of your data. At least 3 copies, in 2 different types of media, and one offsite.

NAS systems are great; Synology are actually quite powerful and really easy to use, but I think they may be out of the desired budget. I usually use an old laptop, set Linux up and use it as NAS/media server/home server/etc. (usually the ones with low-power CPUs, as I keep them on 24/7).

12TB drives seem to be your ideal choice.
Except a single 12TB drive is contradictory to your first statement of 3-2-1.

For now I have it covered with the 2 portables. I'll keep an eye out for the right answer and figure something out in the future.
 
Except a single 12TB drive is contradictory to your first statement of 3-2-1.

For now I have it covered with the 2 portables. I'll keep an eye out for the right answer and figure something out in the future.
I did say I think it's a good guideline. That doesn't mean it applies to everyone, especially in this case; you don't like the cloud and thus you'd have to find some way to set up a server somewhere you trust. Or keep bringing a drive to said place. That's a very basic thing to understand when giving advice, what you think fit the most for your own needs, may not suit someone else.
 
HD prices have come down so much I just use two ext 12TB HD that mirror each other next to the desktop computer, two portable 4TB SSD to work from, both the desktop and laptop computers each have two backup hds and I use a small group of portable 1TB SSDs to download to while traveling. I do not use any cloud storage other than for my IPhone and for all the years I shot professionally in digital formats there a very large number of 4tb hard drives stored in a closet and for all the film stuff sits in file cabinets that one day I hope to scan.
 
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