External Hard Drives and Photos?

Eco · Nov 11, 2009

Hopefully someone can help me out with a few questions about storing photos on an external hard drive. With over 100 gb of photos on my Macbook it's running very slow when I'm working with my photos so I bought an external hard drive last night.

Questions:

1. Once my drive is backed up to the external drive is it safe to delete the photos from my computer?

2. Since I store my photos in Iphoto can I pull an event from the external drive, work with it, back it up to the external and then delete it from my computer?

Thanks

icassell · Nov 11, 2009

Keeping your images in one place is NOT safe. I delete them from my computer, but I back them up on a 2 TB RAID (duplicate 1TB drives). Even this is not ideal. Ideally, they should be backed up in 2 places that are physically separated so that destruction of one disk does not destroy your archive.

clarinetJWD · Nov 11, 2009

Seconded. I have all my photos backed up on my website, and I have them on 2 separate hard drives on my PC. Keep all important files in at least 2 places, ideally in different locations.

Wilynn · Nov 26, 2009

Hope you're one of the fortunate ones. EHD's (external hard drives) are like eggshells. They're notorious for failing in the first year of use. Not all of them fail, of course. But enough of them to where a fair, unbiased and rational person would say that 'The failure rate for an EHD in the first year of use is very high.' And it is. People have testified to that time after time in the reviews they wrote at Newegg and Amazon. That is why I took a hard look at online backup services and eventually bought into one of them.

Nevertheless I rolled the dice and recently purchased a portable EHD made by Toshiba. But Toshiba does have a 3 year warranty so that provides a little relief. I would not have bought it if they offered only a one year parts replacement warranty. Though Toshiba's tech support department gets a D on their report card for not being open 24/7/365, for not having remote access, and for not always answering their phone thus forcing the customer to leave a message and wait around for a call back that might not ever come (and when it does come, IF it comes, you might be on the side of a mountain snowboarding or sittin' in your car stuck in a traffic jam or pushing a shopping cart through aisle of your favorite supermarket or underneath your car changing the oil far away from your computer hardware and a scenario like that is never any good for you, your computer gear or your sanity.) So that's why Toshiba's EHD tech department gets a D.

I had been backing up my data online with Jungle Disk and it was going great but it came to an end. I was with Jungle Disk for approximately 7-9 months and all those months were great except for the last four days of service. Recently their backup system failed on me. At first I could not backup any of my data, something I would do on a daily basis 3 to 10 times a day. And then I couldn't access any of my data. They had just performed a system makeover though I never found out for sure if that's what caused the mess.

The Jungle Disk system failure was a huge problem thrust on me as it happened on a major holiday, And because I create a lot of new files on a daily basis. The Jungle Disk tech support department does not offer support over the phone. When I first signed up with them that didn't set well with me but I kinda threw caution to the wind and elected to go with them anyway knowing full well that troubleshooting system issues in a forum or via email is a great way to extend the life of the problem exponentially and prolong the matter of finding a fix till god knows when. Yeah I threw caution to the wind because I remember telling myself 'When Jungle Disk breaks like all things break I just hope that when it does break that them not having a call center won't be too much of a problem. And hey look at me...Jungle Disk stores my data on Amazons server, and that makes me special 'cause Amazon's servers are bullet proof!!' In retrospect that was one of my brains stupider moments cause Jungle Disk did break big-time. I'm wiser now...

When a Jungle Disk user experiences a significant problem that requires extensive troubleshooting, you have to go to their forum, post the problem, and then wait around and hope that someone who's top gun comes along to render help. I don't live off of a 401K. I don't play golf every afternoon. I'm not retired. Time is of the essence. I juggle work, school and try to recreate when I can, if I can. Waiting around for call backs and posts to a discussion forum for answers to a technical problem that requires immediate attenion are MAJOR time eaters and I don't have time available to be eaten away at random. Especially to a company that I pay a monthly fee for the service of providing a place to store my data online and for a software program that used to back up my data with one click of the mouse. Besides the great amount of time wasted, if you use your data for work and school, the stress incurred due to an out-of-the-blue 911-worthy malfunction that disables your backup strategies number one component is the type of stress that will put a small dent in your brain for an hour or more. For four whole days we played a game of virtual e-mail tag. During those four days the Jungle Disk 'support department' offered suggestions but none of them fixed the problem. In one post I posted my phone number and told them to call me. We're talkiing personal data, I was desperate for a solution and the email tag-like back and forth get nowhere fast forum thing wasn't cuttin' it. On day four I concluded that the malfunction would never get fixed so I had to quit using their service because not only was their backup/storage program unreliable but so was their so-called tech support department.

Though I'm big on backing up data remotely, no more online backups for me, at least for today (I gotta backup up my data remotely as well as locally 'cause I live in an apartment complex and you can't always trust your neighbor to do the right thing or to be sober and/or drug free 100% of the time no telling which idiot is gonna start the next fire that burns my apartment complex down to the ground is what I'm sayin' and that's why I always gotta have a remote backup just not with Jungle Disk or Mozy or iDrive or probrably not Carbonite, either, though I'll think of something).