Media managment?

vinski · Jul 27, 2010

OK was just shooting jpeg, now shooting 19mb files raw and Jpeg. Filling up HD space fast. Need to know asap of methods used by professionals to properly store my pics before things turn out to be a huge mess? Using aperture on a macbook pro with 250g HD. Have plenty of external drives. Could get an Imac...not sure if I want to go that far yet.

You are all the best...no really the BEST!

Cheers

JamesMason · Jul 27, 2010

Have you looked into Network Attached Storage ? You can buy some cheap TB hard drives and fit loads on that stuff. Unsure how it works with the latest aperture tho. Better external hard drive management was the reason i moved to Lightroom

AverageJoe · Jul 27, 2010

I'm in the same boat:

If you have an airport you can plug almost any external hard drive into it and it will appear as a drive icon. You can then upload to it via WiFi.

I've been doing this with a 500 GB drive which is now getting full. I think I might get a external blue ray burner and burn all the data on the drive to discs then delete the drive and start over again till I need to burn more blue ray discs.

There is no cheap option but one thing is for sure; hard drives don't last forever so don't use them as a primary source of backup.

JamesMason · Jul 27, 2010

AverageJoe said:
I'm in the same boat:

If you have an airport you can plug almost any external hard drive into it and it will appear as a drive icon. You can then upload to it via WiFi.

I've been doing this with a 500 GB drive which is now getting full. I think I might get a external blue ray burner and burn all the data on the drive to discs then delete the drive and start over again till I need to burn more blue ray discs.

There is no cheap option but one thing is for sure; hard drives don't last forever so don't use them as a primary source of backup.

Indeed

There are also some HDD caddies that include blue ray burners.

vinski · Jul 27, 2010

Good advice. Blu ray discs for archiving.. As far as keeping my best and tossing the rest is that a method of pros or do they just keep everything?

AverageJoe · Jul 27, 2010

Personal choice, I might go through some big folders and delete RAW files not worth saving.

You have to do that thing you do when you go through your garage "Am I ever going to use this again?".

Mike_E · Jul 27, 2010

^ It's called editing. Put the culls on a DVD if you like.

Neil S. · Jul 27, 2010

vinski said:
Good advice. Blu ray discs for archiving.. As far as keeping my best and tossing the rest is that a method of pros or do they just keep everything?

I agree with using optical media for backups.

Remember though that these discs were never meant to last forever, just keep that in mind.

Steve01 · Jul 27, 2010

Neil S. said:
I agree with using optical media for backups.

Remember though that these discs were never meant to last forever, just keep that in mind.

That's right, you want to buy and use archive grade discs, and these should be in addition to at least one other backup, better yet two.

AverageJoe · Jul 27, 2010

At some point you have to accept the fact that your photos will not last forever, all media formats will fail at some point.

mwcfarms · Jul 27, 2010

Im not a pro but I cull all the shots I dont plan on editting. Backing up now every two days lol and will have online harddrive back up as well as my external drive which is 1.5TB.

Neil S. · Jul 27, 2010

Steve01 said:
Neil S. said:

I agree with using optical media for backups.

Remember though that these discs were never meant to last forever, just keep that in mind.

Click to expand...

That's right, you want to buy and use archive grade discs, and these should be in addition to at least one other backup, better yet two.

Agreed.

Diversity is by far the best strategy for data protection.

Fireproof safe is a good one to have too.

vinski · Jul 27, 2010

So with the technology of solid state memory improving exponentially, will this create a viable option to archive? Backup on External HD for now and when 1 TB SD cards are available use those??

Neil S. · Jul 27, 2010

vinski said:
So with the technology of solid state memory improving exponentially, will this create a viable option to archive? Backup on External HD for now and when 1 TB SD cards are available use those??

My experience with flash memory has been better than with optical media or HDDs. I have experienced much less data loss on flash media.

This is to include a 160 gig Intel SSD, countless hard drives, burned blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, CF cards, USB flash drives, and others.

I am starting to think maybe its a better way to go than the others. Its just so damn expensive still.

SSDs are starting to drop rapidly in price, and will soon be very affordable. They have no issues with shock damage really, and are very lightweight. I believe they can handle very high temps too compared to HDDs. They seem to be the future of storage....

I was a sysadmin for 4 years in the U.S. Navy by the way.

vinski · Jul 31, 2010

Yeah, It's interesting how much these little cards seem to have the potential to just keep getting bigger and faster. It was only a few years ago when all I could find was a 512mb SD card and now I just bought a 32G. Which is only 64x bigger however 64 times bigger than 32G is 2064. WHich means that in 3 years we could have 2 TB cards at our disposal.