Freeing up hard drive space - throw aways?

[JerryPH]

I've started to do both. I've bought a 1 terrabyte hard drive for my laptop and use that as my portable storage area. At home, I just recently set up and use an 18 terrabyte SAN for my home network.

That said, I have something like 80-90 gig worth of pictures that I went through just recently and culled it down to 72 gig in all of about 15 minutes. All the pics that I cannot save, or are not of at least a pretty good quality, or are blatantly blurred, or have no real meaning and are not of my standard... get permanently erased.

There is absolutely NO reason I need to permanently store a picture of an underexposed family member that is so motion blurred that I cannot make out a face. LOL

In my defence, my number of keepers per 100 is always rising and the overall quality of my pictures has drastically improved.

 

[djrichie28]

So far, I'm deleting all but my keepers. I'm not sure how that will change as I get better, though.

I am pretty much the same way. Even though I have plenty of HD space the 'just ok' pictures never seem to get better over time, if anything, they get worse as I get better as a photographer. At one point I did keep 'not that bad' photos as a reference to make improvements, but recently I have been using the 'keepers' as my guide. I also find it helps with my motivation when I see only the keepers on my system. They get backed up on a portable HD monthly.

Everybody is different and have their own methods and desires of archiving, there really is no right or wrong way in general. If the so - so images are worth keeping, then keep them. There have been many great suggestions so far as to storage.

 

[skywalkerbeth]

At one point I did keep 'not that bad' photos as a reference to make improvements, but recently I have been using the 'keepers' as my guide. I also find it helps with my motivation when I see only the keepers on my system.

Ain't that the truth! If you only saw my keepers you might think I'm a halfways decent photographer. I sure forget all the bad ones, when all I view are the good ones I've saved online. :lmao:

 

[mrodgers]

Another vote for "buy another drive" if you are able to.

I have 2 drives, the original 200 gig drive and my old 80 gig. Total is telling me 260.45 gig in Windows explorer. Of that, I have.... 12.29 gig free .

Majority of my taken space stems from being on dialup for the longest time and of the racing sim I use. We have many fantastic video composers with the racing sim and I use to download them at work and bring them home on a thumbdrive. I am also into RC flying and flight simming and have hundreds of videos of those. I'm going through them and deleting many as I only probably had 5 gig free a week ago.

An example of some of the videos are, there was a league series in the racing sim that they produced the entire races along with commentary and I had about 10 of them downloaded. They were approximately 800 mb each, so that clogs up the drive pretty quick along with all the other racing and flying videos.

Now that I'm gathering up more photos, I need to delete the videos since they are now easily available with my broadband that I got a year ago. I wouldn't go deleting if it was my photos. I would get another drive if I had enough photos to fill a hard drive.

 

[Sandspur]

I'm drive poor.
1- 200 that's the catchall for everything (except client files) and is hooked to my Apple Extreme router so I can dump to it from any of the three Macs I have.
2 - internal 120s on my main system (one backs up the other automatically three times a week.)
2- 80 gig externals - on the main system - My ancient G4 (one exclusively for client files)
1- 120 gig external (travels with the laptop)
1- 60 gig external (was originally the HD that came with the MacBook) I pulled it and replaced it with a 160

And for BIG projects - I always burn a DVD (or three or four) of the entire project once the initial culling has been done.

 

[Jeff Canes]

Figure on buying a new extranet ever 12-24 months for the rest of your life or shot film, i'm up to 4

 

[Phranquey]

Pretty much with everyone else...buy an external USB hard drive, and do occasional culling. You will look back in a few years, as you improve, and look at pictures while thinking "OMG, I actually kept THAT".....delete.

I have two USB externals now. A few years back I had a computer take a total dump on me. I tried pulling the hard drive and put in another computer, but it was done for. I tried taking it to a place that did recoveries, and their initial "down payment" to even look at it was $500, with a likely bill in the $1000 range. Needless to say, those pics are gone, and I am now overly anal about backing up...all it takes is once, and I never wish that upon anyone.

 

[ThePup]

Thanks everyone. Great points. I do have an external hard drive. I will be more creative with it - I'll set aside a separate folder on it for the "also rans" and keep those indefinitely, and get rid of them on the main HD. QED.

That's pretty much what I do - My primary HD is pretty tight, my external has loads of space. When I load new pics from the camera, I do a backup, then go through and delete obviously bad ones. From there, I've generally got multiple shots that are very similar, so I cut down about half the doubleups. I've always got 'em on the external backup drive if I want to go through them later.

 

[Dao]

Do you think backing up your entire collection to a permanent external source is a better choice? Like DVDs .. or Bluerays discs in the future ..

You never know when your drives will fail. Once you have them backup, you can simply delete the one that you do not want to keep in your primary storage. If in case you need them back for any reason in the future, just copy them back to your drive and work on it.

 

[Village Idiot]

I have two backup sources. An external drive where I can pull images from whenever I need them and DVD's sitting on a shelf.

 

[TCimages]

Everything has a shelf life, including DVDs. BlueRay will certainly add to the capacity of storage and probably have archival quality, but I find burning to DVDs just too darn slow. Also, these are fine for incremental backups, but to replace all of your back up DVDs would be painful.

Drives are so reasonbly priced and you can easily dump your pics onto a thrid copy to keep on the shelf. There is also RAID configurations to ensure redundancy.

Drives just seem like the obvious choice for me.

 

[Mystwalker]

In beginning, I sorted by Good, Saveable, Delete ... that took FOREVER.

Today, I save from CF-Card to HardDrive1 (HD1). Make a copy to DvD, or two (both jpeg and RAW)

Look through all and pull out ones I want to print out immediately. Copy these to folder called "printable".

Upload "printables" to CostCo.com to print. Upload "printables" to flickr.com to show off to family - do photo management in flickr, etc ...

Before deleting from computer I copy everything (jpeg+RAW) to hard drives on another computer and then back up to external Seagate FreeAgent Pro.

I'm paranoid about losing pictures. Probably should delete the "bad" ones from external drive.

Anyone know a good forum on Premiere Elements? My wife started using a camcorder so now I have about 15-20 of those 8mm tapes lying around. Not sure about life of these things so would like to process them and save to DvD soon.

 

[Mystwalker]

Everything has a shelf life, including DVDs. BlueRay will certainly add to the capacity of storage and probably have archival quality, but I find burning to DVDs just too darn slow. Also, these are fine for incremental backups, but to replace all of your back up DVDs would be painful.

Drives are so reasonbly priced and you can easily dump your pics onto a thrid copy to keep on the shelf. There is also RAID configurations to ensure redundancy.

Drives just seem like the obvious choice for me.

Oh oh thought DVDs and CDs will keep going, and going. What is their shelf life? If it's anything greater then a normal lifespan, it's good.

RAID may be expensive, and when they do go down - OUCH! Amount of time you spend fixing, or amount of money you pay for others to fix, you may as well have spent time/money backing up to CD/DVD/BluRay. I do my backups and uploads when I'm sleeping

 

[Dao]

Oh oh thought DVDs and CDs will keep going, and going. What is their shelf life? If it's anything greater then a normal lifespan, it's good.

RAID may be expensive, and when they do go down - OUCH! Amount of time you spend fixing, or amount of money you pay for others to fix, you may as well have spent time/money backing up to CD/DVD/BluRay. I do my backups and uploads when I'm sleeping

30 years+ according to the following links.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/technology/a/cdcaretips.htm

And I am sure people will move to the newer technology in 10 to 20 years later. As far as RAID. It is not as bullet proof as people often think. I have seen them failed in the past. (The place where I work has a lot of servers 2000+ and most of them are RAIDed from generic to name branded servers.) But don't get me wrong, I 100% agree it is a hassle to back things up on DVDs So back stuff up on a network storage is still a very good choice as long as that is not the only copy you have.

The reason now they have RAID6 is because often that more than 1 drive fail around the same time. I'd seen 3 drives died at the same time for a 5 drives RAID5 IBM server. Especially when the drives were made around the same time from the same factory.

 

[pbsmoker]

With the price of portable media dropping so rapidly, its just easier to keep everything. I saw a 500gb hard drive for $110.
And they are just getting cheaper.