How big is your....

[griffin86]

3 TB and it's got 2TB on it. I bought it 8 months ago.

 

[The_Traveler]

I don't think anyone taking pictures for fun does 500 GB of photos a year that are worth keeping.
That's about 35,000 good size pictures.
Let's say you edit 1/10 to 200 meg, so you're down to ~20,000 originals + edits.
That's about 400 keepers a week.

It isn't that your disks are too small, it's that you are keeping stuff that doesn't deserve the space.

 

[JDFlood]

I have 8tb on my PC, an 8tb drobo and 8tb of 2tb bare drives with a USB device to mount the 2tbs for backup. Triplicate. I am about to swap my 2tb drives in my PC for 4tb drives... Then do the same in my drobo.JD. That's life and Moore's Law I probably take 10,000 decent photos a year... At 65meg each that is more than 500 gig. I see no reason in spending a lot of time carefully evaluating which perfectly good photos to delete. Easier to increase disk space.

 

[amolitor]

I agree with Lew in general that if you're keeping more than a few thousand pictures a year, you're almost certainly wasting a lot of space on duds.

There's a bigger issue here, though, which is that stuff is going to get buried. Since the advent of roll film photographers have had the ability to fall behind, sometimes quite drastically. Digital has increased this immensely. Winogrand and Maier died with 100,000+ undeveloped negatives each. Now they seem like pikers, any fool can crank out 100,000 pictures in a year, and lose them all in the bowels of multiple terabytes of storage.

I have about 150G of digital pictures lying around on my hard disk. That includes a little bit of duplication. Call it 15,000 individual pictures. It's pretty well organized, but it's still more pictures than I can reasonably make sense of. I have something like 10G shared out with family, say a few thousand pictures, and that collection I can make sense of. It's a second level of culling, editing, and organization on top of that first layer, so it's pretty well sorted out. Also, it's only a few thousand pictures.

If you have 10x as many pictures lying around as I do, I submit to you that you've lost track of what you have. You possess it in some sense, but not in any really useful one.

 

[gsgary]

External storage drive?

So how big is yours?

Fistly I don't drive my storage Then my storage is internal, I always keep it inside the house. How big ? Three cupboards on the wall, four large plastic containers under my darkroom table, six banker boxes full of gear. And yet still lots of stuff just laying around on shelves and desks. Failure of this system of storage is, that sometimes I fail to find what I need ! Oh, life is fun....

And no need to back up just re scan the neg you want, mine go in negative holders and in the filing cabinet

 

[gsgary]

I have 50 rolls of APX 100, 100 feet of Orwo54, 100 feet of HP5 and 100 Feet of Kodalith Ortho in my fridge no room for food

 

[gsgary]

I agree with Lew in general that if you're keeping more than a few thousand pictures a year, you're almost certainly wasting a lot of space on duds.

There's a bigger issue here, though, which is that stuff is going to get buried. Since the advent of roll film photographers have had the ability to fall behind, sometimes quite drastically. Digital has increased this immensely. Winogrand and Maier died with 100,000+ undeveloped negatives each. Now they seem like pikers, any fool can crank out 100,000 pictures in a year, and lose them all in the bowels of multiple terabytes of storage.

I have about 150G of digital pictures lying around on my hard disk. That includes a little bit of duplication. Call it 15,000 individual pictures. It's pretty well organized, but it's still more pictures than I can reasonably make sense of. I have something like 10G shared out with family, say a few thousand pictures, and that collection I can make sense of. It's a second level of culling, editing, and organization on top of that first layer, so it's pretty well sorted out. Also, it's only a few thousand pictures.

If you have 10x as many pictures lying around as I do, I submit to you that you've lost track of what you have. You possess it in some sense, but not in any really useful one.

And what have you got with digtal, all you got is a load of 0 and 1's

 

[480sparky]

I already posted this.

I've got.... hmmmm... lemme see.

1tb internal with OS and software.
1tb internal for virgin downloads.
80g intetnal for Capture scratchpad.
1tb external for current albums.
Two extnl. 2tbs for archives.
Four extrnl. 2tbs for rotating backups.
Two extrnl. 2tbs for off-site backup and safety net.
1 500gb portable for backup when traveling.

That's close to 20tb total.

 

[Tiller]

^ That almost seems unnecessary

 

[squirrels]

I'm using an online backup plan, which has been a real comfort now that my laptop is playing BSOD roulette every time I export from photoshop.

 

[astroNikon]

6 x 3TB. Well, 1 is active, with a daily backup to a second one. Then there are the 2 rotating off-site backups, and 2 are archived materials (again, 1 is "active", the other is "backup").

Since I've been in the computer business (and I've had the first PC's - anyone remember the commodor 64?), I've lost a drive every year. Some lasted 3-4 years, some were only 1 year. So it's not "IF" the drive will fail, but "WHEN". All of my systems are mirrored (laptops as well as desktops), and one of the drives goes bad also about one a year. Sometimes you can rebuild the drive, sometimes you can't and have to replace the hardware. But I'm never lost data.

Yeah, I remember learning programming on the Commodore Pets, apple // and the little handhelds things that I cannot remember.

two x 3 tb drives. One is storage, backup and processing (lightroom), the other is backup of that first one. I have other HDs on my mac and PC but I'm not counting those.

 

[table1349]

External storage drive?

So how big is yours? I just filled a terrabyte drive and it took 2 years, that kinda terrifies me! All that data on one drive... I'm not going to say it and tease the storage gods but you know where I'm going with that thought...what if...

I'm thinking of going with smaller drives more often so in the case there is a failure less is at risk.


Thoughts?

It ain't the size of you "Storage" that matters. It's how you use it.:mrgreen:

 

[robbins.photo]

I don't think you really want to know.. lol

 

[nmoody]

I guess you could say my storage backup is 4TB which about half is used currently. But I have many tiers...

My primary machine has a 2TB drive with all my pictures I have not archived yet, that then gets backup up nightly to another computer with multiple 2TB raid arrays along with anything I have archived. Anything that is either sentimental or I think is exceptional for me is in cloud storage (not that many).

This system is a bit complex for the average user and requires a lot of organization but the chance of me loosing something is significantly less than the average person.

 

[480sparky]

^ That almost seems unnecessary

I'm of the opinion that if your work doesn't reside in at least three distinct USPS addresses, it really doesn't exist.

If I ever have a drive crash, or lose an image, I have at least two places I can go to to retrieve it.