How do u lot store ur photos

mosu84 · Mar 11, 2009

TheSon said:
WOW... you got jacked. I paid $65 for my 1TB fantom external and $106 for my 1.5TB internal.

$119 for 500gb is a good price maybe 5 years ago. I would return it and get a 1TB for under $100. Do a little research and you'll save a lot of money...

Here's a quick example ($80 w/ fs):
Fantom Drives GreenDrive 1TB External eSATA/USB 2.0 Hard Drive GD1000EU

Easy, fella. Tone down the hyperbole a bit. You have no idea what he purchased--all he said was that it was 500GB. Not all hard drives are the same.

inTempus · Mar 11, 2009

Mystwalker said:
Thanks for info. This sounds like a great idea.

I currently make a DVD, store on two different computers, upload to Flickrs (still do not know if they will let me retrieve same size I upload), + back up to two external USB drives.

Besides the Flickr upload, everything is in my house.

I will feel safer with an external source I know I can retrieve my photo.

Yeah, off-site is by far the best. Carbonite has been around for many years. I noticed some people ripping on off-site/online storage but for the cost there's no better way to get your stuff out of your primary residence/business. Few experts would argue against off-site backup - it's a standard.

I don't recommend you use ONLY a service like Carbonite, that's a bad idea... but no one suggested it either. I use it as a secondary service to augment my external USB drives and DVD's as I mentioned.

If they go out of business, they will notify you and allow you to make back-ups... but then you should already have backups. At that point it's a simple matter of finding a new service provider.

Katier · Mar 11, 2009

My images are a bit split at the moment I really need to sort it out.

My ideal setup would be something like :-

Mac Server with a script that copies the images from other locations.
Time Machine (great backup option) then copying onto an external disk.

TheSon · Mar 11, 2009

mosu84 said:
Easy, fella. Tone down the hyperbole a bit. You have no idea what he purchased--all he said was that it was 500GB. Not all hard drives are the same.

Hyperbole? I didn't exaggerate anything? I showed him a good deal. Especially when 500gb drives are selling for $50 (and cheaper) at staples.

What a strange statement to take offense to... :lol:

especially when it wasn't directed at you.

Back to topic:
I store a lot of my pics on my hosting site. With my website I have a 200gb virtual drive. Very reliable and very easy to update. The only thing I worry about is privacy, but I'm sure that is somewhere in the contract.

I like the idea of just my two 1TB mirrored external HD's and my 1.5TB internal. That is enough for me to sleep secure at night...

mosu84 · Mar 11, 2009

TheSon said:
Hyperbole? I didn't exaggerate anything? I showed him a good deal. Especially when 500gb drives are selling for $50 (and cheaper) at staples.

What a strange statement to take offense to... especially when it wasn't directed at you.

Back to topic:
I store a lot of my pics on my hosting site. With my website I have a 200gb virtual drive. Very reliable and very easy to update. The only thing I worry about is privacy, but I'm sure that is somewhere in the contract.

I like the idea of just my two 1TB mirrored external HD's and my 1.5TB internal. That is enough for me to sleep secure at night...

Sorry, your post just sounded condescending. Plenty of quality 500GB drives (with more features and of better quality than the one you linked to) are available for around $100-120. What if the guy needed a 1394 interface? Or maybe he wanted it to be lighter and more compact? You're going to end up paying more for those features. No need to jump on the guy and basically tell him he's a sucker (which I'm sure you didn't mean, but it's how it sounded when I read it).

Anyway, like you said, thread hijack over.

Marc Kurth · Mar 11, 2009

It was mentioned once, but bears repeating:

CD/DVD media that you burn yourself is not a good long term storage solution because they have a limited life even stored in ideal conditions. Don't rely solely on them and assume that your important files are safe.

To answer the original question, I use multiple redundant hard drives which are added to on a regular basis. My permanent files exist on no less than 5 separate drives at any given time, never all in one place at the same time.

Defy · Mar 11, 2009

Data Robotics, Inc.

Kinda pricey but nice solution if you are not computer savvy enough to set up your own raid array!

mosu84 · Mar 11, 2009

Marc Kurth said:
It was mentioned once, but bears repeating:

CD/DVD media that you burn yourself is not a good long term storage solution because they have a limited life even stored in ideal conditions. Don't rely solely on them and assume that your important files are safe.

To answer the original question, I use multiple redundant hard drives which are added to on a regular basis. My permanent files exist on no less than 5 separate drives at any given time, never all in one place at the same time.

Can you list all 5+ drives? I'm guessing RAID + external + online?

MikeBcos · Mar 11, 2009

I have a file server containing all my Raw images and jpg conversions. On my regular desktop I have DNG and jpg conversions of all my images. I have an external drive which contains my NEFs, DNGs and jpgs.

The file server also backs up daily to Mozy online backup - 176GB so far.

MikeBcos · Mar 11, 2009

Also, I've said this before, but I'll happily say it again:

RAID should NEVER be used as your only backup system. If your primary drive suffers a partial failure and corrupts the data on it, that corruption will be copied to all the other drives. Multiple drives are no good if they are ALL corrupt.

RAID systems are designed to supply redundancy to servers, they will allow it to continue running if one drive goes down, they were never designed to be used as primary backups.

Don't get me wrong, RAID is a great thing, if you do suffer a total drive failure you lose nothing, but all files should be backed up to yet another drive or drives.

dakkon76 · Mar 11, 2009

Not only that, but I've heard that if your raid card fails, that you may not be able to simply replace the raid card and have your drives work. In other words, while your data may exist on 2 different drives, if your raid card fails you may still be SOL. This is why I prefer simply backing up from one drive to another. Then for off-site storage I'd recommend either doing a DVD/Blu-ray backup once per month and trashing the old DVDs each time, or backing up to an external hard drive that you keep off site.

nikonguy · Mar 11, 2009

i dont store any photos on my internal HD, they all go to an external HD, organized by job, and then they are also stored on my smugmug site (all by job again) and then I also store them on another external hard drive that sits at my office, just incase the one at my house for some reason dissappears/burns/dies

Jeffrey Byrnes · Mar 11, 2009

I upload to a temp folder. Then I move the photos to folders that they belong to. Say I shoot in a Town I am in often, it has its own folder. I dump them there and have a seperate folder inside that one for the edited and finals. Then I also have a folder for the images that will go to print. Of course everything is backed up onto an external hard drive.