Running Out Of Space...

An external drive won't cost you the earth...A decent 1TB should do the trick for you...Amazon etc all have deals.

I have huge video and still photography archives and use a Pegasus R4...shortly will be adding in an R8...not something you need now probably, but thought for the future...The advantage with the 2 arrays is that I can edit in real time with the Thunderbolt high speed connection:


For now a large USB drive shouldn't cost you much:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=430544031

I use a couple of WD mybooks, 4tb units in Raid 01, one for RAW files, the other for Lightroom 4 library, there are also Drobo FS 5 disk units that work well, using the externals let me use two 1tb drives in Raid 01 in my Mac Pro for tv and film stuff, but ive used the mybooks for a couple of years and they 'just work' so well, and simple to set up. older projects get archived on 2 dvd's for filing.

WD MyBook

For off-site backup I use the Seagate GoFlex Pro Ultra Portable. This is the one that has interchangeable connectors. I bought an extra FW800 connector (my system is too old for TB) and 3 HDD units. Two are in my safety deposit box.

Every once in a while I use SuperDuper to clone all of my photos (and Lightroom catalogue) to one of the GoFlex units, and rotate it into my safety deposit box, bringing one home. This puts my photos on a Time Machine backup, a nightly cloned backup, plus a couple of off-site cloned backups.

Your situation will need tweaking, of course.

I have one of the GoFlex drives for backup, too, and I like it. Mines on the firewire 800 bus as well. I have the "older" aluminum MacBook Pro 17 with a Expresscard/34 slot. I added an eSATA card to it from OWC and have a dual drive dock from Thermalake. I can drop any laptop or desktop HD in it for backup or booting from a different OS version. The only problem with this is that the eSATA card only sees one of the drives because it isn't multiport aware. The dock will take Firewire 800 and USB as well. My future plan is to add a desktop with a Thunderbolt port and get a SATA adapter. Then I will put my Aperture library on an SSD. That will allow me to use the same library with two computers.

This is my budget solution. If you look at the drive selections at OWC, they have several bus powered RAID solutions that may do what you want.

Here is a link to OWC.

Maybe the Guardian Mini or Elite Pro Dual will fit the bill?

Dale

acearchie said:

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Since the budget is small I will probably stick to a 2TB Raid 1 array so I will have 1TB of usable space to offload all my old photo's and keep the laptop and the portable drive for my current work before I offload it again.

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I have no experience with Raid drives. That's because several people whose opinion I respect (on these forums) have convinced me that Raid is not appropriate for back up solutions. You can set it up for speed (iirc that's striping), or for redundancy (iirc mirroring). But for backup striping is not a good choice because you've doubled (or more) the chances of a failure - and if one disk goes bad you've lost the lot. And mirroring doesn't give you much extra protection because once you've make the backup you are taking it off-line in any case. You are just as protected with a non-raid cloned backup.

acearchie said:

Is there a way to move them in lightroom or will I have to set something up with Tri-Backup or another app?
...

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Read up on the Adobe support pages - they are very good. But I believe what may work best for you is this. Lr has the capability to export and create a whole new catalogue from selected images. In your case you could select all 2010 photos (for example) and split those images off into a new catalogue. The advantage to this is that you can use Lr to browse these catalogues to find photos when you need them - all metadata is preserved. And if you need to you can merge the catalogue back into, well any catalogue. Usually it will be your current in use catalogue. So... if you need access to an archive while also working on current projects, you can just merge the two catalogues. Later you split it again based on the year.

acearchie said:

Since the budget is small I will probably stick to a 2TB Raid 1 array so I will have 1TB of usable space to offload all my old photo's and keep the laptop and the portable drive for my current work before I offload it again.

Click to expand...

I think you've chose the best option. Storage solutions can be very complex and I believe a lot of people overcomplicate things (like me - I'm designing a NAS at the minute). If your requirements are only to safely back-up photos, a RAID1 is perfect. Assuming you regularly back-up the data and have some contingency plan for the time period between back-ups (such as leaving your photos on an SD card - extremely secure form of storage) then you're fine seeing as it offers a layer of data redundancy.

What really makes me cringe is when people move hard drives when they're still spinning or move it before the drive has fully span down. They're just asking for trouble.

Finally, I can fully recommend the WD MyBook. WD replaced my old 1TB external hard drive (generic) after the cable became very tempromental with a 1.5 TB MyBook. It works like a charm and certainly looks/feels well built.

My 2c: off site consideration- Live Drive at a little less than 7 USD/month; RAID external HD- G-Tech, depending upon where you look (Amazon, Adorama, etc) about 130-150 USD (don't know about shipping to the UK, etc)

I had (have) a 1TB WD MyBook Studio, and it wasn't very reliable. I ran it as a TimeMachine backup and it repeatedly failed to remember the path, with TM giving me "failed" notifications. I'm a Seagate dude all the way, now. The HD in my MBP is Seagate and my backup disk is a GoFlex. I intend to pull the drive from the WD and drop it into my eSATA dock to see if it's the drive or the interface in the WD casing.

Dale

acearchie said:

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But in my mind this is a cheaper and less hassle method than buying two separate drives and then copying the photo's to each. If one drive goes in the Raid then I still have the other with data as I replace the other.

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I have the GoFlex drives for off-site storage, with 3 drives. One is in the safety deposit box. One is connected getting nightly clones. One is sitting on the desk collecting dust. When I have enough new stuff to make it worth my while I swap the dust collector for the connected unit. That night it will be brought up to date. The formerly connected drive will be taken to the safety deposit box, and that unit brought back to collect dust and wait it's turn to be rotated in. I also have a TM running to cover a HDD failure between rotations.

I don't shoot masses of images, so the number of my images exposed to loss is minimal. So for me this works. I can see how the Raid system works better for you ... if you have a good system for rotating the Raid disks to off site storage. I guess this comment is more for background material for other people reading this thread.

acearchie said:

Took your advice and found you can actually just keep it in the same catalogue but move the desitnation of the photo's to the external hard drive so that when on the run they will appear offline and when I connect it they will be there.

Still yet to see whether there is a way to keep a JPG preview so that I can have a visual reference of all the files even if the RAWs are offline.

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That's a good solution. There is a Preferences setting that allows you specify the length of time previews are held before being deleted. I'm guessing you can specify that previews are never deleted. However, you may find the preview database balloons. But perhaps it's worth it.