External hard drive for photos - Tiger

[Tanya UK]

I have a question about using photoshop/bridge from an external hard drive.

Having been burning off my photos onto CDs for the past few years, I have been told it would be better to back them up onto an external hard drive (to speed up my computer and to have another back up... I am a heavy, heavy photograph user).

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to completely back up my hard drive, and then use this hard drive in an ongoing capacity (sorry, I don't know the technical term!) on a daily basis using photoshop/bridge? Would this be incredibly slow?

2. What does partitioning (a word I've stumbled across in my googling) do/is this how I should be doing the above?

My main objective, other than having an external back up, is to take 'bridge' and all my photographs off my internal hard drive.

Does this make sense? Sorry, I'm not very technically minded, but would appreciate any advice! Thank you.

 

[Paulywauly]

It sounds like you may be confusing a few terms here, if you put your photos on a single external drive and then delete them from your main internal hard drive your not "backing it up" your simply moving it from one place to another. While this could speed up your internal drive if it is especially full it isn't making your data any safer.

A good data storage strategy for you could be the following:

- use your internal hard drive for all of your apps and for working on photos, it's always going to be the fastest and if you do a lot of work it's going be worth it.

- get an external hard disc just to store all of your archived photos on

- buy another one set up with some form of backup software (time machine is built into Mac and works very well) get one big enough to fully back up both of the other drives with room to spare for growth.

Reason I recommend two externals is because it's a very bad idea to have your data and your backups on the same disc. You could use partitioning to split 1 drive into 2 "virtual drives" but I'm this case it's not at all suitable because if the drive breaks your backup copy is also gone!

I hope i haven't confused you there? You could spend lots more money on this but it seems to be the simplest way to store your archived photos and provide some kind of backup

 

[John T]

Photographs, once lost, can never be replaced. Therefore, because hard drives can, and do fail, it is vital to store your photos on at least two drives (your internal drive and one external drive are the absolute minimum).

 

[Tanya UK]

Thank you, with apologies for slowness, for your response - I guess I was overcomplicating a little bit...