Hey Photographers, how much disk storage do you have on your computer?

[Chappers]

I thought I had a lot of photos until I came here - just 12000 - bugger. I bought a 500GB external but gave it to my brother-in-law as he needed it more than me (he's a student).

 

[pinktank]

after a while, old ones can go into archival dvds

 

[kitki83]

I have about 100gig in RAW, I am creating a new methodology for organizing my files when exporting them to TIFF/JPG. Anyway I have 100gig original on 2nd HD, 3rd HD is Time Machine back up, 4th is USB copy, and 2 sets of DVD copies one held by a friend.


Come Black Friday I am going to horde myself of 750-1tb because I just cannot handle my file load and I am worried this is something I will again. I should look into online storage, recommendations?

 

[MattKanzler]

500 GB external.

250 GB on my macbook

 

[Renderz]

500 GB external.

250 GB on my macbook

How much storage do your photos take?

 

[ButtUglyJeff]

2 * 500GB = 1TB
2 * 160GB = 320GB
1TB + 320GB = 1.32TB ≠ 760GB

Everything is saved twice, and its not striping or mirroring, there is some kind a data compression going on, at least the for the second copy........

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobolator.html


Data Robotics refers to it as "BeyondRaid", but I think it would be better served a "Raid for Dummies".....

http://www.drobo.com/Products/BeyondRAID.html

I'm not going to pretend to be a RAID expert, because I'm not. All I know is that it has to do with creating partitions to infinity, thus you can keep adding storage (bigger drives) without hitting a limit. At least that's the theory........

 

[ButtUglyJeff]

The cost is a concern that I see with it too...with and without the NAS adaptor............

....................So what are all of the highly compelling features on the drobo that make it a better value in comparison and context?


-hh

I find it ironic, that on a Mac forum, a Mac owner has a hard time justifying the purchase of an accessory that makes one's life easier. This is not that unlike the same justification in any Apple purchase, so I guess we all would have to dig down deep in our Apple vs PC ammo.........

 

[rhett7660]

I find it ironic, that on a Mac forum, a Mac owner has a hard time justifying the purchase of an accessory that makes one's life easier. This is not that unlike the same justification in any Apple purchase, so I guess we all would have to dig down deep in our Apple vs PC ammo.........

I also find it quite ironic one would not spend the money to protect something that can not be replaced.

Call me paranoid but I have had some of my hard drives crash and I lost some items. Never again.

In my Mac Pro:

4 hard drives
1 for apps
1 for time machine back up
2 for scratch disks and manage items I am working on at the time

1 120 gig external just word docs
2 500 gig external music photos
4 500 gig in an external enclosure music photos
2 80 gig hard drives in my server as back ups for just photos and music
2 120 gig hard drives in my server as back ups for just photos and music

 

[Zer0]

120 Gib in mabcook
120 Gib External
250 Gib External partitioned into two 125's

Total 490GiB

I store everything I use on the macbook internal drive. Make a clone of the pictures documents etc on the 120Gib.

Store rarely accessed files on the 120Gib drive and clone it on the 125Gib partition of the 250 external drive.

Store archive files on the 125Gib partition of the 250 drive and burn DVD's for backup!

Also monthly cloning of the entire OS X on the other 125Gib partition of the 250 drive.

I do take a lot of pictures, but I'm extremely critical and keep very few. (Or may be I'm just crap with camera )

I'm running very close to full now, but I like the current set up I have. Plan to go 500 internal, 500 external and 1TB external soon.

 

[termina3]

I do take a lot of pictures, but I'm extremely critical and keep very few. (Or may be I'm just crap with camera )

Most of my photos are terrible (around 10% are keepers that I'd display), but I keep all of them. Call it a pack-rat mentality towards photos (and it's paid off before... sometimes people want photos of their kid, no matter how bad they are).

 

[rhett7660]

Most of my photos are terrible (around 10% are keepers that I'd display), but I keep all of them. Call it a pack-rat mentality towards photos (and it's paid off before... sometimes people want photos of their kid, no matter how bad they are).

I couldn't agree more....... I do the same thing and now the wife does it too. It is amazing how many photos you think are crap, someone comes along and really likes it and wants a copy of it. So yup, I pretty much keep them all.

 

[onomatopoeia]

I use a Drobo loaded with three 750GB drives. I store my main Aperture library on a 1GB internal drive but sync it to the Drobo regularly (that effectively gives me 3 copies of my Aperture library: 1 on the Mac Pro's internal drive and 2 on the Drobo).

 

[apearlman]

Not so much; 25 gig.

With 5 years of photos, I'm still using only 25gig of my 250GB hard drive. Backup is another 25GB on an external. Most of my images are JPG and about half are from an old 4MP camera, but I still have about 12,000 images total.

You should realize that when you ask a question like this, people who use LOTS of drive space for photos are more likely to answer than those who use very little. So these responses probably are not representative of most people's setups.

 

[onomatopoeia]

You should realize that when you ask a question like this, people who use LOTS of drive space for photos are more likely to answer than those who use very little. So these responses probably are not representative of most people's setups.

You should realize that people who give answers like this may feel inadequate due to their lack of disk space.

Seriously, I think that's over analyzing things. Storage is so cheap right now there is no reason not to have larger capacity. Besides, it often gives the opportunity for redundant backup.

 

[CrackedButter]

I have 200GB on my MacBook, a portable 80GB drive and a desktop size HD which is 160GB in capacity.

I'm going to use TimeMachine with the 160GB and put my most important stuff on the 80GB.

 

[Cliff3]

I was using a 750GB external drive to host a 300GB photo library, among other things. The drive was damaged while being shipped to Australia with my other personal effects, and of course I had no backups. The dead drive has been replaced with a 1TB RAID 1 drive (FW800/FW400/USB). Hopefully a data recovery place can help me with the damaged drive at a reasonable price.

I mainly use a MBP with a 120GB internal drive, and have an 80GB bus powered FW400 drive for additional temporary storage if needed.

 

[MacNoobie]

1.4tb

 

[Kirbdog]

My current setup consists of:
500GB in my iMac
500GB external that is exclusive to Time Machine
500GB that is for manual backup and extra storage
Every project that I do also gets backed up to DVD, I then store all the DVD backups at another location in case I lose everything in my home office.

I take backing up my photos very seriously!!

My philosophy is this: I can get a new computer if it dies, replace a HHD if it fails. If I lose a program I can download it and reinstall it. I can rewrite a document but I can NEVER go back and re-create or re-live the photos that I have taken over the years.

They are literally irreplaceable. So Back them up!

 

[66217]

Most of my photos are terrible (around 10% are keepers that I'd display), but I keep all of them. Call it a pack-rat mentality towards photos (and it's paid off before... sometimes people want photos of their kid, no matter how bad they are).

I couldn't agree more....... I do the same thing and now the wife does it too. It is amazing how many photos you think are crap, someone comes along and really likes it and wants a copy of it. So yup, I pretty much keep them all.

What happens is that those terrible photos are kind of the good ones people normally take with their P&S. I swear that whenever I enter Facebook and see photos, most of them are either out-of-focus, overexposed, underexposed or just simply with a terrible composition.

Lately I have stopped deleting photos, but sometimes I just can't stop myself. Last baseball game I went to I took around 250 photos, I ended erasing like 150.

 

[yrsonicdeath]

What happens is that those terrible photos are kind of the good ones people normally take with their P&S. I swear that whenever I enter Facebook and see photos, most of them are either out-of-focus, overexposed, underexposed or just simply with a terrible composition.

Lately I have stopped deleting photos, but sometimes I just can't stop myself. Last baseball game I went to I took around 250 photos, I ended erasing like 150.

Sometimes it's really hard. I'm trying to break the habit as well!

 

[Renderz]

Lately I have stopped deleting photos, but sometimes I just can't stop myself. Last baseball game I went to I took around 250 photos, I ended erasing like 150.

I'm the other way round. I don't delete enough!

 

[iGary]

1.75 TB

But I find that most "photographers" image libraries could be at least half of what they are. So many of them are filled with useless junk that they don't even need...

 

[-hh]

I find it ironic, that on a Mac forum, a Mac owner has a hard time justifying the purchase of an accessory that makes one's life easier. This is not that unlike the same justification in any Apple purchase, so I guess we all would have to dig down deep in our Apple vs PC ammo.........

Thanks, but Mac or no Mac, I do like to have a realistic clue as to what value I'm getting out of buying something. When the claim is "makes life easier", then it should be easy for someone to articulate some specifics, so others can then judge for themselves if its worth the higher cost to them.

For example, I understand the concept of the drobo feature of being able to do incremental upgrades using any old random drive, but what I question is the real world pragmatic value-added of this feature. My admitted cynicism is because my HD upgrade cycles over the past 20 years have tended to be such that the older HDs are fairly quickly "left in the dust", such that it becomes questionable pretty quickly as to even bother to keep the old HDs actively available. Afterall, why bother to do so, when one can buy a pair of 400GB HDs for $100?

The slipperly slope here becomes the question of how large of a stack of external HDs do you want to eventually collect in your office, each with its own spinning fan making noise. On my first PPC system, I think at one point I had my system running 6 spindles. The new machine had more HD than all of those others combined, so they were retired...and gosh, the office was suddenly and dramatically silent!

Similarly, for drobo's RAID platter failure, the automatic email alert function is duplicated in freeware, with products such as RaidEye or shareware such as RAID Alert.

I also find it quite ironic one would not spend the money to protect something that can not be replaced.

I agree, but I'm not really all that sure that the question was intended to really articulate between 'total storage' versus 'backup strategies', even though the two topics are interrelated.

FWIW, I had believed that I was being clever a few years ago when I bought an external case that used a removable tray system (and had 3 trays/3 HDs). The reason why is because it turns out that the power supply on the external case was a single point of failure opportunity. Granted, it was nothing that buying a couple of new enclosures didn't solve, but the initial troubleshooting was problematic when the power was intermittant and some drives appeared good, then bad, while others that had seemed bad became good, etc.


-hh

 

[tonie]

got a 1tb.

 

[Everythingisnt]

1 750g harddrive for media (photos, movies), and a LaCie external drive as backup.

Right now I have 3 aperture libraries, one 'personal' at 14Gigs, one 'work' at 44Gigs, and one 'misc' at 4Gigs