running out of space on my mac - archiving help!

[carrieann]

I have a 750GB hard drive on my macbook pro (my only computer) with only 50GB remaining free. I have every photo on here, along with most of my HD video that I take with my camcorder. With just those two things alone, I have 200GB of photos and 350GB of video sitting on my laptop. I used to have an online backup (JungleDisk) that I was going to use for archiving my photos, but it wound up costing over $100/month for this because I have so many files. So now I'm looking for a new/better backup and archive solution.

My first option was to get an external drive, but in my past, I've had too many of those fail. So I'm nervous about archiving things there. If I did that, I'd want an external for archiving, a backup of my archive, and then another backup of my laptop. So that's THREE externals.

Anyone else have a better solution? All of the online file storage sites seem to be sync only... meaning if I delete the file from my computer, it's gone online, too. I can't find someone who also does archiving, and has a "reasonable" price for online storage/archiving for that much data.

I also upload all my photos to Flickr, but that's just the modified JPG's... I'd like to still hang on to all my RAW files!

What does everyone else do? I can't imagine how long it would take me to burn all these files onto DVD... and then what if the DVD gets scratched??

 

[miles01110]

External drives are going to be the most cost-effective way to do it.

 

[ashman70]

I concur, external is the way to go. Dlink and others make some relatively inexpensive external enclosures that can hold 2, 4 or more drives, depending on your budget; you buy your own drives, whatever size you want, say 2x2TB drives and configure the enclosure (not all do this) with RAID 1, that way you have redundancy if one drive fails. This is what I would suggest you look into, its not that expensive and provides lots of space and protection from drive failure. Most of these enclosures are USB, some, usually more expensive, offer firewire or network connectivity.

 

[blueroom]

A NAS like Synology or QNAP make. They also act as TimeMachine backups.

 

[mgipe]

Clearly, an external HDD is the answer. For the $100/month you're spending on cloud services, you could buy a TB of local storage each month.

Even better would be a NAS system -- basically a dedicated file server on your local network. There are lots of products out there. Drobo is a very popular one. There are a couple advantages to this approach. You can configure the system for RAID or similar failure protection, along with hot swapping drives to replace failed drives. The data is also readily available without the hassle of locating and plugging in a portable drive.

I find the NAS approach to be particularly useful for photo and video storage. You can actually do your editing directly off the network drive, or you can easily move the file over the network to the local disk in order to speed up processing. I use Lightroom to work on photo files stored on a network disk, and it works out very well.

 

[carrieann]

FANTASTIC. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to go the NAS route. Thanks all, I'll check out Synology and Drobo... seems like the best way to go!

 

[blevins321]

If you would like to make a reasonable investment, a NAS might be your best bet. I have a Synology DS411J that I wrote a review about HERE. You can throw up to 4 SATA desktop drives into it. As long as you have more than one, your data will be protected automatically from one drive failure. The software on board also can automatically backup your data to one or more external USB drives. My setup is 4x2TB Western Digital Green drives in one of these along with a 2TB USB external drive that is used for a 3-times-weekly nightly backup. I have a couple thousand Aperture RAW files along with nearly 1TB of movies. It works flawlessly for everything. Plus it has automatic Time Machine support that works surprisingly well over wireless.