# How big is your....



## PixelRabbit (Nov 26, 2013)

External storage drive? 

So how big is yours? I just filled a terrabyte drive and it took 2 years, that kinda terrifies me! All that data on one drive... I'm not going to say it and tease the storage gods but you know where I'm going with that thought...what if...

I'm thinking of going with smaller drives more often so in the case there is a failure less is at risk.

Thoughts?


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## Ysarex (Nov 26, 2013)

Everything in triplicate. I have multiple terabyte drives; not because I have that many photos but because I have that many copies.

Joe


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## pixmedic (Nov 26, 2013)

don't worry about it.
nothing will ever happen to your 2TB drive. 
its all good.


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## pgriz (Nov 26, 2013)

6 x 3TB.  Well, 1 is active, with a daily backup to a second one.  Then there are the 2 rotating off-site backups, and 2 are archived materials (again, 1 is "active", the other is "backup").

Since I've been in the computer business (and I've had the first PC's - anyone remember the commodor 64?), I've lost a drive every year.  Some lasted 3-4 years, some were only 1 year.  So it's not "IF" the drive will fail, but "WHEN".  All of my systems are mirrored (laptops as well as desktops), and one of the drives goes bad also about one a year.  Sometimes you can rebuild the drive, sometimes you can't and have to replace the hardware.  But I'm never lost data.


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## runnah (Nov 26, 2013)

I have infinite space on my Amazon S3 account. They handle all the backing up and I write the check. Price is very reasonable, about the cost of a new TB drive ever year.


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## Tiller (Nov 26, 2013)

I have never backed up anything, and keep all my photos on my 4 year old laptop.


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## pgriz (Nov 26, 2013)

@ tiller:  time to buy a lottery ticket.  Because if your luck is that good, you should be able to monetize it. ;-)


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## SnappingShark (Nov 26, 2013)

memory card > computer > portable hard drive > NAS

I'm layered. Stuff will eventually reside on the 2 x 2tb NAS. Always 3 copies floating about.


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## lambertpix (Nov 26, 2013)

2 x 2TB in my desktop - mirrored.  Need to upgrade, as these are just about full.

Drobo 5N NAS for backups - currently 6.3TB online, but will also grow as I migrate desktop drives over there.


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## Aloicious (Nov 26, 2013)

2x 640GB RAID1 internal on desktop, 1TB backup #1 internal on desktop, 5 or 6 external portable hard drives ranging from ~320GB to 2TB each, Synology 5 bay expandable NAS currently with 2x 4TB enterprise level drives and 1x 500GB drive. 

I've usually got at least 2, but mostly 3 copies of images (both raw and edited) in separate physical locations similar to brightbynature's setup.


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## sm4him (Nov 26, 2013)

1 TB drives x however many it takes. Currently, I have five--well, three 1TBs and two 500gbs.  I always have one "main" drive and one backup. When I transfer the photos from my sd card, I move them to the main drive. THEN, I make a backup on the second drive. Then, I delete them off the sd card, only when I've verified that I have two good copies.  At that point, I do all my editing on the main drive files and then make copies of any edited photos on the backup drive as well.

I sometimes do the double-backups thing, but right now, I'm just hoping that I've got enough drive space to get me through till January with an original and a backup, because I'm about to buy a car and the budget will get pretty tight for a couple of months!

The way I figure it, drives are relatively cheap compared to the risk of losing your photos because you don't have a backup. Sure, the CHANCE of it happening are slim, but it DOES happen. In fact, I'm currently working on trying to recover all of my sister photos from about 2009-2011 from a drive she had that somehow stopped working. She did have a backup of the photos&#8230;on her laptop. Which had been stolen about a month before the drive failed. So, yeah, even 3 copies is really NOT overkill.


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## amolitor (Nov 26, 2013)

I don't care about most of my pictures.

Family stuff is culled and whatever's ok is uploaded to someplace for sharing with family. Other stuff is mostly disposable, I don't worry about it. The stuff I care about I back up to SD cards from time to time. There's not that much of it.

I cull pretty ruthlessly.


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## timor (Nov 26, 2013)

PixelRabbit said:


> External storage drive?
> 
> So how big is yours?


 Fistly I don't drive my storage Then my storage is internal, I always keep it inside the house. How big ? Three cupboards on the wall, four large plastic containers under my darkroom table, six banker boxes full of gear. And yet still lots of stuff just laying around on shelves and desks. Failure of this system of storage is, that sometimes I fail to find what I need ! Oh, life is fun....


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## Tiller (Nov 26, 2013)

pgriz said:


> @ tiller:  time to buy a lottery ticket.  Because if your luck is that good, you should be able to monetize it. ;-)



Buying $20 worth of lottery tickets is a 100% way of losing $20 

I keep meaning to but a portable HD. I just never seem to get around to it.


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## timor (Nov 26, 2013)

I forgot to mention medium size fridge for films. That to :roll:.


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## griffin86 (Nov 26, 2013)

3 TB and it's got 2TB on it. I bought it 8 months ago.


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## The_Traveler (Nov 26, 2013)

I don't think anyone taking pictures for fun does 500 GB of photos a year that are worth keeping.
That's about 35,000 good size pictures.
Let's say you edit 1/10 to 200 meg, so you're down to ~20,000 originals + edits.
That's about 400 keepers a week. 

It isn't that your disks are too small, it's that you are keeping stuff that doesn't deserve the space.


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## JDFlood (Nov 26, 2013)

I have 8tb on my PC, an 8tb drobo and 8tb of 2tb bare drives with a USB device to mount the 2tbs for backup. Triplicate. I am about to swap my 2tb drives in my PC for 4tb drives... Then do the same in my drobo.JD. That's life and Moore's Law   I probably take 10,000 decent photos a year... At 65meg each that is more than 500 gig. I see no reason in spending a lot of time carefully evaluating which perfectly good photos to delete. Easier to increase disk space.


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## amolitor (Nov 26, 2013)

I agree with Lew in general that if you're keeping more than a few thousand pictures a year, you're almost certainly wasting a lot of space on duds.

There's a bigger issue here, though, which is that stuff is going to get buried. Since the advent of roll film photographers have had the ability to fall behind, sometimes quite drastically. Digital has increased this immensely. Winogrand and Maier died with 100,000+ undeveloped negatives each. Now they seem like pikers, any fool can crank out 100,000 pictures in a year, and lose them all in the bowels of multiple terabytes of storage.

I have about 150G of digital pictures lying around on my hard disk. That includes a little bit of duplication. Call it 15,000 individual pictures. It's pretty well organized, but it's still more pictures than I can reasonably make sense of. I have something like 10G shared out with family, say a few thousand pictures, and that collection I can make sense of. It's a second level of culling, editing, and organization on top of that first layer, so it's pretty well sorted out. Also, it's only a few thousand pictures.

If you have 10x as many pictures lying around as I do, I submit to you that you've lost track of what you have. You possess it in some sense, but not in any really useful one.


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## gsgary (Nov 26, 2013)

timor said:


> PixelRabbit said:
> 
> 
> > External storage drive?
> ...



And no need to back up just re scan the neg you want, mine go in negative holders and in the filing cabinet


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## gsgary (Nov 26, 2013)

I have 50 rolls of APX 100, 100 feet of Orwo54, 100 feet of HP5 and 100 Feet of Kodalith Ortho in my fridge no room for food


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## gsgary (Nov 26, 2013)

amolitor said:


> I agree with Lew in general that if you're keeping more than a few thousand pictures a year, you're almost certainly wasting a lot of space on duds.
> 
> There's a bigger issue here, though, which is that stuff is going to get buried. Since the advent of roll film photographers have had the ability to fall behind, sometimes quite drastically. Digital has increased this immensely. Winogrand and Maier died with 100,000+ undeveloped negatives each. Now they seem like pikers, any fool can crank out 100,000 pictures in a year, and lose them all in the bowels of multiple terabytes of storage.
> 
> ...



And what have you got with digtal, all you got is a load of 0 and 1's


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## 480sparky (Nov 26, 2013)

I already posted this.



480sparky said:


> I've got.... hmmmm... lemme see.
> 
> 1tb internal with OS and software.
> 1tb internal for virgin downloads.
> ...


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## Tiller (Nov 26, 2013)

^ That almost seems unnecessary


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## squirrels (Nov 26, 2013)

I'm using an online backup plan, which has been a real comfort now that my laptop is playing BSOD roulette every time I export from photoshop.


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## astroNikon (Nov 26, 2013)

pgriz said:


> 6 x 3TB.  Well, 1 is active, with a daily backup to a second one.  Then there are the 2 rotating off-site backups, and 2 are archived materials (again, 1 is "active", the other is "backup").
> 
> Since I've been in the computer business (and I've had the first PC's - anyone remember the commodor 64?), I've lost a drive every year.  Some lasted 3-4 years, some were only 1 year.  So it's not "IF" the drive will fail, but "WHEN".  All of my systems are mirrored (laptops as well as desktops), and one of the drives goes bad also about one a year.  Sometimes you can rebuild the drive, sometimes you can't and have to replace the hardware.  But I'm never lost data.



Yeah, I remember learning programming on the Commodore Pets, apple // and the little handhelds things that I cannot remember.

two x 3 tb drives.  One is storage, backup and processing (lightroom), the other is backup of that first one.  I have other HDs on my mac and PC but I'm not counting those.


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## table1349 (Nov 26, 2013)

PixelRabbit said:


> External storage drive?
> 
> So how big is yours? I just filled a terrabyte drive and it took 2 years, that kinda terrifies me! All that data on one drive... I'm not going to say it and tease the storage gods but you know where I'm going with that thought...what if...
> 
> ...



It ain't the size of you "Storage" that matters. It's how you use it.:mrgreen:


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## robbins.photo (Nov 26, 2013)

I don't think you really want to know.. lol


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## nmoody (Nov 26, 2013)

I guess you could say my storage backup is 4TB which about half is used currently. But I have many tiers...

My primary machine has a 2TB drive with all my pictures I have not archived yet, that then gets backup up nightly to another computer with multiple 2TB raid arrays along with anything I have archived. Anything that is either sentimental or I think is exceptional for me is in cloud storage (not that many). 

This system is a bit complex for the average user and requires a lot of organization but the chance of me loosing something is significantly less than the average person.


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## 480sparky (Nov 26, 2013)

Tiller said:


> ^ That almost seems unnecessary



I'm of the opinion that if your work doesn't reside in at least three distinct USPS addresses, it really doesn't exist.

If I ever have a drive crash, or lose an image, I have at least two places I can go to to retrieve it.


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## table1349 (Nov 26, 2013)

480sparky said:


> Tiller said:
> 
> 
> > ^ That almost seems unnecessary
> ...


Wow and all those folks in every other part of the world besides the good ole USA with cameras and computers must not really have any images at all. :lmao:


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## robbins.photo (Nov 26, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> 480sparky said:
> 
> 
> > Tiller said:
> ...



True, but on the upside they can buy the brand new Canon SL-1 in snowy white.  So, there is that.


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## 480sparky (Nov 26, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> Wow and all those folks in every other part of the world besides the good ole USA with cameras and computers must not really have any images at all. :lmao:



They won't when their one single hard drive crashes.

Or they accidently delete an image and don't discover it for a while.


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## robbins.photo (Nov 26, 2013)

480sparky said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > Wow and all those folks in every other part of the world besides the good ole USA with cameras and computers must not really have any images at all. :lmao:
> ...



Lol.. I think his objection wasn't so much to the idea of having off site backup but rather the fact that you stated that it had to be in separate USPS zip codes, meaning that you would have to be located in the US since they don't use zip codes elsewhere.


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## manaheim (Nov 26, 2013)

I burn non-critical crap off to high quality DVDs and occasionally blurays and then delete them off live storage.  Anything critical I keep a copy of in one folder on my server and back that up periodically.

I also outright delete anything that's crap before it ever gets backed up.

It's a good way to force yourself to learn how to cull the stuff.


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## 480sparky (Nov 26, 2013)

robbins.photo said:


> 480sparky said:
> 
> 
> > gryphonslair99 said:
> ...



Um... where did I say anything about ZIP codes? :er:


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## robbins.photo (Nov 26, 2013)

480sparky said:


> I'm of the opinion that if your work doesn't reside in at least three distinct USPS addresses, it really doesn't exist.



I think it was pretty much implied here - and I think that's what he was taking issue with.


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## table1349 (Nov 26, 2013)

robbins.photo said:


> 480sparky said:
> 
> 
> > I'm of the opinion that if your work doesn't reside in at least three distinct USPS addresses, it really doesn't exist.
> ...


Nah, all of my European friends realize that the only place to keep anything of value is at a USPS address, if of course you want it to exist.  :lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao:


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## robbins.photo (Nov 26, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> robbins.photo said:
> 
> 
> > 480sparky said:
> ...



Well I guess we can just all be thankful that they recently dropped that requirement from 5 to 3 then.. lol


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## table1349 (Nov 26, 2013)

robbins.photo said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > robbins.photo said:
> ...



Yeah, because they were all wanting to be exceedingly safe so they would ship their external hard drives by 5 different carriers.  Big hassle and terribly expensive, not to mention how costly the thousands of miles of USB cable necessary to connect their drives to their computer. :mrgreen:


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## kathyt (Nov 26, 2013)

I cull super hard and keep only my 4 and 5 star images in LR. I don't need a crap load of storage because I dump a lot. I have two 1-TB external backups and have filled neither of them. Not even close. I only keep 5 LR backups at a time.


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## Ysarex (Nov 26, 2013)

The_Traveler said:


> I don't think anyone taking pictures for fun does 500 GB of photos a year that are worth keeping.
> That's about 35,000 good size pictures.
> Let's say you edit 1/10 to 200 meg, so you're down to ~20,000 originals + edits.
> That's about 400 keepers a week.
> ...



I only get 16,000 photos per 500 GB of storage and that's without converting any of them.

Joe


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## gsgary (Nov 27, 2013)

manaheim said:


> I burn non-critical crap off to high quality DVDs and occasionally blurays and then delete them off live storage.  Anything critical I keep a copy of in one folder on my server and back that up periodically.
> 
> I also outright delete anything that's crap before it ever gets backed up.
> 
> It's a good way to force yourself to learn how to cull the stuff.



DVD's dont last long

Sent from my GT-I9100P using Tapatalk 2


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## manaheim (Nov 27, 2013)

gsgary said:


> manaheim said:
> 
> 
> > I burn non-critical crap off to high quality DVDs and occasionally blurays and then delete them off live storage. Anything critical I keep a copy of in one folder on my server and back that up periodically.
> ...



DVDs and CDs CAN degrade, yes. However, in all of my CDs and DVDs... including the pack of about 300 that sit in my car on a car seat and cook all summer long... I have... to date... lost 2. And we're going back about 20 years now.

You will also recall I said high quality DVDs. I don't buy crap. The DVDs I buy are specifically tested and abused to **** to make sure they withstand some stupid amount of abuse. Of course, it's impossible to predict what time will bring, but I'm not buying these cheap $.10 things you get at Staples. (There's nothing really wrong with those, I'm just not banking anything more important on them)

AND you will also recall I said I keep the critical stuff on DVD AND on spinning disk AND on backups.  We all take a heck of a lot of pictures... but how many of those will you REALLY care about if you lose them?  And how many of those would you care about if you lost the RAW files? 10% would be a shockingly high number if you ask me.

I actually have two such volumes... one is family pictures. Those are ALL JPEGs. I don't give a crap if I lose the raw of some snapshot of my girls playing at Disney World.  The other directory I keep is a MASTER RAWs directory, where I keep JPEG, TIFF, PSDs of my interpretations of the image AND the RAW.  Those are any of the images I'm particularly proud of and would be DESTROYED if I lost them.

All the rest... meh. DVD works fine enough. If there's even a 1 in 10 chance I lose any given DVD it's worth it to not have to maintain and backup 10TB of storage all the damned time.


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## PixelRabbit (Nov 27, 2013)

Thanks so much everyone! Well it looks like I'll keep with 2 large drives instead of going smaller for now and restart my process with some tweaks.

Lew I agree, I took and kept WAY WAY WAY more pictures in my first year and a bit then I do now and I'm still working towards better culling and less files taken and kept.  



The_Traveler said:


> I don't think anyone taking pictures for fun does 500 GB of photos a year that are worth keeping.
> That's about 35,000 good size pictures.
> Let's say you edit 1/10 to 200 meg, so you're down to ~20,000 originals + edits.
> That's about 400 keepers a week.
> ...


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## 480sparky (Nov 27, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> Yeah, because they were all wanting to be exceedingly safe so they would ship their external hard drives by 5 different carriers.  Big hassle and terribly expensive, not to mention how costly the thousands of miles of USB cable necessary to connect their drives to their computer. :mrgreen:



Don't you have any next door neighbors, trusted friends, family members or a workplace?

I have a neighbor who has a key to my house. They collect my mail and take care of my pets when I'm gone for any length of time. How difficult do you think it is to ask them to store an external drive in their safe (just like I have one of theirs in mine)?

Is taking a back-up drive to your office and putting in a desk drawer too difficult? 

Are the logistics of such simple actions too complicated?


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## ratssass (Nov 27, 2013)

480sparky said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > Yeah, because they were all wanting to be exceedingly safe so they would ship their external hard drives by 5 different carriers.  Big hassle and terribly expensive, not to mention how costly the thousands of miles of USB cable necessary to connect their drives to their computer. :mrgreen:
> ...




 See also,
[h=3]TPF Across America - The Journey of One Lens Across the USA - Round 2[/h]


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## robbins.photo (Nov 27, 2013)

kathythorson said:


> I cull super hard and keep only my 4 and 5 star images in LR. I don't need a crap load of storage because I dump a lot. I have two 1-TB external backups and have filled neither of them. Not even close. I only keep 5 LR backups at a time.



Lol.. well probably shouldn't admit this but I don't cull - at all.  I've still got every single photo I've taken with the D5100.  Now I've only gotten back into photography recently here so that's only a few months worth of images granted - but I haven't started culling yet for two reasons.  First and foremost because I like having the non-keepers around for reference.  I find it a good exercise to go back through them and see what went wrong, examine the EXIF data, try to use that to improve the images I'm taking now.

Second, well because the amount of drive space taken up by the pictures is so neglible compared to what I actually have available that it just hasn't been worth the effort to go back through them yet and decide what to keep and what to delete.  I most likely will eventually, but it just really hasn't been an issue so for now I'm just rather hoping that if I ignore it long enough it will sort itself out.. lol


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## table1349 (Nov 27, 2013)

480sparky said:


> gryphonslair99 said:
> 
> 
> > Yeah, because they were all wanting to be exceedingly safe so they would ship their external hard drives by 5 different carriers.  Big hassle and terribly expensive, not to mention how costly the thousands of miles of USB cable necessary to connect their drives to their computer. :mrgreen:
> ...



For me it's not and I have a perfectly workable and entirely safe setup. For all my European friends however, meeting YOUR REQUIREMENTS of storing them at USPS ADDRESSES is a bit more complicated, difficult and costly. :lmao::lmao::lmao:


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## 480sparky (Nov 27, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> For me it's not and I have a perfectly workable and entirely safe setup. For all my European friends however, meeting YOUR REQUIREMENTS of storing them at USPS ADDRESSES is a bit more complicated, difficult and costly. :lmao::lmao::lmao:



Strange.

If I walked into a post office in the US with a package addressed to just about anywhere _in the world _, it would get delivered.

I guess you're just too hung up on shipping out of the country.  But hey, if your obsessions are what gratify you, who am I to deny you?

Me..... I'm going out shooting. I'll leave it to you to fret over others back-up methods and over-complicate heating up Pop-Tarts.


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## IByte (Nov 27, 2013)

PixelRabbit said:


> External storage drive?
> 
> So how big is yours? I just filled a terrabyte drive and it took 2 years, that kinda terrifies me! All that data on one drive... I'm not going to say it and tease the storage gods but you know where I'm going with that thought...what if...
> 
> ...



12 TB of storage fuzzy bunny


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## snerd (Nov 27, 2013)

I have a 500gb external Maxtor drive and a 2tb WD Passport drive. I run True Image backups to each and also just copy photo folders and Lightroom catalog to each. Nuttin' fancy.


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## table1349 (Nov 27, 2013)

Problem Solved: Western Digital US Online Store

Even WD is getting into the Black Friday spirit.  Sheesh.


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## bratkinson (Nov 28, 2013)

As a non-professional, I really don't have much reason to keep every 'keeper' photo I've taken in RAW, SOOC JPG (for 'just in case'), edited JPG, and 'final list' JPGs. My 'audience' is primarily myself and the various people in the photos I've taken during non-wedding church events.  But once it's all done, I can't recall having to go back for any of them other than to use as screen savers at work.

So why do I keep all sorts of copies of these photos, in triplicate? (1 offsite). Beats me. Perhaps because buying a bigger hard drive or 3 gets cheaper every year. At least I HAVE been fairly regular at deleting the RAWs after I'm all done and happy. But as I've upgraded cameras through the years, the size of the RAW files has gone from not-too-bad to DISK EATING MONSTERS!!! 

As a computer geek, I well recall the cost of replacing the 10 MEGABYTE (MEGs, not GIGs!) drive in my IBM PC-XT was $2000. 3-4 years later, a brand-new 20 MEG RLL hard drive was in the neighborhood of $400...installation extra. So 1TB drives for under $100 these days, I guess that beats having to actually decide WHAT to cull to make room for more.


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## TheFantasticG (Nov 28, 2013)

4 x 6TB internals and 3 x 3TB externals... I need to organize my drives though.


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