External or internal disk for photo library?

Guitarman0

Guitarman0

Guitarman0

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I have only had a DSLR for a few months and I have been shooting RAW from day one. I quick look at my free HDD space the other day (on my internal drive) and got a bit of a shock!

I was just wondering, do you guys write your photos libraries to an internal or external disk?
 
On a sepeate physical internal disk with backups to two different external hard disks. External disks are usually quite slow so I would use a faster internal disk for main usage and an external for backup. haveing an external disk for backup means you can also store it away from your computer. Ideally you could take it somewhere else like a friends house or to work, then if there is a fie you don't loose your backup and main file system.

Saying that I am really bad about making backups and should investr in some software.
 
internal seperate HD, backup to an external Drive, soon to be cloud storage so its off site too!
 
adamau5 said:
both
Click to expand...

This! Any single disk solution is simply wrong and having seen the look on someones face when they lost everything it's not pretty.

I'd also avoid RAID as your only copy as it gives you no physical security if someone nicks your PC or your house burns down again you loose the lot.

Personally I have everything on a Disk in my Server and a copy of everything on my server on a USB drive in my desk at work which I tke home and update once a week or so.
 
i think you have the point by now but just in case..

as many different disks/media (raid array counting as 1 disk) as possible.

for example all of my raw files are stored on my RAID5 NAS which is backed up to a twin HD bay unit, and raw are then burned to Blu-Ray and taken off site (work drawer).
 
I have my Aperture library on an internal RAID 0 inside my Mac Pro, obviously it's not very secure, but it's quick. I back this up periodically as I'm using it with the Aperture Backup Vault feature to my Drobo. I also have a Time Capsule running which backs up the Vault from the Drobo every hour.

Finally I have a couple of password protected LaCie Rugged drives which I make another Aperture Vault on each, I then leave these at my parents place, swapping one out every now and again so it's current. That way if worst comes to worst, I've got a backup somewhere else.

I realised how easy it is to loose a lot of your stuff if something goes wrong and it was only really when the riots hit during summer I thought about how easy it would be for your house to burn down and loose everything.
 
I use a laptop so have to use an external drive (I think I have 700GB+ of photo data), eSata is your best external option if you have the connection. Although there is USB 3.0 (I think I'm lucky my laptop has USB 2.0!). I've also got a back up HD in the gaming PC that I copy the external to periodically.

I've also got one of these eSata dock things that you just stick a Sata HD into, but the drives do get pretty hot (as they are just stuck up in the air). Performance was pretty good though. If HD prices hadn't gone silly I would probably have bought a 2TB drive to stick in, but ended up buying an external 3TB drive that was still going cheap. It was the wrong time to run out of storage space!
 
Thanks for the replies. Just so you know I do have all of my photos backed up (in fact I have my whole mac backed up) but I am editing currently on an older iMac which has no high speed external connections (other than one firewire 800 port). So would I be right in assuming having my library on my current internal disk and then backing up to an external disk is the best option?
 
Firewire 800 is plenty fast enough with the right external drive, I had my library on a Lacie RAID0 external drive connected by FW800 for a while, I only gave up on it as I got fed up of carrying round another thing everything...
 
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