How Do You Store Your Videos? (External drive suggestions)

[PalmettoAerial]

Quickly filling up my MacBook Air (the drive actually warned me it was full today)

Looking for suggestions for external storage - either a drive or cloud.

 

[dbyantis]

I got a Western Digital Cloud, It provides internet access to your own "10TB cloud"and I have all of my family's phones set to auto upload, so all family trip pictures from everyone is saved automatically. I also have a WD MyBook which is a hard-wired attachment to my computer. Plenty of space. Luck.

 

[LuvMyTJ]

Grab a Lacie or Western Digital laptop powered an external drive. I use one and put all my footage on there and access it when needed on my MacBook Pro.

 

[tcope]

3TB Wd MyCloud for wireless backups. But for active files I move them from the SD card to a 5TB external drive. I create a folder for each outing. If I fly multiple drones I create subfolders, such as P4, Mavic, etc. I do the same when I also take traditional photos, Canon, 360, etc.

 

[wayy510]

Grab a Lacie or Western Digital laptop powered an external drive. I use one and put all my footage on there and access it when needed on my MacBook Pro.

Yeah. I would use a physical terabyte drive before using any cloud based storage. Just my opinion, but cloud based stuff is vunerable to snooping from unwanted guests including the U.S. Government.

 

[sparky1111]

3TB Wd MyCloud for wireless backups. But for active files I move them from the SD card to a 5TB external drive. I create a folder for each outing. If I fly multiple drones I create subfolders, such as P4, Mavic, etc. I do the same when I also take traditional photos, Canon, 360, etc.

I don't believe in cloud storage as you are giving your precious material to someone you can't trust who can view it at their leisure under the veil of our ever decreasing privacy due to so called war on terror.
I have nothing to hide of course but I like my data under MY CONTROL.

 

[regdawg]

I use both cloud storage and local storage for all my pics/videos just to be on the safe side. I learned my lesson when I used pogoplug cloud storage back then. The cloud service went out of business and I lost alot of my pics. I was pissed!

I have a 4TB Western Digital Network drive. All my families mobile device photo's get auto synched to the drive once they connect to our home network. On top of that, our pics are also synched to Amazon photo's (unlimited for PRIME members) and OneDrive (1TB included with office360). Our PC's are also synched to our Western Digital Network drive to back-up as well. I normally keep all my DJI / GoPro / DSLR / etc files on my desktop.

I still feel like I need to add another layer of back-up somewhere.....can't be too careful with data.

 

[tcope]

I don't believe in cloud storage as you are giving your precious material to someone you can't trust who can view it at their leisure under the veil of our ever decreasing privacy due to so called war on terror.
I have nothing to hide of course but I like my data under MY CONTROL.

The WD MyCloud is an external drive. Your data is stored locally, albeit, on a network drive. No different than having your computer connected to your network.

 

[Montana]

The WD MyCloud is an external drive. Your data is stored locally, albeit, on a network drive. No different than having your computer connected to your network.

I guess he didn't know it wasn't under his control.

 

[PalmettoAerial]

Grab a Lacie or Western Digital laptop powered an external drive. I use one and put all my footage on there and access it when needed on my MacBook Pro.

How do you like the LaCie? I've owned seagate & WD in the past with good & bad results as I've also had them fail.

 

[Flying Images]

I just bought a 4tb wd drive. Active stuff I keep on my desktop which has 1tb.

 

[LuvMyTJ]

How do you like the LaCie? I've owned seagate & WD in the past with good & bad results as I've also had them fail.

I primarily use the Porsche design 4TB. It has been good to me so far. I have used Seagate & WD and had better luck with WD (less failures). The LaCie is a premium version of the Seagate... I find the LaCie better than plain Seagates.

 

[1dr1]

To OP: get the Western Digital Wireless Pro. Make sure it's the Pro version. The nonPro version is not very user friendly. The WD has a built in SD card reader, so you don't even need to attach to pc/MAC to store files, which happens automatically once the card is inserted. It also has an enclosed battery and powered USB port which can be used to charge a phone (haven't tried an iPad). The wireless connection to iPad is a quick way to look over videos and pics or the USB 3 connection will allow faster transfers. Have been using mine for the past 6 months without any issues.

 

[Cyberpower678]

I have a 9 year old 4TB server, that still performs admirably.

 

[Brojon]

I'm going to advise against any such items as Western Digital "MyBooks" and the ilk.
The reason for this is that they typically use two smaller (cheaper) hard drives to get the advertised capacity. The way they do this is with proprietary software - usually Linux based - that arranges the two or more disks into a JBOD (Just a Big Old Drive). They do this using RAID 0 config which means they "stripe" the data - alternating tracks between the two drives. If one drive develops problems you've just lost everything as even the data recovery people will struggle with it. Ask me how I know this. In my case Western Digital compounded the issue by keeping the software on some hidden sectors on one of the drives.
So now I do two things:
1 - a network RAID box to store all working materials (I use DROBO)
2 - a USB 3.0 SATA dock that accepts 2.5 or 3.5 hard drives. I use this to archive data to a cheap hard drive which gets filed and put away.
You can get a 3.0 cradle for around $30 and a 2TB hard drive for less than $80.
The external hard drive solution works really well as you can put stickers on the end and use those to lookup what's on them.
I would also mention that I periodically load the drive into the dock and do a disk check which seems to help keep the data intact.

 

[Cyberpower678]

I'm going to advise against any such items as Western Digital "MyBooks" and the ilk.
The reason for this is that they typically use two smaller (cheaper) hard drives to get the advertised capacity. The way they do this is with proprietary software - usually Linux based - that arranges the two or more disks into a JBOD (Just a Big Old Drive). They do this using RAID 0 config which means they "stripe" the data - alternating tracks between the two drives. If one drive develops problems you've just lost everything as even the data recovery people will struggle with it. Ask me how I know this. In my case Western Digital compounded the issue by keeping the software on some hidden sectors on one of the drives.
So now I do two things:
1 - a network RAID box to store all working materials (I use DROBO)
2 - a USB 3.0 SATA dock that accepts 2.5 or 3.5 hard drives. I use this to archive data to a cheap hard drive which gets filed and put away.
You can get a 3.0 cradle for around $30 and a 2TB hard drive for less than $80.
The external hard drive solution works really well as you can put stickers on the end and use those to lookup what's on them.
I would also mention that I periodically load the drive into the dock and do a disk check which seems to help keep the data intact.

Just RAID 0 does not always mean stripe. There’s also a RAID 0 where the data is stored in sequence and then spills over to the next drive. My 9 year old raid array is a 4 disk system in RAID 0 stripe which I setup that way for maximum space and performance. It’s held like a champ.

 

[Brojon]

Just RAID 0 does not always mean stripe. There’s also a RAID 0 where the data is stored in sequence and then spills over to the next drive. My 9 year old raid array is a 4 disk system in RAID 0 stripe which I setup that way for maximum space and performance. It’s held like a champ.

That's because you decided to set up *your* system that way. In fact as far as I'm concerned a JBOD isn't a good idea for data because it is still in a format that most recovery software can't read.
Read again carefully and note that I said my WD MyBook was setup striped PLUS had the dang control software on hidden sectors.
Totally unrecoverable *to this day*. This was in response to the folks that recommended WD drives as backup.

 

[Cyberpower678]

That's because you decided to set up *your* system that way. In fact as far as I'm concerned a JBOD isn't a good idea for data because it is still in a format that most recovery software can't read.
Read again carefully and note that I said my WD MyBook was setup striped PLUS had the dang control software on hidden sectors.
Totally unrecoverable *to this day*. This was in response to the folks that recommended WD drives as backup.

I did. My system is a WD Sharespace. Though after the hard drives have been in near continuous operation for so long, I’m thinking they are due for a replacement. They don’t have any SMART errors yet, but still...

 

[Ping^Spike]

Yeah. I would use a physical terabyte drive before using any cloud based storage. Just my opinion, but cloud based stuff is vunerable to snooping from unwanted guests including the U.S. Government.

Amen to that my brother.

I use an external 1TB USB3 drive for storing my raw / unedited footage (in case I ever need to go back to it) and I store my edited vids along side all my films, tv shows, etc under my Plex (on a 1TB drive in the desktop pc), which all gets backed up to another 1TB drive (albeit in the same pc) once a week automatically.

 

[Tonka]

Currently WD Ultra Metal Ed. 4TB. I refresh drives every 3-4 years of use. I don't trust any backup storage. I have had enterprise ssd's die.