How long do you keep original drone files (and footage) on your drives before totally deleting?

[vindibona1]

As noted in other threads, I've primarily been a still photographer. I used to shoot video... when VHS was still the technology of the day . While FLYING a drone is fun, for me it needs purpose. And so I've taken on a few interesting (personal!) projects. I had no idea how much disk space this would require!!!! Right now I've backed up the raw footage from 2 months of flying and it's 96GB. My edited footage on one current project alone is 121GB, causing me to upgrade my C drive from 500GB to 1TB, with internal and external drives for backup.

With still I often keep original raw and processed files for a very long time. I can see that I can't do that with video footage as I would need an unthinkable amount of storage space. So what do you guys do about storing or deleting video files? I see now that this can get out of hand very quickly.

 

[Tavicu]

I have a 4TB HDD for storing. When it's full, i start deleting

Also, i don't film in 4k where i know i won't zoom. 2.7k is more than enough for what i need

 

[dirkclod]

I have 2 5TB external HD’s plus a older X Box that I have about full.
What I do is when I dump my card I glance through it,delete anything
i don’t think I can edit later and just store it. Been doing it 6 years
and swear one day I’m going to go through it all. 4K stuff eats up space .

 

[vindibona1]

Hi def video sure does take up a lot of space. I've got my old 500GB SSD on the desk, waiting to make sure the new 1TB C: drive is solid. Then I'll reformat it and install it in the remaining bay. The thing is that I'm only doing short video clips. I can't imaging what kind of space wedding video guys have to have?

 

[Electromen]

I have an internal 2TB SSD and an external enclosure that has four - 2TB solid state drives. 10TB total.
But I only save the best footage & photos. It too easy to fill it up.

 

[bushie]

I have a NAS with 3 x 3TB hard drives with room for another HD.

So far I have used about 5TB and just keep everything. Am presently downloading a heap of old DV tapes to the hard drive and just had all my old 8mm video film scanned.

 

[Chunter]

i store them until i make a video from them, once video is done they get deleted.

 

[Dave Maine]

Digital video and massive disc space requirements go hand in hand. Discs are cheap, far cheaper than your time. Best Buy has 8 and 10 TB drives available for less than $200 US.
If disc space minimization is an important goal, shoot H265, which is the most space efficient codec that DJI makes available. Note that this puts a huge load on your PC, with older ones unable to lay the footage without stuttering.

 

[Photo Beaty]

I also come from still photography and I have 20 years of photos stored. I mostly just buy more external hard drives for storage. However, in the case of drone videos, the idea of deleting footage once the final video is finished makes sense.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

I got a 10TB Western Digital drive from Best Buy for $179. I haven't even put a dent in it yet.

 

[theDRONEranger]

I have 2 5TB external HD’s plus a older X Box that I have about full.
What I do is when I dump my card I glance through it,delete anything
i don’t think I can edit later and just store it. Been doing it 6 years
and swear one day I’m going to go through it all. 4K stuff eats up space .

Myself, I use 2 WD external 2Tb’s and one SG external 5Tb. I have had to change all my previous save to locations as the HD on my Dell G3 went belly up twice this year. So I lost all data I had on the laptop. I was locked in the cycle of I will back up tomorrow. Tomorrow never came and I lost everything on the laptop on the first failure. Second failure, I was fortunate as I had redirected the download directories to my WD HD’s. Second HD failure with the HD was covered under warranty, so it was replaced easily enough. Once I had the laptop back, I redirected SAVE TO to the 5Tb external. To top it all off, I double checked the RAM by opening the laptop and ordered 2x 16Gb RAM cards ($125 via Amazon). Quite a step up from the 8Gb I had previously. Now, when using Dell G3, it runs much faster. By having the extra RAM the laptop has less work to do. Everything loads and runs absolutely faster and smoother.

 

[skunky1]

I use a NAS with 24tb of storage capacity for all my media incl movies, music, photos and camera footage incl drone.

Still haven’t deleted anything

 

[zeusfl]

A NAS connected to your home router (must be a good one) is the way to go. IF this is for work and you are making good money from that, I will sync the data with a Google Drive account. If you are dealing with videos, direct connection to the router is the best, you can also use a WiFi 6 connection.

In this way, you can work with videos without having them on the local computer working directly in the NAS.

 

[zeusfl]

A beast like this will be nice to have.

Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless) - Newegg.com

Buy Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

 

[skunky1]

A beast like this will be nice to have.

Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless) - Newegg.com

Buy Synology 4 bay NAS DiskStation DS920+ (Diskless) with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

Exactly what I have!!

 

[zeusfl]

Exactly what I have!!

Nice !!!!!!! How do you like it ?

 

[skunky1]

Nice !!!!!!! How do you like it ?

I’ve had an 6 year old Synology D212 before which was slow.

I’ve connected this as a bonded 2gb/s Ethernet connection and added 2 NVME SSD’d for cache and is now superfast.

 

[zeusfl]

I’ve had an 6 year old Synology D212 before which was slow.

I’ve connected this as a bonded 2gb/s Ethernet connection and added 2 NVME SSD’d for cache and is now superfast.

And what do you have for drives ? Regular SATA or SSDs? i love the idea of the NVME M.2 as cache but combining with more SSDs... UFFFF most to be super fast. Your own datacenter at home !!! And more if you bonded to 2gb.

 

[skunky1]

And what do you have for drives ? Regular SATA or SSDs? i love the idea of the NVME M.2 as cache but combining with more SSDs... UFFFF most to be super fast. Your own datacenter at home !!!

I use 8tb Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives.

An 8tb Samsung SSD will be launched at a whopping price of $900 so you might as well buy a real datacenter [emoji23]

 

[zeusfl]

I use 8tb Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives.

An 8tb Samsung SSD will be launched at a whopping price of $900 so you might as well buy a real datacenter [emoji23]

Buddy,
In our datacenter each SSD from our SAN cost 5K each and they are 4TB only. Each chassis use 24 of them and we have over 12 chassis. That is 1.2 Millions only in SSDs.