Suggestions About More Storage Options Wanted

[Bob in Savannah]

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space.

So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me another single 1 tb of storage. The problem is that it is a "back up" which is copying my pics and vids that I already have. So, now both the OneDrive storage and my local pc storage fill up at the same time basically. I DO have an older Samsung Portable SSD T5 1tb external drive but its several years old. Its solid and healthy, though.

For just pennies more I can upgrade my Personal OneDrive subscription to a family plan which (amazingly) allows SIX (6) tbs of storage! Is this a viable option? It seems super cheap to purchasing hardware storage drives. OneDrive has never lost files that I know of in over a decade so what's the negative here, people?

Should I rely on OneDrive online storage or buy hardware every (x) amount of years for fear of failure?

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

 

[Jagerbomb52]

I find online storage expensive. Buying a few large hard drives is a one time expense I can live with.

 

[Yorkshire_Pud]

Just as a matter of interest why do you have such a large collection? And how many of these videos do you actually watch/use on any sort of regular basis?

I am not 'knocking you', I am just wondering if it is necessary to keep such quantities of video.

 

[Eagle Eye 62]

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space.

So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me another single 1 tb of storage. The problem is that it is a "back up" which is copying my pics and vids that I already have. So, now both the OneDrive storage and my local pc storage fill up at the same time basically. I DO have an older Samsung Portable SSD T5 1tb external drive but its several years old. Its solid and healthy, though.

For just pennies more I can upgrade my Personal OneDrive subscription to a family plan which (amazingly) allows SIX (6) tbs of storage! Is this a viable option? It seems super cheap to purchasing hardware storage drives. OneDrive has never lost files that I know of in over a decade so what's the negative here, people?

Should I rely on OneDrive online storage or buy hardware every (x) amount of years for fear of failure?

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

I would buy an external Hard Drive. You can't beat the price per GB. I have a small condo drive of the same size as my backup. It has worked well for me so far....

 

[Johnmcl7]

My understanding of how the Onedrive storage works is that it's 1TB per account not 6TB combined which might make it more fiddly to manage the data?

Just as a matter of interest why do you have such a large collection? And how many of these videos do you actually watch/use on any sort of regular basis?

I am not 'knocking you', I am just wondering if it is necessary to keep such quantities of video.

I keep much larger collection of photos and video which are absolutely priceless because if I lost them they could never be created again. Memories fade over time so I find it fantastic having even 'bad' videos to be able to go back through when I'm in the mood.

 

[Grandpa]

I, too, recommend an external drive. If you stick with online storage, remember that you need internet access, how long to download your images and clips and that storage requirements are going up. The newest iPhones will require large amounts of memory for the new cameras.

 

[DJ Wes]

Should I rely on OneDrive online storage or buy hardware

OneDrive is not a "back-up" solution. It is a "mirroring" solution. The purpose of OneDrive is to mirror your files on one computer so that they can be accessed from another computer (or device). If you delete a file in local storage that is mirrored on OneDrive, that file will also be deleted from OneDrive. You cannot back-up files to OneDrive and then delete them from your computer to free up space. If you have 1 TB of OneDrive space, OneDrive will "mirror" 1 TB of your local disk space.

 

[Lister]

My external 12TB Ironwolf USB 3 video data drive cost about $300USD.

Resolve plays 4K 60 off this drive with no complaints. I don't need my NVME SSD drive, even though I paid big bucks for it.

 

[BobaFut]

I have a 4 drive enclosure that currently has 2x8gb drives. AFAICT, 8gb is the sweet spot for capacity and price. I store all my clips on the drive and then all my finished videos also go into online storage. It’s a bit of a compromise, but so far I wouldn’t call any of my video ‘irreplaceable.’

 

[LoudThunder]

I agree with going for 1TB hard drives (or larger…) and then buy a Hot Swap Drive Bay for your computer. They sell various types. Inexpensive ones that go into the front of your computer like a DVD payer does. You would pop it out and pop in a different hard drive, sort of like switching out a diskette. There are more expensive units that hold several hard drives and they plugs into your computer in various ways. And there are some very elaborate hot swap bays that are better suited for a Server used in a business.

If any of this sounds reasonable, google "swapping hot drives in your home PC"

You can also visit your favorite Best Buy Store or similar business in your area. But if you are not willing or able to get into the "inner workings" of your computer, Best Buy has the "Geek Squad" to do the work…

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or you can get cheap and just post everything in social media. You know your stuff will be out there for ever more…

 

[lensimages]

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space.

So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me another single 1 tb of storage. The problem is that it is a "back up" which is copying my pics and vids that I already have. So, now both the OneDrive storage and my local pc storage fill up at the same time basically. I DO have an older Samsung Portable SSD T5 1tb external drive but its several years old. Its solid and healthy, though.

For just pennies more I can upgrade my Personal OneDrive subscription to a family plan which (amazingly) allows SIX (6) tbs of storage! Is this a viable option? It seems super cheap to purchasing hardware storage drives. OneDrive has never lost files that I know of in over a decade so what's the negative here, people?

Should I rely on OneDrive online storage or buy hardware every (x) amount of years for fear of failure?

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

Every year around the start of the year I transfer all my files from computer to another different external hard drive, label it with the year date , then delete all my files off the internal hard drive which leaves me plenty of space for another year, cheers Len

 

[Aerialskape]

I use external drives 6TB in total (more will soon be required so looking at NAS drives) and Backblaze as recovery backup. Used to delete older footage, but have recently regretted this as have been asked for some shots which I did have, now deleted, so will have to reshoot..

 

[Dale D]

I'm quickly running out of storage space like many of you can understand. I still have time but I can see the end approaching to my 1tb SSD limit.. lol. These videos sure take up a lot of space.

So, here's where I'm at: I originally had/have a Personal MS 365 subscription which allows me another single 1 tb of storage. The problem is that it is a "back up" which is copying my pics and vids that I already have. So, now both the OneDrive storage and my local pc storage fill up at the same time basically. I DO have an older Samsung Portable SSD T5 1tb external drive but its several years old. Its solid and healthy, though.

For just pennies more I can upgrade my Personal OneDrive subscription to a family plan which (amazingly) allows SIX (6) tbs of storage! Is this a viable option? It seems super cheap to purchasing hardware storage drives. OneDrive has never lost files that I know of in over a decade so what's the negative here, people?

Should I rely on OneDrive online storage or buy hardware every (x) amount of years for fear of failure?

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

For many years of photography I have DOUBLE backups to two (2) Seagate hard drives. One is a 6 TB and one is an 8 TB. I purchased them from Costco. When traveling, I back up twice a day (AM and PM shoots)to two portable 1 TB Hard rives. For years they were non-solid date. One of them malfunctioned and I sent it to Seagate and they recovered precious African Safari images. But I already had a 2nd backup . That taught me a lesson. NOT to back up to Non Solid state drives because eventually they will fail. Now, I bite the bullet and back up to solid state hard drives- usually Samsung, which are very expensive at $200 for a 1 TB drive, but I have peace of mind.

Amazon has solid state Samsung hard drives an they are also sold at Best Buy.

Dale
Miami

 

[Dave Maine]

Video takes a lot of space, especially 4K 60 fps and above. No way around that if you want to maintain image quality. External drives are the usual solution. They can be purchased in large sizes approaching 20 TB and are fast enough to play back the stored footage. For archival storage LTO tape is also a choice, although very expensive.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

I have a 10TB Western Digital Drive for backup and a Raid 5 or 6 ( I can never remember which) Symbology 8TB NAS. If one drive goes bad, the data is still safe and I just replace the bad drive. Nowhere even close to filling it up yet.

 

[JoelP]

My 8TB Western Digital Elements drive was only $170 on Amazon and it is more than enough. I am very tired of paying for cloud storage to so many vendors.

 

[russpury]

All of these suggestions sound solid. But I have had several external HDs fail and lost all the data on them. At least I've managed to live without it. YMMV

 

[Bob in Savannah]

Just as a matter of interest why do you have such a large collection? And how many of these videos do you actually watch/use on any sort of regular basis?

I am not 'knocking you', I am just wondering if it is necessary to keep such quantities of video.

Yea. No answer, really. Honestly, maybe 2/3s of my media I could live without. Your point is well struck. humph.

I probably need to get in the habit of "filtering" what I want to to keep because its about to become overwhelming.

The general consensus seems to be using external hard drives. Thank you, everyone.

 

[Johnmcl7]

For many years of photography I have DOUBLE backups to two (2) Seagate hard drives. One is a 6 TB and one is an 8 TB. I purchased them from Costco. When traveling, I back up twice a day (AM and PM shoots)to two portable 1 TB Hard rives. For years they were non-solid date. One of them malfunctioned and I sent it to Seagate and they recovered precious African Safari images. But I already had a 2nd backup . That taught me a lesson. NOT to back up to Non Solid state drives because eventually they will fail. Now, I bite the bullet and back up to solid state hard drives- usually Samsung, which are very expensive at $200 for a 1 TB drive, but I have peace of mind.

Amazon has solid state Samsung hard drives an they are also sold at Best Buy.

Dale
Miami

Solid state drives can and do fail as they're made up of complex electronics and if any of those chips fail, it's not just the end of the drive but there are no viable recovery options as there are with a hard drive. I work in IT with a large number of solid state drives and seen a number of them fail, even enterprise ones with high endurance in as little as one month. People are very surprised when I tell them their SSD is dead and I can't get any data back for them as I may have been able to do with a hard drive.

I'm not saying SSDs are unreliable and they certainly offer the major advantage that they're not vulnerable to shock damage (one of the main reasons for hard drives failing) as well as using less heat and power with dramatically faster read and write speeds. However there's no way I'd trust a solid state drive any more than a hard drive nor any other single storage solution, important data must be stored on separate devices. Hard drives do fail as well but out with ones that have had shock damage I find it's not many and have had drives at work that have been running for over 20 years 24/7 without missing a beat.

My back up is currently around 12TB so solid state isn't remotely viable, I use one 12TB drive in the PC as the 'hot' backup which is synced daily, a 14TB USB drive as the 'warm' backup which is synced monthly but disconnected the rest of the time and a 12TB USB drive which is the 'cold' one and stored outwith the house which is synced at irregular intervals. I'm out of space so toying with moving up to 18TB drives but now I've moved from a 14Mb/s download/10Mb/s upload to 500MB/s up and down I'm toying with only buying two drives and then doing the rest of the backups online with something like Backblaze.

 

[Robert Prior]

Just as a matter of interest why do you have such a large collection?

Can't speak for the OP, but my photo library is approaching 10 TB. I shoot lots of panoramas, often keep multiple versions of them, and also keep all the component photographs.

The advice I got from Michael Freeman (professional photographer and author) is to never delete shots (excluding obvious duds) because the cost of storage is cheap, and your skill and technology improves with time so you can revisit a 'bad' shot and salvage it, while you can't revisit the time/location to reshoot it.

My library sits on an external hard drive, which is backed up, and many shots are also uploaded to Flickr (as a form of online backup as well as display).