What are you guys doing for storage?

[Robert Prior]

I had a scare last week when one of the two WD drives holding my 11 TB photo/video library wouldn't mount. Fortunately I had a new drive hanging around and was able to restore from backup. But I learned while checking to see what I could do with the failed drive* that apparently WD does hardware encryption on the drive, so you can't just remove it and plug into an external dock.

This has made me reconsider using WD drives in the future.

My current strategy is media on a 12 TB external drive, which is backed up to other external drives. I need to add a third backup to the mix, just in case of two disk failures. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't want to lose decades of work to a couple of drive failures.




*Suspected the problem was controller not drive, as it sounded normal and the symptom was that it suddenly disconnected rather than showed errors.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

Any archiving I do, I burn to blu-ray for older stuff. I use that as my permanent backup.

 

[Blexius]

Hi. There's here several replies about storage solutions, I think all of them solves the issue and the best global solution will be different from one person to another ... (brand preferences, capacity, complexity, etc).

Another approach here is the fact that we record a lot of material to produce a final piece (example raw material of 100 GB and final/edited piece of 1GB) ..., so, do we need to save all raw files or only the final one? (another open question...)

I guess we all want to preserve all, just in case, but even with storage's price dropping over time, is a lost race and in a near future we'll probably retain only final pieces … (or selected ones, but definitively not all).

I like to go out and record everything but with post-production in mind, I know that the mayor part of my raw material will never go live …

Best regards!

 

[Robert Prior]

I guess we all want to preserve all, just in case

Years ago I read the advice to keep everything, in a book by photographer Michael Freeman. He said that as technology and your skills advance, you can often do things with photographs that you never imagined when you took them. (It's the digital equivalent of keeping negatives, not just prints.)

I learned the truth of that when I digitized and processed images I'd taken decades ago, and actually got something useful out of them!

So I guess I'm on the "preserve everything" side of the fence. I'm not shooting hours of 4k video, but my larger images do take several GB — and my entire photo library is closing on 11 TB.