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As a brief break from the craziness on the thread below, I'm currently also speccing up a machine for my friend to take with us to the Alps. I'm trying to decide between mini-ITX and micro ATX for portability and power. The only thing I'm not sure on is storage. The smallest shoebox system will only fit 2 x SSDs and 1 x HDD. Anything bigger will fit several HDDs. What do all you normal people with houses and jobs and space to put stuff use? Multiple HDDs in a regular tower? What about Mac users? Drobo? Any other ideas?


Mon Aug 27, 2012 8:51 am
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I have individual external hard drives. I currently have three which is soon to expand to four.
When I'm away from home with my camera I store images on my iPad (where I can also process them and upload if I want to).
Currently my full image library is also on the internal drive of the laptop too.

Mark

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 8:57 am
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I picked up a tip the other day: Treat memory cards like film. In other words, fill the card, take it out of the camera, put in a safe storage box or case, and put a fresh card in. Just buy loads of cards of 4GB to 8GB as they're reasonably cheap. Keep filling them up but don't wipe them until you're sure the images have been copied off and backed up.

I use external drives for my library storage. My laptop's internal drive is simply not big enough for more than just a quick shoot. I've started thinking about different drives for different projects now. I'm doing a long term project documenting plants for a friend, and I've devoted a whole external drive to just that.

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:19 am
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HeatherKay wrote:
I use external drives for my library storage. My laptop's internal drive is simply not big enough for more than just a quick shoot. I've started thinking about different drives for different projects now. I'm doing a long term project documenting plants for a friend, and I've devoted a whole external drive to just that.
If you are using external drives for storage, then you have those drives backed up to another drive, yes?

Each one of the drives I mentioned in my post above has all my images on.
One drive I keep in a drawer in work in case anything happens to the place where I live (fire, flood, break-in).
Yeah, it seems like paranoia, until something happens and you need that drive.

Mark

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okenobi wrote:
All I know so far is that Mark, Jimmy Olsen and Peter Parker use Nikon and everybody else seems to use Canon.
ShockWaffle wrote:
Well you obviously. You're a one man vortex of despair.


Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:27 am
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How much space guys?

At the moment I have a full tower machine here with a 3TB, and 3x 1TB plus SSD boot drive. But over there I won't have access to that. I don't like external coz it's slow and expensive, but I guess that's what everybody does in Macland. Are there any Macs that come with tons of storage or are upgradable? If not, it's looking like it'll have to be external. Do Macs do NAS?


Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:30 am
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Yes, macs can see a network!

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:50 am
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As long as you make sure you delete all of the crap photos you'll probably need much less space than you think you do. However if you start shooting video you may need more than you think. I can only speak of my own collection but I generally shoot no more than 10Gb per year, after the wheat has been sorted from the chaff.

Rather than a massive load of storage in one device, even if it is over three drives for backup, I would have a reasonable drive in the PC and two other externals. Cost is relative.

One of these would be kept handy in case of a failure of the PC drive, and one kept offsite in case of fire theft, etc. If you're based around a hotel keep this one in the safe and rotate it with the other external as you backup.

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:51 am
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tombolt wrote:
Yes, macs can see a network!


I know! But NAS seems a bit uncool for Mac users and they always seem to have a "prettier" solution to things than the rest of us. So just asking! :)

Thanks Matt. That probably makes sense. I'm thinking a mini-ITX SFF case with a 3TB and SSD boot. Then a couple of external enclosures with whatever size I need. For now I can borrow one of the 1TBs out of my machine if necessary. Ultimately, if I keep the HDDs in the same machine, I lose some of the benefits of backup I suppose.


Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:57 am
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If you have adequate hardware now then use it. When you eventually need more it will no doubt be cheaper, larger and faster.

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 10:00 am
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timark_uk wrote:
If you are using external drives for storage, then you have those drives backed up to another drive, yes?


Yes. There's a WD 2TB jobbie (actually 2x1TB RAID0) which houses a backup of my main libraries.

I'm not quite as paranoid as you, but I've got backups of backups all over the shop. I need to get more organised. :?

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 10:22 am
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okenobi wrote:
How much space guys?


Depends. Are you planning on shooting RAW, or will you shoot JPEG for speed?

My main Aperture library is on a 320GB drive, and is about to be moved to something much larger as it's only got 10GB left. The flowers library is currently resident on a 160GB as that was all I had spare.

I've already archived out photos I don't access often from my main library to other drives. I need to be more organised about it, frankly, as it's so easy just to dump everything into one drive and let the software deal with it.

There's never enough space! :o

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 10:27 am
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HeatherKay wrote:
okenobi wrote:
How much space guys?


Depends. Are you planning on shooting RAW, or will you shoot JPEG for speed?

My main Aperture library is on a 320GB drive, and is about to be moved to something much larger as it's only got 10GB left. The flowers library is currently resident on a 160GB as that was all I had spare.

I've already archived out photos I don't access often from my main library to other drives. I need to be more organised about it, frankly, as it's so easy just to dump everything into one drive and let the software deal with it.

There's never enough space! :o


I'll likely shoot JPG for the action stuff, but I imagine there'll be a fair amount of RAW for fiddling with later (as whilst I'm learning the camera and how to actually take pictures, I'll probably be relying on Lightroom a little more for tone and WB).

So hopefully for now a 3tb in the machine and my 1tb external should be enough. Thanks guys.


Mon Aug 27, 2012 11:40 am
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RAW will give you more flexibility for post processing. But as you'll be shooting in similar conditions on a daily basis you should easily be able to find suitable camera settings that allow you to shoot JPEG, and yet still be able to produce quality shots that the punters will purchase with minimal post processing.

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 12:03 pm
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belchingmatt wrote:
RAW will give you more flexibility for post processing. But as you'll be shooting in similar conditions on a daily basis you should easily be able to find suitable camera settings that allow you to shoot JPEG, and yet still be able to produce quality shots that the punters will purchase with minimal post processing.


True story. And that's my longer term plan. But at the moment, I can lean on post whilst I'm learning :)


Mon Aug 27, 2012 12:22 pm
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A small thought - if you're doing continuous shooting, isn't RAW slightly quicker than JPG because the camera doesn't have to compress each frame?


Mon Aug 27, 2012 1:45 pm
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