A tale of what ‘not’ to do when storing your digital photos
Digital photographers can use up hard drive space at an alarming rate. While it’s tempting to download today and worry about sorting out your files later, I’m here to tell you that can lead to wholesale disorganization.
If you shoot a couple pictures every now and again, you can stop reading now. But, if you are a serious photographer, shooting a couple hundred photos a week or more, allow me to embarrass myself in the hope of saving you the similar grief.
My digital photo archives go back to the mid 1990’s when I began putting my color slides on Photo CD’s and shooting with my first digital camera – the Kodak KD50. In the old days, a CD was the most convenient method of storage, which eventually gave way to DVD’s. Today unfortunately, shooting high-resolution RAW files, I can shoot in one day more than a standard DVD can hold.
Also, as you shoot more and more, your need for an archiving system becomes mandatory. I’ve tried many and finally decided on Adobe’s Lightroom. I’ve been using it since version 1 and they are now on version 4. It’s a great system and allows you to find your files on whatever hard drive they reside.
That very quality was my undoing. Since I could index the files on my laptop as I traveled, that’s what I did. It worked wonderfully. When my laptop would start to fill up, I could move some of the older files to an external USB drive attached to my desktop machine in the office.
I had my photos stored all over these 10 external drives
Making backups of the files resulted in other copies being made to other external USB drives. When those filled up, and I ran out of USB ports, I bought a firewire drive since I had a free firewire port. Sooner or later it was bound to happen and I filled every port I had on my desktop machine with external drives. Now what?
The answer was to consolidate all my original (and/or edited) files to one large drive and move all my backup copies to those external USB drives. The USB drives were then placed in storage in a building separate from my large drive, just in case of fire, theft, etc.
While I continue to keep my current files on my laptop, it gets backed up nightly to my large drive as well, whenever I’m in the office. In addition, my best shots are also stored on my photo website, so I now have three copies of my best files and two copies of everything else.
You can read about my trials of organizing all my files in another article on the large drive I used to sort everything out – the OWC 16TB Qx2 external drive.
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