Down side of shooting RAW...HD all full up!

[Lani]

Just downloaded my latest shoot, and have been shooting RAW for quite a while now...lo and behold, bloody hard drive is nearly full!...that snuck up on me....going have to go through and have a hard cull until I get my upgrade sorted out. Problem is I am a bit of an image hoarder.

Question is, how big a hard drive to go for...1TB enough?
and how does everyone decide which images to get rid of... as you download them or fairly quickly once you have sorted through them in Bridge/LR etc?

[ricktas]

I sort mine once in lightroom, Lani

Go to library view, and use arrow keys to go from one to the next. If photo is blurry etc, hit the x key (sets as reject). Once the whole lot are checked, use the menu (cant recall the menu item as I am not at my pc) to "delete rejected photos".

[NeilC]

I guess it doesn't matter how big you go. One day down the track it will fill up as well. It's just how long before that happens.

I use a 640GB drive for photos alone at the moment. Just checked and still have 137GB left. I really don't want to know how many photos are on there

I use View NX for sorting and the labels system. Go through them all after i download them and do a preliminary backup onto a portable HDD., give them a number. 1's are keepers 2' and 3's need editing 6's (blurry) and 7's (duplicates) get shown the door.

Seems to work really well and I can quickly know where i am up to in the process of sorting them out at a glance.

[Kym]

I sort mine once in lightroom, Lani

Go to library view, and use arrow keys to go from one to the next. If photo is blurry etc, hit the x key (sets as reject). Once the whole lot are checked, use the menu (cant recall the menu item as I am not at my pc) to "delete rejected photos".

Ctrl/Backspace or Photo/Delete rejected photos

[ving]

blurry, under and over exposed deleted straight away...

[arthurking83]

.....

I use View NX for sorting and the labels system. .....

Ditto!

I have my 320G (internal)drive with only 16Gigs of space remaining free.

I have a 1Tb external drive for backing up that drive, so I'm going to work on the principle that if it's a year old, I don't need it on the internal drive and just need a copy of it(and a secondary backup of it too)

keep the clutter to a minimum on the PC for the sake of speed.

If I were to invest in another drive I'd make sure it was for back up purposes only, and use my existing HDD for storage of more recent images.

So the question is Lani, is this the main PC drive(with OS on it) or a secondary drive reserved for images only.

I find a bit of extra speed in processing by using separate drives, where OS and apps are on one drive, images on another, and even another drive reserved only for cache(which is et to the extremely large size of 160G) and temporary transfer of very large amounts of data.

I reckon get a couple of external drives as they aren't all that much more expensive now.

[Seesee]

I must be stricter in my sorting and deleteing methods....my PC has a mere 300 gig storage capacity and I've only used about 70 gig of that, I reckon a 1 TB of space will do me a lifetime I myself only keep the very very best as RAW files and the rest jpegs.

[BLWNHR]

I've hit the same problem Lani. I have filled my 320GB drive at the office, the 160 in my laptop is full and I have 30GB on my portable HDD.

At the start of next month I'm buying 2No. 1TB Samsung drives from PC Case Gear (dealt with these guys for years, great prices and fast postage). These will be setup in RAID 1 in my office machine. I will also be picking up a 1TB external drive for off-site backup (these can be had for around $120-140 locally).

To answer your question, yes I think 1TB is enough. I keep around 4GB of shots per outing and don't go out every week. So, with a 1TB drive I'll have capacity for around 5 years. By that stage technology like this should be reasonably priced and it will make data backup to media once again a viable choice.

There have been a lot of discussion on here about benefits of RAID and off-site backup etc. My setup works like this:

Photos downloaded to, and edited on, my office PC. This will have 2No. 1TB HDD's in RAID 1 (mirror).
After each session I will back it up to the 1TB external drive and take this home with me. This also has the added advantage of access to the photographs without having to go into the office (should someone wish to buy a print or electronic image after hours).

I currently use the exact same system for my day-job files. I work from a server with 2No. 500GB HDD's in RAID 1. Each night it creates a compressed backup file. Each morning I come in and download this to a 320GB portable HDD and it goes home with me each night. Worst case I lose 1 days work.

Work out if this will adapt to you situation Lani.

As far as culling images. I am really hard on my shots and only the best survive. If it isn't exactly what I want it goes.

[Goldie]

External 1TB drives can be bought for less than $200 nowadays; space is cheap nowadays.

[phild]

Hard drives are dirt cheap, I haven't had to prune yet. I keep 3 copies of my images on 2 different machines and a backup drive. I saw a customers PC die once after a nasty power surge, the whole HDD was kaput, so was the backup drive attached, they lost the lot. You can buy 1Tb drives for around $140.

[Miaow]

I prune a couple of times - pics on camera that are blurry go as soon as I notice them on cmaera - ones I think are ok are downloaded but then pruned if needed on comp for problems or if too boring etc lol

[David]

I dont have that problem cause most of my photos are crap (poor composition,flare, out of focus, fingermarks on the filter, blown out, blown up, tourist framing, unexposed, overexposed, should never have been exposed in the first place, shot whilst drunk, tired, aloof, emotional, ethereal, bacterial, dust bunnied, mist smitten, rain on lens, me inside frame, mother in law yelling its time to go home, tripod slip, tripod missing, mother in law missing, brain missing (frequently)..


but i shoot in RAW all the time cause one fine day Im going to jag one by pure frustration on the part of the photography gods watching this clutz behind the shutter and... yeah Im buying Hard Drive back ups in case my delete button gets worn out.

[DAdeGroot]

Question is, how big a hard drive to go for...1TB enough?
and how does everyone decide which images to get rid of... as you download them or fairly quickly once you have sorted through them in Bridge/LR etc?

I have seen a marked increase in hdd usage since going to the 5DMkII (no surprise really - 26Mb RAW images do that).

1Tb may be enough, but enough for how long ? I generally buy two hdds at a time (and mirror them), and buy at whatever is the best price point at the time (for example 1Tb drives seem to be the best value at the moment, coming in around $129 ea).

As for sorting, I import into LR and then delete anything that's out of focus, followed by anything that is just plain bad (bad composition, people walking in front of the camera, etc). I tend to hang on to anything that may prove useful at some time in the future though.

[scpleta]

I read all the posts and I am wondering how come nobody didn't mention anything about storing images in a DVD? I remember reading an article about putting up a library of photos using DVDs. Aren't the DVDs a better option than HDDs?

[Lani]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I have external hard drive space, my newest courtesy of An AP prize ....it just snuck up on me today when I only had 3.4 gig free.
Reckon I need to do what has been suggested ...remove non current images to external drives and just retain current ones on PC as well.

New system...get two hard drives and have a dedicated images one...which is what I have set up now on a smaller scale,but 1 TB should do for a while....just have to get a bit stricter in the chuck out phase.
Not sure if I can justify a RAID system, will have to look into that a bit more.

Thanks again peoples.

[DAdeGroot]

I read all the posts and I am wondering how come nobody didn't mention anything about storing images in a DVD? I remember reading an article about putting up a library of photos using DVDs. Aren't the DVDs a better option than HDDs?

DVDs degrade over time. They do not have the reputed 100year life span originally touted, that's for sure, and they only hold 4.7Gb (that's smaller than my larger CF cards). HDDs are cheap, always available, and easy to migrate to new ones. You can always buy extra and store them off site.

[DAdeGroot]

Not sure if I can justify a RAID system, will have to look into that a bit more.

Can you justify losing images if your image drive crashes ? Can you afford the downtime to restore from backup (if you have any) ?

Drives are cheap, mirror'd raid is a piece of cake to setup (all major operating systems now support it out of the box, and quite a lot of motherboards do too (although I'd caution against that due to technical reasons)).

[Lani]

Can you justify losing images if your image drive crashes ? Can you afford the downtime to restore from backup (if you have any) ?

Drives are cheap, mirror'd raid is a piece of cake to setup (all major operating systems now support it out of the box, and quite a lot of motherboards do too (although I'd caution against that due to technical reasons)).

Yeah I do backup, but you're right, it would be really time consuming to have to do it.
To be honest I don't know a lot about it, so assumed it would be complicated...I'm not very techie as far as hardware goes. I am going into the pc store tomorrow to check on the specs for a new system I want built, is there any recommended system to ask for?

[DAdeGroot]

Yeah I do backup, but you're right, it would be really time consuming to have to do it.
To be honest I don't know a lot about it, so assumed it would be complicated...I'm not very techie as far as hardware goes. I am going into the pc store tomorrow to check on the specs for a new system I want built, is there any recommended system to ask for?

Well something with a dual or quad core processor, and 4Gb+ or ram and maybe three hdds (one for the OS and programs, two mirrored for photos).

Personally, I built a Mac as I prefer OSX to Windows and could not justify the $4k+ for a MacPro (built a nearly equivalent for $1.2k). But for that you do have to be techie and do a fair bit of research on hardware components, etc.

[MarkW]

Whilst DVDs will degrade - depending on the quality of the dye in the DVD, HDDs are mechanical products and definitely will die depending on a number of factors including cycle times, heat, humidity, mechanical damage, voltage spikes etc. So called surge protectors really aren't 100% foolproof.

If you put all your eggs in one basket, then don't cry when you drop that basket and all your eggs are broken.

For me, I copy everything from the camera as RAW onto an archival quality DVD thats either Gold quality Kodak DVD or Taiyo Yuden DVD. These are then stored out of light in acid free pockets.

The second copy out of the camera goes to a folder for keep/delete review and some basic post processing before uploading into Aperture.
Aperture has its own backup system called vault which is backed up to a 1Tb external HDD.

Therefore I have 1 copy in the external HDD that normally contain my images, just a 250Gb WD portable drive. 1 copy in the Aperture "Vault", a 1Tb WD MyBook Studio HDD for Mac. 1 copy on an archival DVD.

Even if a power surge spiked the two drives which are only ever connected at the same time during a backup, the DVD is still the last chance option.