Extra Storage

Lensflare

Lensflare

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Simon Everett
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Yes
With the January sales looming I think it would be the right time to invest in an extra hard drive to plug into my confuser. My hard drive fills quite quickly because it isn't that big and the modern camera files are larger than I got with the D3. So, I need one of those plug in hard drives.....fine, but there are a huge number of them, so all I am asking is for some pointers as to a decent, stable, long term reliability one to go for. I haven't thought about budget, but within reason! I do NOT want wifi download and sharing and all that guff. Why not? Because I haven't a clue about technology to that extent and I don't trust it. I do like a wire so I can plug in. I understand USB sockets!
 
Lensflare said:
With the January sales looming I think it would be the right time to invest in an extra hard drive to plug into my confuser. My hard drive fills quite quickly because it isn't that big and the modern camera files are larger than I got with the D3. So, I need one of those plug in hard drives.....fine, but there are a huge number of them, so all I am asking is for some pointers as to a decent, stable, long term reliability one to go for. I haven't thought about budget, but within reason! I do NOT want wifi download and sharing and all that guff. Why not? Because I haven't a clue about technology to that extent and I don't trust it. I do like a wire so I can plug in. I understand USB sockets!
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Hi Simon

FWIW I use Freecom Tough Drives, as the name implies they are in toughened casing compared to the likes of say Western Digital Passport drives.

And please remember no hard drive is infallible, they all fail eventually.......so if you are asking about extra drives for archiving/backups consider getting 2 of them and storing one off site.

Hope that helps :)
 
In Recent years I have been using Western Digital USB 3- 2trb Hard Drives without any issues so far
I used to use 500gig transcend storejet again still working after 7 years plus these are USB 2 though.
Have you thought about a Flickr account 1 trb free storage

https://www.wdc.com/en-ie/products/wd-recertified.html
 
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Box Brownie said:
That is on "watching list" (folk hereabouts do use it afaik) but you do need fibre speed connection IMO to get best usage benefit.
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Yes I put a friend onto them a few years back and he backs up all the company's data to them only this year it payed for itself in recovering some important data one of the staff lost
 
I have 2x Western Digital Passport drives. Had them for about 3 years with no problems of reliability. They just sit on top of the PC so I don't need tough drives. Maybe if I was using them on the go with a laptop a tough one would be good.

As for Backblaze, it's the best value cloud backup I've found. It'll backup everything with no file type/size limit and a once yearly payment of £35ish ($50) is great for peace of mind.
Yes it can be slow to backup your whole computer, but that's not surprising when you likely have a terabyte or two. I just leave it backing up all the time in the background so any new files get backed up.
 
ABTog said:
I have 2x Western Digital Passport drives. Had them for about 3 years with no problems of reliability. They just sit on top of the PC so I don't need tough drives. Maybe if I was using them on the go with a laptop a tough one would be good.

As for Backblaze, it's the best value cloud backup I've found. It'll backup everything with no file type/size limit and a once yearly payment of £35ish ($50) is great for peace of mind.
Yes it can be slow to backup your whole computer, but that's not surprising when you likely have a terabyte or two. I just leave it backing up all the time in the background so any new files get backed up.
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Eh? My computer has 150GB hard drive....how many pictures do you lot take? :eek:
 
Have a look here

https://www.cclonline.com/

The cheapest option is to buy a 1TB 3.5 in SATA drive and a HDD caddy with USB connection, otherwise buy an external HDD that pugs into a USB socket.
I have no idea what else is available , I use CCL because they are local to me.
BTW the answer to your question is lots , 150GB is not very big these days.
 
Lensflare said:
Eh? My computer has 150GB hard drive....how many pictures do you lot take? :eek:
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I've 7 drives in my PC, totally over 20Tb, with a 20Tb backup nas box, around 130K images in my lightroom catalogue having taken about 80K out. :D

WD passport drives are very reliable. I've got a daily used 2Tb drive in my backpack thats travelled on the motorbike for over 5 years (and one crash writing the bike off)
Another two that are used weekly as rotating offsite storage.

Bear in mind how much you'll be writing to it and allow for time. They average around 60Mb/sec over USB3
 
Lensflare said:
Eh? My computer has 150GB hard drive....how many pictures do you lot take? :eek:
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SanDisk make a 512 GB SD card these days - probably even bigger by now! Far better to keep a large drive almost empty than a small one nearly full. HDDs are so (relatively) cheap these days, as are memory cards.
I have 2 separate external HDDs as well as extra copies of (to me) important files. USB3 makes a big difference in file transfer speeds from card to computer and computer to EHDD so it's possible that a computer upgrade might be in order too.
Not sure if you use raw or JPEG - raw files take up a LOT more space in any memory.
 
Been watching this thread and looking at my own storage. I have been thinking about adding a SSD for my Lr catalogue and recent/working photos and keeping older ones on regular drives (1 connected and 1 backup). I was wondering what are the benefits of external drives as opposed to internal with either a dock or enclosure
 
ChrisHeathcote said:
Been watching this thread and looking at my own storage. I have been thinking about adding a SSD for my Lr catalogue and recent/working photos and keeping older ones on regular drives (1 connected and 1 backup). I was wondering what are the benefits of external drives as opposed to internal with either a dock or enclosure
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External drives are portable - good for backup storage, ease of use with USB. Other connections are available.
Internal drives are generally faster, bigger

Lightroom loves a SSD for catalogue and cache. You don't need a big one, a small 120Gb one would do. I'm using 64Gb for my cache and catalogue with 130K images in it
 
Thanks for your replies, they are far more computer orientated than I am. Half of them I don't understand (whatever the initials stand for, I haven't a clue).
A computer update is out of the question, unless someone buys me a lottery ticket and I win. Because it isn't just the cost of the thing, it is the cost of having to learn how to use a new system. I simply can't face it again. If I have to go to one of these touch screen things, I will have to give up. It is like these iPad things, I have no idea how they work. I went into the Apple shop in Sheffield and they have tutors in there - but even he gave up. How people remember how all these different things work I simply cannot understand. There is just too much.

I will get a plug in hard drive, but I don't know which one is good value. One of the bug bears we have in this house is the fact that few people have pictures anymore. We have boxes of them from my parents, going back to the late 1890s. I wonder what will be left for people to look back on in 3 or 4 generations time? Nobody seems to put much value on 'history' or keeping things any more. It is all the here and now only, the same goes for companies - did you hear about Apple deliberately sabotaging their customers' phones to make them have to buy a new one? That is so disgraceful, just who brought up the engineer who thought that one up. It is tantamount to theft.

Maybe I'll just get used to not worrying whether anything survives or not. If I get my use out of it I suppose I should just be happy with that.

So what to buy with a wire that plugs in the side please?
 
Lensflare said:
<snip> I wonder what will be left for people to look back on in 3 or 4 generations time? Nobody seems to put much value on 'history' or keeping things any more... <snip>
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Do you have any back-up Simon? Without that, if your hard drive fails (and they do) you run a very real risk of losing everything in an instant. If you want to enjoy the benefits of digital working, then you have to play by the rules and either embrace all of it, or reject it all - and go back to film and shoe boxes of prints in the loft.

At the very least you need a second hard drive to back-up your working hard drive (to guard against equipment failure), and then a back-stop to guard against fire or flood or theft. That needs to be in a remote location but the very easy option most people use is Cloud storage.
 
HoppyUK said:
Do you have any back-up Simon? Without that, if your hard drive fails (and they do) you run a very real risk of losing everything in an instant. If you want to enjoy the benefits of digital working, then you have to play by the rules and either embrace all of it, or reject it all - and go back to film and shoe boxes of prints in the loft.

At the very least you need a second hard drive to back-up your working hard drive (to guard against equipment failure), and then a back-stop to guard against fire or flood or theft. That needs to be in a remote location but the very easy option most people use is Cloud storage.
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I have a case full of dvds with old stuff on, before these plug in hard drives arrived on the scene. The trouble with many of these old pictures, and one of the reasons I will never buy Canon again, is that I can't open them. The new Canon software doesn't tlk to old Canon RAW pictures..... OH NO IT WON'T. My old G10 RAWs will not be opened by the G12 software programme that came with that one - but I had to change to the new Canon software otherwise I couldn't do the G12 pictures.....they did this to all their camera buyers when autofocus first came in and they changed the mount from the old FD to the new EOS, I have a feeling they changed it again later on, leaving all their previous customers high and dry, stranded and having to buy not just a new body, but all new lenses as well. What did Nikon do? They proved you could use the existing lens mount so as not to force their customers innto changing everything. Financially Canon did the right thing, morally Nikon did and for me that morality has far greater worth than the monetary value.

Other than the DVDs, I have some floppy disc with writing work on them. Some of those I have put on DVDs as well. Then I have got one plug in the side hard drive, but it is an old one that is nearly full, hence why I need to get another one and things have moved on, so I was asking for what people reckon is a good value and reliable sort to get. MANY answers, some going off the rails a bit (I know, I do it all the time!). Having not had any income other than selling a few bits and our savings since June, when I had the crash - a new computer is out of the question. I use about 10% of the capability of this one, why do I NEED (as opposed to like or want) a new one that I will understand even less of? Like my telephone I have now got. I have no idea how it works other than to make a text or a phone call - the camera worked last night, even though it took me about 10 minutes to find out how to turn the flash off. Downloading them was the next worry - they were on the confuser somewhere, finding them was another headache.

So, my confuser and phone knowledge is very, very basic. People don't have the patience to teach me how to use the stuff, doing it in four button pushes and handing it back done is not showing you how to do it. Since the bang on my head my memory is worse than ever. I am still reading the book to find out where to find the menu on the Fuji. I can't remember where it lives fro one day to the next. That is one of the reasons I use the very basic editing of Capture NX2 and the Canon one for the G12, but to be fair I haven't used it for about a year. The Nikon compact is so much easier to use and the editing is the same as the D3 was (and D4s when I had it).

So, in a nutshell, I just need extra storage to plug in that will work with my little laptop (indows 7 I am told it is).

As for losing everything. Yes I know how that feels. The entire publishing house archive was lost in a big fire. All the back copies, trannies, design and chromalins going back to the early 80s was lost in one fell swoop. Life goes on.
 
What everyone has missed is how often do you need to store photos? by this I mean a professional may want to store thousands whereas the hobby photographer may only want to store a few hundred.

being one of the latter I find a 2TB extrnl hard drive sufficient and that is one made by Seagate and lasted for years and still only 1/2 full. That also includes loads of videos on it.
 
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I know you mentioned that you didn't want to consider fancy tech solutions due to tech fears but I would still recommend something like Google drive. Saves to the cloud and nothing is accessible by others unless you specifically choose to share it.

Gives me a lot of peace of mind out on the field as I use an eyefi memory card that transmits both jpeg and raw to the phone which then sends to Google drive on the cloud. Means I've got at least 3 copies when I'm out and about and taking shots.
 
Lensflare said:
I have a case full of dvds with old stuff on, before these plug in hard drives arrived on the scene. The trouble with many of these old pictures, and one of the reasons I will never buy Canon again, is that I can't open them. The new Canon software doesn't tlk to old Canon RAW pictures..... OH NO IT WON'T. My old G10 RAWs will not be opened by the G12 software programme that came with that one - but I had to change to the new Canon software otherwise I couldn't do the G12 pictures.....they did this to all their camera buyers when autofocus first came in and they changed the mount from the old FD to the new EOS, I have a feeling they changed it again later on, leaving all their previous customers high and dry, stranded and having to buy not just a new body, but all new lenses as well. What did Nikon do? They proved you could use the existing lens mount so as not to force their customers innto changing everything. Financially Canon did the right thing, morally Nikon did and for me that morality has far greater worth than the monetary value.

Other than the DVDs, I have some floppy disc with writing work on them. Some of those I have put on DVDs as well. Then I have got one plug in the side hard drive, but it is an old one that is nearly full, hence why I need to get another one and things have moved on, so I was asking for what people reckon is a good value and reliable sort to get. MANY answers, some going off the rails a bit (I know, I do it all the time!). Having not had any income other than selling a few bits and our savings since June, when I had the crash - a new computer is out of the question. I use about 10% of the capability of this one, why do I NEED (as opposed to like or want) a new one that I will understand even less of? Like my telephone I have now got. I have no idea how it works other than to make a text or a phone call - the camera worked last night, even though it took me about 10 minutes to find out how to turn the flash off. Downloading them was the next worry - they were on the confuser somewhere, finding them was another headache.

So, my confuser and phone knowledge is very, very basic. People don't have the patience to teach me how to use the stuff, doing it in four button pushes and handing it back done is not showing you how to do it. Since the bang on my head my memory is worse than ever. I am still reading the book to find out where to find the menu on the Fuji. I can't remember where it lives fro one day to the next. That is one of the reasons I use the very basic editing of Capture NX2 and the Canon one for the G12, but to be fair I haven't used it for about a year. The Nikon compact is so much easier to use and the editing is the same as the D3 was (and D4s when I had it).

So, in a nutshell, I just need extra storage to plug in that will work with my little laptop (indows 7 I am told it is).

As for losing everything. Yes I know how that feels. The entire publishing house archive was lost in a big fire. All the back copies, trannies, design and chromalins going back to the early 80s was lost in one fell swoop. Life goes on.
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You need proper back-up. DVDs are not safe long-term storage. There is software available to read all your old stuff.

I'm not great with computers either, they don't interest me and I'm not inclined to clutter my brain with boring stuff I can do without. So I pay a local guy £30 an hour to come and do it for me. I tell him what I want and he sorts it out - bargain. He has a lifetime of expert knowledge and can do things in five minutes that'd take me a week. These people are not hard to find.

If you continue to bury your head in the sand with your ass in the air, don't be surprised if you get bitten ;)
 
HoppyUK said:
You need proper back-up. DVDs are not safe long-term storage. There is software available to read all your old stuff.

I'm not great with computers either, they don't interest me and I'm not inclined to clutter my brain with boring stuff I can do without. So I pay a local guy £30 an hour to come and do it for me. I tell him what I want and he sorts it out - bargain. He has a lifetime of expert knowledge and can do things in five minutes that'd take me a week. These people are not hard to find.

If you continue to bury your head in the sand with your ass in the air, don't be surprised if you get bitten ;)
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I am not burying my haed in the sand - it is just I cannot do it. I have tried and all it does is get me depressed and I get a massive headache from trying to work this stuff out. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to go to learn how to do any of this stuff.
 
There's no need to beat yourself up, you're not alone in this, but you have an IT disaster waiting to happen. You either fix it yourself with all the attendant grief, or get someone else to do it for you. I choose the latter course.

Google local home computer technicians. Tell them you want to upgrade your hard-drive, plus an external drive to back-up automatically each day, including installation and testing. 1Tb drives are about £50 on Amazon, £70 for 2Tb, £100 for 4Tb. Compare quotes.

Meanwhile, ask on here about how to get all the data off your DVDs. If they're okay, I don't see why that should be difficult. Then work on them, sort the wheat from the chaff, catalogue everything, save it to your new system and then and bung it all up to the cloud. Along the way, it might be a nice idea to get some of the good stuff printed :)
 
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I would not trust cloud to store my photos on, look what happened to Photobucket, started charging for the service. This i think is what is going to happen in the near future with cloud based storage
 
realspeed said:
I would not trust cloud to store my photos on, look what happened to Photobucket, started charging for the service. This i think is what is going to happen in the near future with cloud based storage
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Photobucket hardly counts as the cloud, that was an online hosting service.

“The cloud” costs money, generally speaking and there are many services available, going with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google or Dropbox is as good a fail safe as you’ll get.

Indeed, if you are prepared to let google compress your photos (and to be honest, their compression is very good, I can’t tell a treated file) then you can have unlimited storage of photos, you’d be daft not to use this service as an absolute minimum cloud backup. It’s a no-brainer as you can set it up to auto backup from selected folders, or even Apple photos library.
 
realspeed said:
I would not trust cloud to store my photos on, look what happened to Photobucket, started charging for the service. This i think is what is going to happen in the near future with cloud based storage
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I'm paying 7.99 per month for 1TB of storage on the cloud. I'm not sure why having to pay for something would fall part of one's reasoning process to disregard an option. Most people probably spend more on that over a few days getting snacks from Tescos or wherever.

I now have an automated workflow process that took less than 30 mins to setup that results in photos being shuttled to the cloud while I'm out on the field. That has to be worth something.
 
In all honestly there is a lot in here that is probably to fair behind what you are after, if you are just after something to plug in to expand your current storage and not worried about anything else, then just pop down to Tescos/pc world and pick up a 1tb drive it will last you a long time going by what you have said here. and if you go for the major brands Western digital/seagate/scan disk you cant really go wrong. Just go for a standard spinning drive rather than a ssd.

if your not planning on moving around with it and plugging it in to a desk top then go for a larger powered one, rather than the smaller portable ones. After that just pick what ever colour and price point suits
 
Thanks chaps. I have never heard of WD before, but if people think they are OK I'll get one of those and start burning my DVDs to it. The stuff on the DVDs is already catalogued, each folder has the name of the job on it. As is everything on the confuser. The old RAW stuff is a pain though because I can't open the old Canon ones with the new Canon program. To be fair, I don't think there is anything worth getting in a stress about! It can go and ease my life a bit more.
 
Might it be worth setting up an action (in PS or a raw converter that CAN handle your old raw files) to convert them to DNG or TIFF format?
 
Lensflare said:
Thanks chaps. I have never heard of WD before, but if people think they are OK I'll get one of those and start burning my DVDs to it. The stuff on the DVDs is already catalogued, each folder has the name of the job on it. As is everything on the confuser. The old RAW stuff is a pain though because I can't open the old Canon ones with the new Canon program. To be fair, I don't think there is anything worth getting in a stress about! It can go and ease my life a bit more.
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WD stands for Western Digital, a maker of hard disk drives (abreviated to HDD). I prefer Western Digital hard drives over Seagate hard drives because I had a couple of those fail.
If you get an external hard drive (whether it's Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba or otherwise) :
1) plug it into a USB socket on the computer
2) wait for Windows to register the new hard drive and say that it's ready to use
3) insert your old DVD of files into the computer
4) create a new folder on the new hard drive for your old files
5) copy your files to the new hard drive just by selecting them and dragging them (or using copy/paste)
6) repeat for each DVD

As for your old RAW files. I recommend you download a bit of free software from Adobe called Adobe DNG converter.
1) Download it here: http://supportdownloads.adobe.com/product.jsp?product=106&platform=Windows
2) Install it on your computer
3) Open the software and select a folder of old RAW files
4) Then hit convert, and you'll be presented with DNG (Digital Negative file, readable by lots of photo editing software) files.

My older version of Lightroom doesn't read RAW files from newer cameras like my Canon EOS M10 or any of the Fuji X cameras (as manufacturers are always pushing the cameras and RAW file formats), but this Adobe converter will deal with those files.

As for the distrust of Canon over the development of the EF mount. I think it's misplaced. Moving from FD to EF allowed them to make several advancements and provide a future-proof mount. It allowed them to keep the wide f1.2 (and even f1.0) aperture lenses, which Nikon can't manage because the mount is too small. Allowing the fitting of old lenses might have been helpful initially but it creates such a confusion in all the differing versions of lenses, AI/Pre-AI/etc, AFS/AFD and the fact that not all bodies work with all lenses due to needing a motor in the body.
Also worth remembering that Minolta who developed Auto Focus first, also abandoned their legacy MD mount in favour of the A-mount (which Sony took on when they bought Minolta) and Olympus abandoned the OM mount later joining forces with Panasonic for the Micro 4/3rds mount.
 
another vote for western digital from me, having had various other brands fail on me they seem to have stood the test of time the longest. As has already been said all drives can and do fail eventually, but these for me have so far been the most reliable
 
Much obliged. I shall get a couple of those WD drives in the link, then I can have a back up of the back up!

Thank you for all your help in all respects. Small steps in the right direction. :beer:
 
Whatever you do, and good luck, look after them and look to change as needed.

I've had 2 fail recently, fortunately I also use Crashplan so all photographs are saved.

Regards.
 
razor777 said:
I'm paying 7.99 per month for 1TB of storage on the cloud. I'm not sure why having to pay for something would fall part of one's reasoning process to disregard an option. Most people probably spend more on that over a few days getting snacks from Tescos or wherever.

I now have an automated workflow process that took less than 30 mins to setup that results in photos being shuttled to the cloud while I'm out on the field. That has to be worth something.
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go over to backblaze its only £30 a year for unlimited storage i currently have 3tb backed up for this price BARGAIN.hth Mike
 
dinorock said:
go over to backblaze its only £30 a year for unlimited storage i currently have 3tb backed up for this price BARGAIN.hth Mike
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I have Backblaze too. The yearly fee is much better value that other cloud storage and it's unlimited.
I currently have 1.8TB backed up with them. I have only needed to restore a couple of single files from backblaze so far but it's good to know it's 'completely' safe off site.
 
ABTog said:
I have Backblaze too. The yearly fee is much better value that other cloud storage and it's unlimited.
I currently have 1.8TB backed up with them. I have only needed to restore a couple of single files from backblaze so far but it's good to know it's 'completely' safe off site.
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Sounds good, in terms of a "working drive" how does that work? I have the google drive synced with an internal hdd on the PC so I can work on the files direct in photoshop which are then automatically synced with cloud as i work on them. Same premise as OneDrive (used to be SkyDrive) - does Backblaze offer the same functionality?
 
keeweeman said:
quick question regarding backblaze but can you access your data like you can with say onedrive or is it a backup only (ie, the software creates an image on the cloud and you just download the whole thing in the case of a data loss)?
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With Backblaze you can access individual files to restore them or you can restore a whole folder or even a whole drive. (They even off the option of posting you an actual drive with your data on it for a cost).
You install the software, it then copies every folder and file to their server (you can include or exclude folders you do or don't want to backup), then the entire drive and folder structure is available on their website and smartphone app for you to download (obviously it's encrypted and password protected too).

razor777 said:
Sounds good, in terms of a "working drive" how does that work? I have the google drive synced with an internal hdd on the PC so I can work on the files direct in photoshop which are then automatically synced with cloud as i work on them. Same premise as OneDrive (used to be SkyDrive) - does Backblaze offer the same functionality?
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I have a "working drive" (drive D:). Backblaze makes a list of every file and folder on the drive and begins the initial upload (this can take some time depending on your upload speed and amount of data). Then every time you add a new file or modify a file on the drive Backblaze uploads the new file to their server.

So for example each time I copy 50 new RAW files off a memory card, Backblaze starts uploading them to their server before I've even started editing them. And as soon as I export the edited files from Lightroom, those too are uploaded to Backblaze.
The Lightroom catalogue is also uploaded as soon as it's been added to.

Google Drive is £79.99 for 1TB per year, but Backblaze is unlimited storage for about £30.
Look here for a comparison of features: Backblaze VS others
 
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