petego4it Loc: NY

Long ago I learned to carefully back up hard disks against crashes; now tho I have over 60 CDs/DVDs and more than 12 discarded hard drives of varying capacities from 250MB to 5TB; I need to cut down on junk/get space so will toss disks & sell some HD's. But of course have the nagging thought I may not have successfully re-uploaded originals of precious shots. Also am sure my current Apple/Lightroom combo won't handle some (maybe many due to format), certainly not any from before I transitioned from Windows to Apple (I do have Apple's external CD/DVD drive). Any of you with similar experiences who had to review/consolidate then wipe with advice to offer? Software suggestions/ways to speed this process?

Lucian Loc: From Wales, living in Ohio

The new version of On1 has a feature to recognize and bring up duplicates of the same photo, then give you the option t rename or delete the copy. Take a look at the latest from On1, they just sent me an email yesterday, about it.

Lucian Loc: From Wales, living in Ohio

The new version of On1 has a feature to recognize and bring up duplicates of the same photo, then give you the option t rename or delete the copy. Take a look at the latest from On1, they just sent me an email yesterday, about it.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

My thought is, forget use of CD’s/DVD’s as a storage media...they did not live up to their hype in my experience.

Spreading thousands of images across multiple volumes (CD’s & DVD’s) makes for a nightmare to organize due to limited storage space per volume.

The cost of large external drives today is tiny. Buy large capacity drives for storage, and larger drives for backup, and maintain backups on cloud services. The local backups are your primary restore option, with a cloud backup in the event your local drives are unusable for some reason.

Settle on a storage format for your images that is not proprietary. Meaning it can be read by multiple types of software or operating systems.

FWIW: I keep all of my images on an external drive connected 24x7 to my iMac, I maintain a complete backup that runs hourly of my iMac on a 10 TB external connected 24x7. I run a separate backup of images and important data files on a 2 TB external connected only monthly for the backup. Lastly, I maintain a backup on Amazon Prime Photos of only my images. This backup runs every 30 minutes automatically.

My images are a mix of JPG files easily read on any computer by pretty much any operating system or editing software available, DNG files converted from the original Canon & Nikon raw files and the original Nikon & Canon raw files kept on a separate 2 TB external disk.

I make use of a Media Sonic “Probox” to hold 4 large sata drives using a single usb connection along with a sata dock holding two sata drives and Toshiba 2 TB usb drive that gets power from the usb connection.

For me, it is much easier to keep all my images in one catalog in Lightroom, close to 70,000 images, exporting as JPG when needed. Makes managing, editing & locating any image pretty simple and instantaneous.

If a primary drive goes bad, I can restore everything from my Time Machine backup disk, if the time machine disk goes bad, my originals are still intact, if I lose my TM disk and my originals, I can restore my images from my Toshiba 2 TB disk, if all my locals crap out, I can restore my images from my cloud storage site.

I do not worry about backing up applications as they can be reinstalled should I lose them at some point. Licensing is held either on the vendors site or in saved email communications.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

[quote=petego4it... But of course have the nagging thought I may not have successfully re-uploaded originals of precious shots....[/quote]
I'm not quite following this question.
Backups are copies of what exists in a master location.
What or why would you be re-uploading them?
Aren't the files already there?

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I recently went through a similar situation. I put four drives into a Mediasonic box and three drives into another HDD box. I still have eight drives sitting here, but they're older with lower capacity.

1. See what's on the drives. If a drive has something that you don't have in your main storage, and it's important, copy it over.
2. Check the date of manufacture. I'll let you decide how old is too old.
3. Get CrystalDiskInfo (free) and check the number of starts and the number of running hours. This program will also tell you if the drive is Good, So-So, or Bad. It shows the temperature of the drive as well. These statistics can help you decide whether or not to keep a drive.
4. Formatting the drives before repurposing them would be a good idea.

I doubt anyone would want to buy a drive that is so old or so small that you don't want it. However, there are small powerful magnets inside these drives, and they can come in handy.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

There are many programs that will find duplicate files. I like duplicatefinder. I recently got rid of hundreds of duplicate pictures and files. As dngallagher said, CDs and DVDs are not the best way to back up files. A plain old HDD will give you the most bang for your buck. Of course, in addition to your external storage drive, you should have two other drives as backups.

tbirdlady Loc: Indiana

Like your setup. You even keep the HD spinning. Many don't know a HD can go bad if not frequently spun. Good job for backing up, even up to online.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I started with a hard drive and CD/DVD's then went to 2 hard drive a minor of each other.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I don't know how many of you keep things on OneDrive or Google Drive, but it can be very handy. I used my Kindle last night to read my computer manual from Google Drive.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Here’s my suggestion. Pick two enterprise quality HDs or SSDs large enough to handle everything with plenty of room left over. Format as FAT 32 or ExFAT so both your Windows machine and your Mac can read and write them. Copy EVERYTHING from all sources onto this disk, then deduplicate it using any of the available dedupe aps. Now you have a master copy of everything. Arrange and organize the data into folders if you wish, then copy this disk to the 2nd backup disk. You now have a master copy of everything and a backup that you can mount either to your Mac or PC.

OTOH, if I knew I’d only be using a Mac going forward, I’d format the 2nd disk with the Apple file system and use it as my working disk, keeping disk one as a backup

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

I make use of Evernote to save web clippings as well as documents and pretty much anything, fully searchable and available to all my devices. I always keep pdf's of manuals and important info in Evernote.

There are loads of options these days.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

The only thing I keep on OneDrive is a zip file of an HTML editor that I really, really like and is no longer supported/available by the creator. I have that puppy backed up EVERYWHERE!

Everything else is "temporary" availability for family and friends.
Temporary can be months though....

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Philosophical question:

What do you consider an original?

One answer is that the original is in the camera. The camera copies it to the camera memory card. You copy it from the memory card to your computer. From your computer it gets copied to your archives. In the meantime, you have turned off your camera. The original is gone. But you have exact copies on your memory card, in your computer and in your archives.

There should be no difference between the "original" and the copies. As long as you have good copies you're fine. There's no need to re-upload anything.

The only thing you have to do is make sure you copy everything in your archive when you are updating an archival drive to a new one as part of your maintenance program.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

To me the original is the unprocessed file out of the camera, wherever it lives (Desktop & Laptop).
I can have the "original" in multiple places as they are not different.
The original never gets altered. Edits receive a new file name.
If I edit on the laptop, I send a copy of the new file to the desktop.

(The original being in camera memory, before it is placed on the card, seems to be splitting hairs. )