rfahrens wrote:
My internal iMac disc storage is full. Photos take up most of the storage. My primary camera is a Sony A7ii and I shoot in raw format. I am thinking of storing all my photos on an external storage device. Is that a good solution and what solution or equipment would you recommend? I am concerned about the speed of transferring as well as retrieving data.
I use Western Digital hard drives exclusively. Both my WD My Book USB drives and the five WD Red drives that I use in my RAID system have performed flawlessly over the years.
Computer security experts say you should always maintain a minimum of three (3) forms of backup for your photographs. At least one should be off site to protect against loss in the event of fire or natural disaster. The Cloud is not the best choice because your photos will be under the control another party. I do not and will not use cloud storage because my photos would be under the control of a second party that may have technical problems, financial failure or bankruptcy, sale to an unreliable party or may hold my data hostage to rising costs. In addition, when working with a large number of large raw files at a time as I do, the sheer size of uploads combined with the speed limitations of internet connections means your computer can be running 24-hours a day. If you are a professional, the upload may never catch up. Instead of cloud storage I uses the system that I will describe for you below.
1) All storage of photographs is external to the computer’s (iMac) internal drive except for a COPY of the raw files that are temporarily used on the internal drive during the editing process.
2) Downloads from the camera, editing, final product and primary storage is on an external 5Tb Western Digital My Book drive.
a) Each shoot is stored in a folder identified by date in the format "YYYYMMDD" followed by a space and a title. The date format allows the computer to correctly file the folders in date order.
b) Within each folder are three sub-folders labeled “RAW”, “Edit” and “Final”. All uploads are made to the RAW folder and only copies of the raw files are copied to the Edit folder for editing. The final output that may include JEPG, TIFF, etc. files are transferred to the Final folder.
3) The complete primary storage drive is backed up to a Drobo 5-drive RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). This allows multiple backup copies of the data along with offsite backup. In addition, the Drobo’s firmware automatically corrects any data transfer errors and insures that all backup drives have matched data. The RAID consists of five Western Digital Red Drives, which are designed for this type of service and have an excellent reputation for reliability. Furthermore they are “hot swappable” which means they can be safely inserted and removed from the Drobo without removing power from the system.
a) The Drobo is only powered on when backups are being made. Otherwise, it is powered off. This limits the exposure to possible hacking.
c) Although the Drobo can hold up to five drives, only four are in the unit at any given time. Three of the drives are never removed and provide the basic redundancy.
d) The fourth drive position is used for the offsite backup. Two drives are used for that purpose. Once a week or as necessary, drive 4 is removed from the Drobo and taken to the bank. Drive 5 is removed from my safe deposit box and drive 4 takes it place in the box.
4) Drive 5 is inserted into the Drobo where the data from Drives 1, 2 and 3 are automatically copied to it.