petego4it wrote:
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?
Long ago I learned to carefully back up hard disks... (
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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.