ELNikkor

Good to follow the advice of those who recommend 2 external storage drives, one being a redundant drive, stored in a different location. (Doing that has saved many a priceless image!)

Jim Bianco

Thanks, I will purchase a few this weekend, thanks for all this advice.

flyguy Loc: Las Cruces, New Mexico

Excellent advice, in my opinion.

anotherview Loc: California

Ditto.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Your best bet would be to leave the files on your computer (get a larger drive or install a 2nd drive in it, if need be)...

AND back that up by putting it on something external, like a flash drive or an external drive or "cloud" storage. And I agree with the idea that if you are going to have the backup "on site" with you, double it by having redundant drives you swap out every so often (depending upon how much you shoot, how important your images are, etc.) You might swap them weekly or monthly or every few months. It's up to you. If something happened at your home and you lost BOTH the computer with the primary storage and the external storage device, how many images are you willing to lose irreplaceably?

The software that came with your camera (might need to download and install it) should be able to convert a RAW file to a JPEG easily. Look for something like an "as shot" button, which will use the camera settings recorded in the RAW file and do the conversion based on them. Of course you also could adjust, tweak and modify the RAW file. That's much more possible with the "full data" of the RAW file than it is with in-camera JPEGs.

You may not be aware of it, but you are always shooting RAW files. Every image any digital camera makes is a RAW. When you set the camera to "JPEG", it's quickly converting the RAW file into that JPEG and "throwing away" the original file that contained quite a bit of additional info. To get some idea of the difference, sometime set your camera to shoot RAW + JPEG, take a few shots, then download them to your computer. The two files from each shot will have the same name, but different suffixes when you look at them in your computer's browser. What you'll see is that the RAW file is larger than the JPEG. The difference is what's being thrown away when the camera makes JPEGs.

Besides the RAW always being larger, both RAW and JPEG file sizes vary from shot to shot depending upon how much detail is in each image. An image of a very plain gray area with just a few details would be a lot smaller than a landscape with a lot of trees and foliage details, for example.

Jim Bianco

Thanks for the info, greatly appreciated.

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

ONLY if you have plenty of room on your internal disk.

There are definite advantages to keeping data on an external drive, particularly data that has a tendency to grow with time. There WILL come a time when your drive is too small to conveniently hold your data and you will have to either move it to an external drive or increase the size of the drive in your computer. If you are using a Mac, the second option may not be available to you. Data may not grow linearly with time. Not only do the number of data files grow, but if you update your gear the size of the files will also grow.

If your data are on an external drive and you need a larger drive, it's simple. You get a larger drive. You copy all your data to the larger drive. You unplug the old drive and rename the new drive to use the name of the old drive. The path to all the files is now the same so the process will be transparent to your editor. And you put the old drive away as backup.

Jim Bianco

Thanks for all that info., I will consider that.

cowboydid2 Loc: The highways and byways of America

No, but it gives you VERY limited functionality for editing jpgs. And you actually need two programs from Nikon, (Nikon Transfer 2) and (NX Studio). The first is for transfer from your card, which then automatically sinc's up with NX Studio. It's actually a pretty good program, a ton of functionality with RAW files, and not too rough of a learning curve. Plus tons of video tutorials on YouTube. However, it only coverts Nikon RAW files, no other camera systems.

Jim Bianco

Thanks