How many gigs of photos do you have?

[SunTsu]

OK, so after a short time with my new DSLR, I've found that I am just eating through my 500GB hard drive in no time. So I'm wondering if I'm just a pack rat, so the question is, "How many gigs of photos do you have (RAW, TIFF, JPEG, etc) in total?

[coreypolis]

purge anything you won't use, ever. no point in keeping the bad ones

we're looking at the 1TB My Books at costco online right now if that answers you question ;)

[Ronald S. Jr.]

Pft...if you mean just the ones I've taken, it'd amount to around 600GB. I've only been digital for about a year and 8 months.

I've got 1.6TB on my xps, though, so I should be good for a while.

[august23]

I've got close to 100 gigs of pictures. However, lot's of videos I've taken are also mixed in there. I'd say theres about 30 gigs of pictures, and 70 gigs of video lol.

[Longwatcher]

My archive collection is approximately 230 DVDs right now, mostly full
230x4.5GB = 1035GB about. Give or take 20GB. And then there is the misc shots on the current backup drive (a 500GB western digital) and all the additional TIF versions that are only on the backup drives because I can recreate them later (probably better ) so only keep the raw archive version. So somewhere just over a terabyte of images.

[BradT0517]

32GB but I am trying to be conservative with my 80GB hard drive that has only 10GB left that should last until midsummer around July.

[Echo63]

maybe 5-10gb of Jpeg and 50 or so gb of raw
my hard drive filled up not too long ago so i went through and culled all the C**p
after moving all of my photos to my second hard disk it is now full again
time to get a big backup hard disk (and burn some of it to dvd)

[René Damkot]

About 200Gb selected ones on external Hdd now. Rest is backed up on CD/DvD (about 250Cds and 150DvDs).
And off course a few Gig on internal Hdd awaiting processing.

[Savagebasher]

32GB but I am trying to be conservative with my 80GB hard drive that has only 10GB left that should last until midsummer around July.

How can you live with only 80 gigs? I have 4 drives in my desktop, and I still run out of space more than I'd like to.

[gjl711]

Photos from just the digital camera is only a fraction of the pics I have. I have been scanning in all my old photos as well as some of the family archival photos, some from the 1920’s and have been saving them as tiff files. Each of these photos alone can be 20meg so a gig gets eaten up pretty quick. I have many online on my hard drives but have archived many on DVD’s. Backing up is getting to be a pain. ;)

[In2Photos]

32GB but I am trying to be conservative with my 80GB hard drive that has only 10GB left that should last until midsummer around July.

How can you live with only 80 gigs? I have 4 drives in my desktop, and I still run out of space more than I'd like to.
Haha! I know people that have 80 GB worth of CF cards.:lol:

[CyberDyneSystems]

After massive repetitive cleaning/culling and dumping of ones I won't ever use,. I'm down to between 250 and 300GB (mostly RAW files) on active hard drives.

I also tend to burn the DVDs prior to the more comprehensive 2nd wave culls, so in DVDs I'd be a little over 300GB or so.

I just added two more 500GB drives and converted my 500GB RAID-1 array to a 1 terabyte RAID 0+1 (4X 500GB drives)

[SunTsu]

Photos from just the digital camera is only a fraction of the pics I have. I have been scanning in all my old photos as well as some of the family archival photos, some from the 1920’s and have been saving them as tiff files. Each of these photos alone can be 20meg so a gig gets eaten up pretty quick. I have many online on my hard drives but have archived many on DVD’s. Backing up is getting to be a pain. ;)

I just started to back up to DVD, but I'll admit it is pain because it requires so much baby sitting. On top of that, I just don't trust the longevity of the media because I've had a decent amount of experience with DVDs and CDs becoming unreadable.

[gjl711]

I just started to back up to DVD, but I'll admit it is pain because it requires so much baby sitting. On top of that, I just don't trust the longevity of the media because I've had a decent amount of experience with DVDs and CDs becoming unreadable.
I have heard that as well though I have not had any CD/DVDs fail but have had many drives fail. In either case, it is my backup of a backup. All my pics are stored in three places, My working PC, that is my mail I turn it on every day PC. I run a RAID 0+1 disk array in that bad boy so I have some level of backup right there. Then I have a small slow backup PC. It’s only got a 1.4 Celeron in it but has 2 300 meg drives. Then finally I burn to DVDs. I use only Taiyo Yuden disks as they were the first to manufacture disks and pretty much have a reputation of having the finest quality in the business. In the states they are manufactured under different labels. I have not had any of them go bad on me yet. “Said with crossed fingers” Anyway, here is a fun FAQ site for the Taiyo Yuden disks and how to identify them. “click me (http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=178622)”

[JWright]

The poll is a little misleading in that it only asks for what we have on hard drives. I don't archive on a hard drive. My images are burned off to CD or DVD fairly often. I only have 42Gb of images on my external drive, but I have 240Gb on discs.

Of course this doesn't take into account the some odd 10,000 unscanned slides or innumerable unscanned negatives I've accumulated over 40 years...

[Savagebasher]

After massive repetitive cleaning/culling and dumping of ones I won't ever use,. I'm down to between 250 and 300GB (mostly RAW files) on active hard drives.

I also tend to burn the DVDs prior to the more comprehensive 2nd wave culls, so in DVDs I'd be a little over 300GB or so.

I just added two more 500GB drives and converted my 500GB RAID-1 array to a 1 terabyte RAID 0+1 (4X 500GB drives)

why don't you just make it into a 4 drive raid 5? then you will have 1.5tb of space.

[august23]

I could never imagine trusting my pictures, music, videos, documents, etc to dvd and cd disks. I'd feel much safer investing in a bunch of external hd's.

[BradT0517]

How can you live with only 80 gigs? I have 4 drives in my desktop, and I still run out of space more than I'd like to.

Haha! I know people that have 80 GB worth of CF cards.:lol:

Well when I got it 80GB was alot but around July im going to get 2 250GB then later another 2 250GBs.

[august23]

I Was about to just recommend a terabyte drive, til I realized, it's smarter to spread the files over a couple of smaller drives, than have everything rely on one giant drive.

[Savagebasher]

I Was about to just recommend a terabyte drive, til I realized, it's smarter to spread the files over a couple of smaller drives, than have everything rely on one giant drive.

As long as you do reliable backups then there is no reason to worry if you lose all photos on a main drive.

[mho01]

I'm just to about 1.2 terrabytes

1TB is archived and backed up on multiple drives

the other 200gb is on my Huge Systems MediaVault Raid array which i use as a working drive and back up every time any image is changed, they then go to an Xserve for archive on multiple drives etc.

[JaGWiRE]

As long as you do reliable backups then there is no reason to worry if you lose all photos on a main drive.
Yep. It's not if it will die, it's when. The best thing I could recommend is raid 5, and backing up to multiple medias (so say get a couple external drives, and then occasionally burn to dvd, like once every 2-3 months.)

[Savagebasher]

Yep. It's not if it will die, it's when. The best thing I could recommend is raid 5, and backing up to multiple medias (so say get a couple external drives, and then occasionally burn to dvd, like once every 2-3 months.)


raid 5 is nice. a lot of the people I chat with (on irc) have linux boxes as their file servers, with linux software raid. with a somewhat new cpu, it works golden. one guy even has a raid 6 setup with about 10 drives. crazy stuff! :)

[SoaringUSAEagle]

15gb

[JaGWiRE]

raid 5 is nice. a lot of the people I chat with (on irc) have linux boxes as their file servers, with linux software raid. with a somewhat new cpu, it works golden. one guy even has a raid 6 setup with about 10 drives. crazy stuff! :)
yep. I think I will setup my next pc with a huge case and a crapload of hard drives. I've got over a terabyte of storage now and it feels like nothing.

[NordieBoy]

One of my clients has filled his 2Tb of drives and is looking at another LaCie 2Tb.
He's just an enthusiastic amateur photographer with a 20D.

[2005GLI]

how many megabytes make a giga? i need to clean out all my pics. the train pic file is getting WAY to big!!

[gjl711]

how many megabytes make a giga? 1000

[Savagebasher]

1000

1024
;)

[gjl711]

how many megabytes make a giga? i need to clean out all my pics. the train pic file is getting WAY to big!!

1000

1024
;)
Well, since we are being literalists, and just because I am bored:
1000 megabytes = 1 giga
1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. ;) :D

[JaGWiRE]

Well, since we are being literalists, and just because I am bored:
1000 megabytes = 1 giga
1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. ;) :D

Indeed.

[2005GLI]

wow, i should definitely check how much space i have used up.

[NordieBoy]

Well, since we are being literalists, and just because I am bored:
1000 megabytes = 1 giga
1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. ;) :D


1024 Bytes = 1 KiloByte
1024 KiloBytes = 1 MegaByte
1024 MegaBytes = 1 GigaByte

The "metric" equilivant is kibibyte, mibibyte and gibibyte.

[Gordeez]

Im at 47.9 Gigs.
I need to get some more hard drives.
Ive been thinking about my Mybooks, but my brother insists its cheaper and easier
to get some internals.

[EOSAddict]

About 30GB of actual images, but mirrored twice on two other drives, one internal, one external, plus DVD backups and JPGs uploaded to website.

[cbock]

i'm at just over 40GB now. but, since i started shooting RAW, the numbers have really been going up fast.

i'm one of those with a linux system with a RAID5 array. i bought a used 3ware controller on ebay a few years ago and 4 200GB drives. it's worked flawlessly. this coming monday i'll get my new 3ware card (RAID1) that i'm going to add to the system. it'll be my 'system' drive (/usr /opt...). so that i can keep the system up in the event of a drive failure. the RAID5 array will be /home and where i'll continue to back up my images from my main workstation which is also on a RAID1 array.

guess i've been bit by the bad drive bug too many times over the years. my main workstation has withstood 4 drive failures in 2 years. very happy i'm using RAID1. it's saved me from a ton of lost time re-installing/recovering from disk failures.

finally, my linux box with the RAID5 array has been on-line for 4 years (24/7) with 4 seagate drives. no problems. the main workstation uses western digital drives. i've had 4 go bad and only continue to use the western digital drives because they're still under warranty. i recommend seagate drives .

[august23]

Get them processed out of raw and back to jpg as fast as you can. That'll save space as well as time. (From what I've seen, you shouldnt let your PP folder get bigger and bigger)

[gjl711]

Get them processed out of raw and back to jpg as fast as you can. That'll save space as well as time. (From what I've seen, you shouldnt let your PP folder get bigger and bigger)
If I am reading this correctly, are you suggesting getting rid of the RAW? I would not. Write the RAW files to DVD or some other back up, but keep them. The RAW files are equivalent to negative in film terms and sometime in the future you may want to do some other processing of the picture and doing so from the already processed jpeg is less than optimal.

[cbock]

If I am reading this correctly, are you suggesting getting rid of the RAW? I would not. Write the RAW files to DVD or some other back up, but keep them. The RAW files are equivalent to negative in film terms and sometime in the future you may want to do some other processing of the picture and doing so from the already processed jpeg is less than optimal.
i agree. getting rid of the RAW files is not a good idea. storage is cheap these days. RAW files are way too useful to throw away to save a few MBs.

for more useful info, check out http://www.thedambook.com (http://www.thedambook.com/)

[MazerRakhm]

Too much...

[alix]

OK, so after a short time with my new DSLR, I've found that I am just eating through my 500GB hard drive in no time. So I'm wondering if I'm just a pack rat, so the question is, "How many gigs of photos do you have (RAW, TIFF, JPEG, etc) in total?

What kind of DSLR do you have? Because the amount of space your photos take up will also depend on the amount of megapixels, RAW etc.

[alix]

ohhh ... ok you have 5D. Didn't think of looking at your gear list ... :S

[labbai]

I took abot 20G last summer in 6 weeks... And that was mostly RAW files... It debends. That's why I have a 40G Epson with me all of the time, so I'll be all right for the next 4 months?:wink:

[CyberDyneSystems]

OK, so after a short time with my new DSLR, I've found that I am just eating through my 500GB hard drive in no time. So I'm wondering if I'm just a pack rat, so the question is, "How many gigs of photos do you have (RAW, TIFF, JPEG, etc) in total?

I failed to mention that my approx 250-300GB of images are collected from starting approx 2001.. and the majority of images taken since 2003 when I got my 1st DSLR, a 10D.

So if we ignore the jpegs prior, then that's about 250GB saved since 2003, or four years.

[badams]

I've got around 45GB now, but had 60GB a few months back. Just starting to go through them all and delete the bad ones. If I ever get caught up I'm deleting the bad ones as soon as I put them on the computer.

[purelithium]

I have 13.7 gb, according to Aperture. Not counting my backups, which would triple that amount.

[TomHuckWa]

I have 3 backups a second harddrive in the machine, and an external usb harddrive, and I always burn a dvd backup using roxio copy files to disk. then I burn the pics I like into a slide show and remove them from my primary harddrive.

[R_Metzel]

I have about 140GB between internal, external and DVD's. I want to know who the 3 are that voted for 3+ Terabytes. That is a lot of photos!!!!

[BradT0517]

I have about 140GB between internal, external and DVD's. I want to know who the 3 are that voted for 3+ Terabytes. That is a lot of photos!!!!

Gasrocks, labbai, Palladium.