I have too many photos

threads been dead for three years.

I am getting in the habit of having a backup of all of my unedit RAWs on 2 external HD's, copy of all optimized JPEG's on 2 or 3 HD's, and also an online backup.

I think keeping the Raws is important as post-processing can change in the future.

JAbberwocky wrote in post #12966232
Some of you may have the same problem, but I have too many photos. It is impractical to burn them all to DVD as it would take too long. It took a long time to shoot all these and would be impossible to replace them if I ever lost them.

What is the best way to store them?

Heya,

Many of us have that issue. The beauty is, large capacity is inexpensive these days. $120 gives you 3TB of storage easily. If you have that many photos in RAW/JPG, then ouch. But at that point it's critical to have a good library in terms of organization so that you can actually find what you want in that ocean of files.

I slowly go back and delete unneeded/unwanted RAWS. I review them in DPP and just delete the ones that I know I have no use for. Otherwise, I ensure I delete all TIFFS I convert too as they take up loads of space. I then just keep RAWS and any processed JPGS that I generate from them. I just keep everything in dated folders, with descriptions so I can remember what is what years later.

Large capacity external drives or even a NAS does the job. I go with the inexpensive large capacity USB 3.0 external drives, WD & Seagate often. 2TB drives for $80~100 means lots of capacity. I just label them and store twin copies of every file. Cheap & easy.

Very best,

Recently bought a entry level server from Lenovo with 2 x 4 TB HDDs in a RAID 1 (mirror) mode. This is one of the best and cheapest solutions so far.

Yup. External hard drives. They are reasonably priced theses day. Only catch is you need a backup of the backup.

What made you choose a server over a NAS that could also hold 2 drives in RAID1?