Best options for external storage

Hello all!

I'm currently looking into my options for external hard drives. My editing computer is an early 2008 MBP with a 200GB internal drive.

Right now I'm using a Maxtor 1-touch 'portable' 250GB drive for my Time Machine backups every so often. Works pretty good. So that basically mirrors my internal drive to an extent, and then some (a couple months or so archive). I really like the Time Machine application on these Macs.

Now to my external drive questions. Am I wrong in thinking that keeping the most amount of HDD space possible unused will help the machine stay speedy? I'm most likely going to bump the RAM from 2GB to 4GB shortly (probably going through Crucial? I've heard good things about their RAM for Mac machines). What I was originally going to do is grab a 1TB WD MyBook or Seagate FreeAgent to dump my photo library on so I can keep the internal HDD free of all that data. Now I'm reconsidering. I just recently started working at a photo studio as an assistant and their standard practice is using multiple WD MyBook 500GB's with a separate backup for each that they would backup each night. So in a sense, they would have HD1 HD2 HD3 HD4, along with HD1backup, HD2backup etc...Say they would edit images contained on HD1 during the day, we backup that drive at the end of the day using an App called "SuperDuper". Basically clones the drives. They backups are held in another section of the studio.

Would this be more beneficial to me for my own personal use as well, instead of dumping everything on a 1TB drive without a backup? I'm assuming that my 250GB Maxtor drive will eventually become useless one I exceed 250GB worth of images, which isn't too far fetched considering I shoot RAW on both cameras. I'm thinking about doing the following.

· 1 500GB drive for photo library storage
· 1 500GB drive as a backup for the other drive
· My Maxtor 250GB as a portable drive to store photos I want to edit when not at home. Basically bringing my current projects along with me when I'm out of the house.
· Possibly one more 500GB drive in the future to use as a constant Time Machine backup?

Any suggestions I may be missing? I realize it's in everybody's best interest to backup all data once, twice or more times. Currently leaning towards the 500GBx2 option against the 1TB option. Eventually, I'm going to run out of internal HDD space, and I'm trying to be prepared in the most logical manner.

Well....on to the store now. I'll report back with my final purchases.

wow! are you pretty worried that you're going to experience hard drive failure? you may want to look at RAID options...

http://gizmodo.com …y-is-and-why-you-want-one

I used to worry about hard drive failure too, but then i figure most of my photos are on smugmug anyway.

What I am really concerned about is losing the original RAW files, along with any unflattened TIFF files. If I lose those unflattened files, all my editing is wiped out as well. Masks, layers etc...all gone. If I ever want to do something with the image again, I need to re-edit and hope it looks similar!

I went ahead and picked up two WD 640GB MyBooks at Best Buy yesterday. So far so good (knock on wood). I used Disk Utility to format them in Mac OS extended, and have one as a clone of the other using SuperDuper.

While not using the drive, I plan on keeping them unplugged and keeping the backup elsewhere. I'm about to delete the images off my internal hard drive, and while most of them are backed up onto DVD's as well, I'm probably going to make that a standard practice for any future shoots that are super important.

chinoamigo wrote in post #7979104
wow! are you pretty worried that you're going to experience hard drive failure? you may want to look at RAID options...

http://gizmodo.com …y-is-and-why-you-want-one

I used to worry about hard drive failure too, but then i figure most of my photos are on smugmug anyway.

Be aware that on line storage services have gone out of business with no data transfer for its clients to another service, and countless photos have been lost!

Maybe you should look into an off site backup as well such as Carbonite. I back up to seperate external hard drives (mac and pc), internal drives, and Carbonite as well as smugmug. I stopped doing DVD's because it was to time consuming, storage and DVD rot.

Once I get into more and more important shoots, I'll definitely consider an off-site storage means. Thanks for the suggestion!

For my most important photos now...I'm thinking this...

Load onto External HDD
Burn originals onto DVD
Do any editing for the day
At the end of the day, backup the HDD.