Wits end

Harriers9

Harriers9

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Name
Philip
Edit My Images
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I'm trying to grab more space back on my PC and thought I'd start with sticking my Raws (.cr2) onto the cloud. I'm going back to the start of my Raw saves from 2012 and I'm now up to Dec 2015. Problem is the total of those is 11 folders, 6039 files and a total of 115GB. I have another 10 years worth to go and many of those will be (.cr3) Raws weighing in at a lot more.

What and where the hell am I going to put them bearing the most free of cost I can find are the usuals (Drive, Dropbox etc) that will only accept 10GB before charging. I did look at Terabox that will give me 1TB free but I have to check in every couple of weeks or they get deleted. I just want a send and forget basically.

I don't want to go to the local backup discs route because I already have 3 of those and they're getting full too.

Any ideas
 
Cloud storage is fine if you have just a few files, but for photographers with multiple terabytes of data it's a poor option because of the speeds/long transfer times. Local discs are the right answer, with a duplicate stored offsite.
 
Do you store all of your raw files or do you delete those not needed. I typically delete about half of what I capture. For birds in flight and some sports I delete an even higher percentage but a much lower percentage of studio work etc.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Do you store all of your raw files or do you delete those not needed. I typically delete about half of what I capture. For birds in flight and some sports I delete an even higher percentage but a much lower percentage of studio work etc.

Dave
Click to expand...

I have and that's the problem. It would take years to go through them all deciding which to keep and which to not.

I've now ordered a 6TB WD external drive to put them on. Mainly because when I moved them out of my Pictures folder on (D : ) and put them on the desktop the new folders all went onto the 250GB (C : ) (the desktop defaulting to that drive and no way to change it) and that was reserved for my system files and stuff that won't go elsewhere but (C : ) A disc full warning came up and I couldn't move it all back, open anything or even shut down.

When the new drive comes I'll end my days sorting the crap out. In future I'll only keep the keepers.
 
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FWIW I bought a 12TB drive last year to consolidate my backups in one place. :p
 
Lack of discipline. When I upload my images to LR after a shoot, I always colour code, rate and keyword each image (LR is designed to support this) which includes marking for delete those not needed. immediately after, I delete those marked for delete.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Lack of discipline. When I upload my images to LR after a shoot, I always colour code, rate and keyword each image (LR is designed to support this) which includes marking for delete those not needed. immediately after, I delete those marked for delete.

Dave
Click to expand...

Now why didn't I think of that 20 years ago :)

Once I get this lot sorted then I'll work out a system for managing mine through PS Elements.
 
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I've got a 12tb local partition on my PC dedicated to photos, copied to a 36tb RAID5 NAS (which has a 24tb backup), and also using Amazon Prime photography to provide the off site backup (incredibly slow, and I'm unsafe in the suspicion they are probably training AI off the back of those photos).

It's overkill, but until recently had no discipline - I'm now in the process of deleting crappy photos, rating, adding metadata, identifying duplicates, etc. It's a long and tedious process and I regularly stall, but as long as I'm more disciplined going forwards, and try to occasional blitz a few months worth of old data, I shouldn't need more space.

A NAS really is the way forward for large volumes of data, and at the very least back the important stuff off site.
 
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iDrive is the best by far you can get 10TB for about £90/year
 
Harriers9 said:
I'm trying to grab more space back on my PC and thought I'd start with sticking my Raws (.cr2) onto the cloud. I'm going back to the start of my Raw saves from 2012 and I'm now up to Dec 2015. Problem is the total of those is 11 folders, 6039 files and a total of 115GB. I have another 10 years worth to go and many of those will be (.cr3) Raws weighing in at a lot more.

What and where the hell am I going to put them bearing the most free of cost I can find are the usuals (Drive, Dropbox etc) that will only accept 10GB before charging. I did look at Terabox that will give me 1TB free but I have to check in every couple of weeks or they get deleted. I just want a send and forget basically.

I don't want to go to the local backup discs route because I already have 3 of those and they're getting full too.

Any ideas
Click to expand...

you want it all for free ?
and you want it reliable and available long term?

nope just find a decent solution like iDrive
 
Harriers9 said:
I'm trying to grab more space back on my PC
Click to expand...

Harriers9 said:
I don't want to go to the local backup discs route because I already have 3 of those and they're getting full too.
Click to expand...

I’m confused

Are you trying to use the cloud as a place to keep backup copies of your files or somehow to use it for primary storage?

If it’s the latter, what do you intend to do when you need the files? Copy them temporarily back from the cloud? But then it would be easier to copy them from your local backups, so the cloud is not actually primary storage.

Or are you simply intending to have only one copy of these files on unpaid cloud storage and not keep them locally at all?
 
Musicman said:
Or are you simply intending to have only one copy of these files on unpaid cloud storage and not keep them locally at all?
Click to expand...
that is how i read it
 
ancient_mariner said:
Cloud storage is fine if you have just a few files, but for photographers with multiple terabytes of data it's a poor option because of the speeds/long transfer times. Local discs are the right answer, with a duplicate stored offsite.
Click to expand...

i disagree , local working copies with cloud backup is far better
idrive updates the cloud backup in real time and you are then avoiding buying more and more disks
 
ancient_mariner said:
Cloud storage is fine if you have just a few files, but for photographers with multiple terabytes of data it's a poor option because of the speeds/long transfer times. Local discs are the right answer, with a duplicate stored offsite.
Click to expand...
It's more an issue in terms of the rate you are adding to the data, relative to the speed of your internet connection.
The advantage of a cloud backup like Backblaze is that it happens in the background automatically.
Yes, the initial upload takes some time - but that's a one off thing, which can be done incrementally over a few weeks if needed.

Of course, this is using the Cloud as one element of a backup - you ideally have local storage, and local backup (removal drives or NAS) as well.
 
Mr Bump said:
idrive updates the cloud backup in real time and you are then avoiding buying more and more disks
Click to expand...

Discs will need replacing from time to time, but you can buy quite a lot of HDD space for 3 years at £91 per year.

Some time in the next couple of years we may get fibre TP, but until then, storing 50GB of files in the cloud would be extremely slow. I suspect we're not the only ones for whom transferring gigabytes of data is still significant.
 
Faldrax said:
Of course, this is using the Cloud as one element of a backup - you ideally have local storage, and local backup (removal drives or NAS) as well.
Click to expand...

Yes, it should be just one part, possibly the off-site aspect that you never use except in time of emergency.
 
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