Photo Storage Tips

I probably get asked this question by my friends, family and/or clients once a week...

"How do you manage all the photos that you take?"

Great question and I am going to answer it here on my blog.

There is no "right" way to do things, but this is how I do it and I think it works for me. This really depends on how much data you have so some of you out there that are still <1 Gig of photos, the approach I have maybe overkill. First of all, I shoot 100% RAW. This means storage is a huge issue for me.

Each wedding I do, I shoot approximately 25 to 30 Gig of flash memory. I don't necessarily keep all of the data, but that is how much that I come home with. After each shoot, portrait session or a wedding, first thing that I do is download all of my images onto my computer hard drive.

My computer hard drive is a 500G harddrive which is also mirrored with another 500G harddrive. This is call RAID1 configuration. I think having it mirrored prevents the possibility of a harddrive failure. Harddrive these days are so cheap, so why not have them mirrored? I have a Dell so you can make this configuration directly from the BIOS. Be careful!!!! When you set the 2 drives in RAID1 configuration, everything on the drive will be erased!!! so double check and triple check before you do this.

Usually, these mirrored 500G drives last me for a while, at last 7-9 months. When it is pretty full, what I do is copy (not move) the files onto my external harddrives. I do copy first then delete just in case something happens during a move process. I have two Western Digital My Book 1 TB drives. I run them in RAID1 configuration as well, so each drive only gives me 500G of space. Once again, I want redundancy. These drives are also getting filled up as we speak here. I file all of my pictures based on the year, so I have folders like 2000, 2001, 2002...etc. Pictures that are more than 4 years old, I really don't touch anymore. In this case, anything that is before 2004 can be once again archived.

I have another 1 TB external drive. This time, this drive is NOT running RAID1. This drive is a simple 1TB drive where I store all the old files. I really don't start this up or plug it into my computer, it sits there as an archive drive. I don't have redundancy on this so if anything happens to this drive, my files are gone. This is not OK, but since these are old files, if they are gone, it is not as bad.

I don't do DVD backups because I never had luck with DVDs. I used to do DVD backup until once I tried to recover from them, they failed on me. I never backed up on DVD since. Also, they take forever to back up 20-30G of data. So to save time, HD is my way to go. Again, this storage approach maybe overkill for some of you, but I think having redundancy is always a good thing. Buy one of the Western Digital My Book for $300+ and you will have a safety net. In my opinion, it is well worth it.

Here is a picture of my set up: