Storage problems

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Lawrence

Senior Member
I always thought this would happen ...

I have kept all my photos taken over the past two years either in Elements or LR/PS on my macintosh hard drive.
My mac is rebelling and I now only have 426 Mbs of my total 499 GBs free.

Photos constitute 342 GBs of storage used!!

What do I do?
Can I transfer them to an external drive and if so how?
Should I run my LR and PS off an external drive instead of my hard drive? (How do i do that)

Desperately need help on this please.
 
D

Don Kuykendall_RIP

RIP :(
I moved all my photos to an external 3TB drive and freed up all that room on my main drive in my computer. Not sure about Mac but I would assume you can do that.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
L

Lawrence

Senior Member
Don Kuykendall said:
I moved all my photos to an external 3TB drive and freed up all that room on my main drive in my computer. Not sure about Mac but I would assume you can do that.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

Seems i can. Started with 2014 shots and it will take 3 hours to transfer.
I think this will be a monthly chore from now on.

Although I am not sure if I am doing it right. :)
 
J

J-see

Senior Member
I myself prefer M-disc. The biggest size is only 25Gb blu-ray but once the RAWs are written you don't need to bother about anything.

They have the highest life-expectancy of any storage medium and even when they are small in size compared to other systems, you don't need to bother about degradation, power or hardware failure or even theft.

Correction; I just checked and they have 100GB blu-ray available now.

M-DISC | YOUR LIFE. ENGRAVED IN STONE.
 
Last edited:
Marilynne

Marilynne

Administrator
Staff member
Super Mod
Contributor
Try doing a few at a time instead of all at once Lawrence.

I transfer mine monthly to an external hard drive. Goes a lot faster on a monthly basis.


 
Whiskeyman

Whiskeyman

Senior Member
Don't just use one hard drive!!! Have an additional back up drive(s). Eventually, the probability that a hard drive will fail is directly proportional to how irreplaceable it is! :eek:

Each of my photo storage drives has a back up, and I've been told that isn't enough.

WM
 
J

J-see

Senior Member
The problem with a hard drive is that the more you use it, the more you compromise it. If you frequently do back-ups, it is better to use one drive for those and then one you use solely for a less frequent back-up like once a year.
 
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aroy

Senior Member
Backing up RAW files is easy. Not having LR, I think backing up the LR catalog may require you to copy to an external disk through LR.

I have a few external USB drives, and I back up practically every day. As I have organized RAW date wise, it is pretty easy to copy the files. What you can do is
. Buy a couple of 1TB external USB HDD.
. See how long does LR take to copy/move the RAW files (with their catalog information) to the external USB drive. Start with 100, then 1000 to estimate time. If it takes too long, then just copy the RAW files to an external disk.
. Maintain a mirror copy of the external HDD, that way if one backup disk fails you have a backup of backup.

You may also go for a 2TB USB HDD, and configure LR to run from it.
 
D

Don Kuykendall_RIP

RIP :(
Lawrence said:
Seems i can. Started with 2014 shots and it will take 3 hours to transfer.
I think this will be a monthly chore from now on.

Although I am not sure if I am doing it right. :)
Click to expand...

Once I got my photos all transferred over I then just upload to that drive from the SD card so they never go to the main drive in the computer again. The LR catalog lives on that drive also. Not sure how a mac works but with a PC you can then point the "Pictures" folder to that drive so from now on that is where it will look for photos.
 
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wornish

Senior Member
Don Kuykendall said:
Once I got my photos all transferred over I then just upload to that drive from the SD card so they never go to the main drive in the computer again. The LR catalog lives on that drive also. Not sure how a mac works but with a PC you can then point the "Pictures" folder to that drive so from now on that is where it will look for photos.
Click to expand...

It is the same on a Mac.
 
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WayneF

Senior Member
Lawrence said:
My mac is rebelling and I now only have 426 Mbs of my total 499 GBs free.

Photos constitute 342 GBs of storage used!!

What do I do?
Click to expand...

Get a USB 3.0 external drive. Your 342MB / 3 hours computes about 30 MB/second, which is USB 2.0 speed.

USB 3.0 is vastly faster.
 
R

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
My raw images are stored on an external Thunderbolt drive along with my iTunes library. The internal SSD is used by the OS and applications, and I'll use it as scratch space when working with videos, but the final video product also gets stored to the Thunderbolt drive when exported.
 
Woodyg3

Woodyg3

Senior Member
Contributor
On my Mac I have two external 3TB hard drives. One for pics, one for backup of pics. Nothing else goes on these drives.

I have older pictures on the internal drive, and these are backed up on a 1TB external drive.

Finally, I also make a back up of all my RAW files on yet another set of 1TB external drives.

I set up the 3TB external drives when I first started using LR, so I can't be of much help as to how to move files more quickly.
 
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