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I'm a pro-photographer and work in IT as well. I have run into this storage problem on more occassions than I can poke a stick at. I've seen first hand accounts

I'm a pro-photographer and work in IT as well. I have run into this storage problem on more occassions than I can poke a stick at. I've seen first hand accounts like the one linked, where people acquire hard drive after hard drive with no end in sight. But the problem isn't limited to just photographers, it's anyone who acquires data of any type. However that being said, I use a combination of NAS of which I have about 40TB of pure photos (yes a lot of images). I've been dabbling with LTO to backup images, but you need to know what you are doing with tape. It's not a simple drop type opperation as a hard drive is. You can get a lot of shoeshining if you don't do things properly. So for long term easy access, I recommend to others to look into 4-Bay NAS units (at a minimum) for future flexibility. QNAP or Synology to aid the config and use a blob storage service to store the data (if upload speed permits). I used to use Backblaze but even with basic B2 storage, I found it more expensive than Google Cloud storage (coldline). But with anything your use case, preparedness to learn and financial situation will dictate what you end up doing.

cm2187 5y ago
Plus my experience is that my storage consumption increases more or less linearly whereas drive capacity is more exponential. I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond 4k for videos (that’s already way more than one can perceive on most screen formats, except perhaps for multiplex cinemas). And I am not sure of what is the point of a 100MP camera. You can find 18TB drives now. Very quickly the rationale for replacing drives won’t be that you run out of space but that they become old and too dangerous to keep around, or that you want the performance of SSDs, when they reach this level of price/GB.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  I've got a 60MP camera (Sony a7R4), and I could see the point of a 100MP: extreme crops while still having acceptable image quality in the result. Doing bird photography after a certain point the size and weight of the lens becomes an effectively insurmountable issue (somewhere around the 600-800mm range, depending on maximum aperture) and the only way to get more "reach" is to be able to crop the resulting photo. So I'd never use the full 100MP, but I might discard 75% of it to get a nice print-quality bird image of reasonable size. Of course you also need a really good, sharp lens to take advantage of such a high-res sensor. Any flaws in the lens or your technique or settings will show up more dramatically in a deep crop. So it's not going to save you money on a shorter focal length lens, it's just going to save weight.

cm2187 5y ago

Plus my experience is that my storage consumption increases more or less linearly whereas drive capacity is more exponential. I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond 4k for videos (that’s already way more than one can perceive on most screen formats, except perhaps for multiplex cinemas). And I am not sure of what is the point of a 100MP camera. You can find 18TB drives now. Very quickly the rationale for replacing drives won’t be that you run out of space but that they become old and too dangerous to keep around, or that you want the performance of SSDs, when they reach this level of price/GB.

SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
I've got a 60MP camera (Sony a7R4), and I could see the point of a 100MP: extreme crops while still having acceptable image quality in the result. Doing bird photography after a certain point the size and weight of the lens becomes an effectively insurmountable issue (somewhere around the 600-800mm range, depending on maximum aperture) and the only way to get more "reach" is to be able to crop the resulting photo. So I'd never use the full 100MP, but I might discard 75% of it to get a nice print-quality bird image of reasonable size. Of course you also need a really good, sharp lens to take advantage of such a high-res sensor. Any flaws in the lens or your technique or settings will show up more dramatically in a deep crop. So it's not going to save you money on a shorter focal length lens, it's just going to save weight.