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I'm a photographer dealing with many terabytes of files (numbers go up fast when you're shooting 100 megapixel RAWs). As far as I'm concerned, having a stack o

by gyomu 3y ago

I'm a photographer dealing with many terabytes of files (numbers go up fast when you're shooting 100 megapixel RAWs). As far as I'm concerned, having a stack of redundant external drives is a feature, not a bug. I can easily plug them to a collaborator's computer when network is slow (which is almost always). If one fails, no big deal, I can just swap it out with another one bought at a local store. We're really spoiled, SSDs are tiny and super fast and relatively cheap these days. I remember lugging around 3.5" drives... I always get a laptop with the minimal amount of storage, the money you'd spend upgrading is better spent on drives. That way if it fails, I can buy a new machine, plug in my existing drives, and I'm ready to resume my workflow in 30 minutes. No single point of failure. Same with SD cards, much better to have a bunch of 64 GB than one single expensive 512GB. (of course, I have a nice beefy storage array at my home studio) Now if software would catch up...

jwells89 3y ago
Yeah on premises drives are where it’s at for anything data intensive. I don’t regularly handle the volumes of data you do, but have on occasion and based on past experience I wouldn’t use cloud storage for anything remotely heavy duty, regardless of the desktop platforms and cloud services involved. Too much room for things to go awry when I can’t physically plug the storage in. I’ll use cloud storage for off-premises backup in addition to local backups, but that’s about it.
lxgr 3y ago
But how are you backing up your external drives? I think Time Machine supports it, but you'd need one single drive large enough to store the content of all external drives you use.
VHRanger 3y ago
Look, if you're in the field and having a bunch of SD cards and drives, that's cool. As long as you back your stuff up correctly at some point. The pile of drives can be part of your 3-2-1 if you want. Retrieval is also terrible with "my stack of drives" as well. Having to physically search through drives to get to a file is why we left paper to the 20th century.

by gyomu 3y ago

jwells89 3y ago

Yeah on premises drives are where it’s at for anything data intensive. I don’t regularly handle the volumes of data you do, but have on occasion and based on past experience I wouldn’t use cloud storage for anything remotely heavy duty, regardless of the desktop platforms and cloud services involved. Too much room for things to go awry when I can’t physically plug the storage in. I’ll use cloud storage for off-premises backup in addition to local backups, but that’s about it.

lxgr 3y ago

But how are you backing up your external drives? I think Time Machine supports it, but you'd need one single drive large enough to store the content of all external drives you use.

VHRanger 3y ago

Look, if you're in the field and having a bunch of SD cards and drives, that's cool. As long as you back your stuff up correctly at some point. The pile of drives can be part of your 3-2-1 if you want. Retrieval is also terrible with "my stack of drives" as well. Having to physically search through drives to get to a file is why we left paper to the 20th century.