I get a lot of questions on my hard drives. I guess because people can see them in the background of my videos and I think it looks MUCH MUCH more fancier than it really is. So I thought I’d do a quick write up on what I use and why.
Disclaimer
Don’t expect too much of a techie discussion here. And please DO NOT try to convince me I should change something. Judging from the comments and questions I get from people who watch my videos, I’m the least techie person you know. I have worked REALLY hard at developing the creative part of my skillset over the last 20-25 years. I didn’t start out as a creative person to begin with, but I wanted to be. I personally value that much more than any technical stuff – and I don’t have time to develop both. I deliberately (and almost enthusiastically) avoid tech at all costs.
I don’t look at what’s new in computers, phones, cameras, drives, cars, stereos, etc… unless I’m specifically in the market for something. For example, I bought a new MacBook Pro in 2021. It works great. I’m probably years away from needing a new one, so when Apple announces new stuff I literally don’t even read or watch anything about it. I’ve got way too many things on my plate running a business, and that’s how I compartmentalize things – I ignore them 🙂
The Drives
The Drives are from G-Technology which was rebranded to Western Digital years ago. I bought them originally in 2016 because a friend told me to. You’ll see 4 identical drives, that are each 8TB in size.
Two of them are for photos and two are for my courses/videos that run my business. So if you’re looking at 4 drives, you should really only concern yourself with two of them because you probably don’t have an online training business to run.
One of the photo drives (Photo 1) is my main photo drive where I work off of. The other drive is simply just a backup of it (Photo 2). I have the same system for my Video drives. Video 1 is the main one that I work off of, and the other is a backup.
In case it matters, the Photo 2 and Video 2 drive are typically unplugged and powered down most of the time. I turn them on once a week when I backup to them. And sometimes I forget once a week and it stretches to a month. That’s fine for me because I just don’t use them that much. I have a job to do and editing and working on my own photos every week doesn’t always fit in to it 🙂
Sometimes I forget to turn them off and leave them on. Like I said… if you think I put any more effort than a casual 10 second “Hmmm… I wonder how my backup drives are doing”, you give me way too much credit 😉
I know some one is going to ask me what type of connection they are. I honestly don’t know what it’s called. UPDATE: I just looked it up. It’s called Thunderbolt and it looks like this. In order to have all of the drives connected at once I have to do what’s called daisy chain them together. So one drive connects to another, connects to another and eventually connects to the computer.
Storing My Photos
I don’t want to make this a photography workflow article and I want to keep it on just the drives. My Lightroom System course covers all the technicals on what I do. But, at a high level, I create Descriptively named folders on the drive. I copy the photos from my card reader after a shoot to that descriptive folder. Then I import them in to Lightroom, or just simply use Bridge to browse them if it’s not a shoot I care enough about to bring in to LR.
How I Back Up?
I backup with an app called Carbon Copy Cloner for the Mac. If you google search “Cloning backup programs for PC” you’ll find some equivalents. The nice part about a “cloning” app, is that when I run a backup (which I run about every week or so), it just backs up the changes. That’s what a cloning program does – it makes one drive look like another. If I just did it manually, I would never really know what was new/changed on Drive 1, so I’d have to do an entire Copy/Paste of Drive 1 to Drive 2 every time which would take a while.
However, if you knew that you only edited files from one folder, you could easily copy/paste that every time and skip the Cloning app. I just don’t think that fits most people’s workflow and it’s too much to keep track of for me.
So it looks much fancier than it really is. As far as photography is concerned, I have two drives. One for the photos and the other to back it up. My thoughts on hard drives are that it is not a matter of “IF” it will fail… it’s a matter of “when”. They will all fail at some point. That’s why I always want a backup.
What About a Catastrophe? Cloud Backup To the Rescue!
So what happens if there’s a catastrophe? That’s where my next line of defense is a cloud backup. I use Backblaze’s cheapest plan (I think it’s $7.99 a month). As long as I’m connected to the internet, and my drives are connected to the computer, It backs up my entire laptop computer and every hard drive I have connected to it.
I don’t know the specifics of how Backblaze works, so their website would be the best place to go if you want more info. I have deleted a file or two accidentally from my laptop, and found it very easy to go on to their site and recover it. But I’ve never totally lost a drive so I’m not much help there. I do know they offer you the option of recovering online, which could take a while, or paying to have them send you a drive.
What About That Other Drive On Top
That drive on top is a two-bay hard drive that let’s you pop in and out 1TB hard drives. I use this for business and it’s not something I think most of you would need.
For example, let’s say I’m heading out to teach somewhere. I can’t afford for my laptop to crash on me while I’m away. So I backup my laptop to one of those drives every so often, and I bring it with me. The drive is bootable, meaning I can connect it to my laptop and recover from there. This has actually happened to me once when I used to do a lot of live seminars, and it was a lifesaver. I was up and running from a crashed laptop in minutes. Again, I don’t think most of you need this – but at least now you know what it is.
RAID, NAS, GAS, WTF and Other 3 or 4 Letter Acronyms?
I know that some drives have RAID and NAS and who knows what else. I can barely spell them. And, while at a VERY high level I know what they are, it’s just too complicated for me. I know there’s some IT dude out there screaming at their computer – insisting to me how easy it is for them to have a full RAID system with NAS so they can access their library from underwater on the moon if they needed – and that everyone should do it – but I come from the KISS method. I like keeping things very simple. It works for me, and many others.
What Would I Buy Today
As I said in the beginning, I’m pretty useless when it comes to tech, so I’m not going to be much help for what to buy today.
What I can tell you is this. I bought 8TB drives 7 years ago. About twice a year, that main Photo 1 Drive starts approaching full. Rather than go out and buy bigger drives, I just go in and start deleting stuff. From 2004 through 2017 I used to bracket every landscape shoot I went on. That means I have tens of thousands of photos of over/under exposures that will NEVER get used. Plus, many of those bracketed photos are just bad. So it’s a good exercise to force me to go back in to some folders of photos and delete the bad stuff that I’ve never used in 20 years. Sure, storage is cheap so you can feel free to buy a bigger drive. But for me, there’s a certain peace to having less photos and less clutter on my drives. The more I delete, the better I feel.
Anyway, if I did have to buy new drives today I’d ask a friend who I trust what they use. I’d do minimal online review searching because I personally think most online reviews are crap, and confuse people more than anything – unless it’s from a reputable person that I know and trust. While I’m a fan of Google searching things, I would never google this one because there are too many websites that game the system just to get clicks and affiliate revenue. Or if I did, I would only read/watch things from people who’s names I recognize.
I probably wouldn’t buy the most expensive drive out there even if it touted incredible failure rates. But I probably wouldn’t buy the cheapest either. I may even buy a Western Digital because the name sounds familiar to me.
I’d buy something that would grow with me, by doing some calculations on how much I shoot each year and multiplying that by 8 years or so of growth. And most importantly, I’d buy two. One for the main photo drive and the other as a backup because, as I said before, I believe that it’s not if the drive will fail, but when.
I hope that helps shed some light on my hard drive situation. It’s not fancy, it’s not technical, but it works and make sense to me. Take care!
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Hi, you said my drives are connected to the computer, how do you attach more than one drive to your computer? I can only attach one drive at at time. Can you explain this, please? Thanks
Hi Anne. You can use a number of things (hubs, daisy chaining). I googled your question and found a number of more in depth answers so hopefully that helps. Thanks!
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+you+attach+more+than+one+hard+drive+to+your+computer%3F&sca_esv=567753329&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS980US980&ei=y0gOZaqkHofRkPIPw-2N2AY&ved=0ahUKEwjqtYyy07-BAxWHKEQIHcN2A2sQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=how+do+you+attach+more+than+one+hard+drive+to+your+computer%3F&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiPGhvdyBkbyB5b3UgYXR0YWNoIG1vcmUgdGhhbiBvbmUgaGFyZCBkcml2ZSB0byB5b3VyIGNvbXB1dGVyPzIIECEYoAEYwwRIxwtQyQRYhglwAXgBkAEAmAFyoAHeAqoBAzQuMbgBA8gBAPgBAcICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAgoQIRigARjDBBgK4gMEGAAgQYgGAZAGCA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Matt, Did you dump Super Duper from your your storage configuration? I bought it based on your previous recommendation. It has worked great
Thanks. Jim
Hi. A few years ago they weren’t updating it for the Mac OS at the time so I switched. It’s still a great program.
It’s a good system, Matt. I would add the following suggestion to your bootable drive (that you may already be doing):
On my (Windows) Desktop I have a folder called ‘Installed’. In that folder is the install file for every software program on my computer. If a program – from Capture One Pro to Syncback to whatever releases an update, I install it and replace the install file. I have the Installed folder subdivided by category, but that’s just me. Also in the Installed folder is a file called Licenses. In that file are the serial numbers for each installed software program. And I back up my internal drive (and my external photos drives) regularly.
So if my internal hard drive was to crash, I would buy and install a new drive, re-install Windows, and reinstall my backup software. I would then restore my Installed folder and do a clean install of each program (all the while thinking, “Do I still need this?”) The Licenses file has all of the serial numbers as mentioned. Having done that, I restore my data from the backup drive. Done.
Nice article, as usual, Matt.
My only concern about Cloud backup is that many of these companies go out of business leaving users little or no warning.
I can’t imagine you wouldn’t have a week or two. If that happens, you should still be covered with your hard drives and you can set up another cloud backup right? The cloud isn’t your first line of defense… it’s’ your last. So if you needed it you would have exhausted your preferred ways to backup.
Thanks, Matt. Any specific recommendations for current drives?
A number of years ago on one of the photo blogs (?) I read about using the DoD recommended 3 stage back up. I have copy #1 on my computer; Copy # 2 in in an external SDD drive (they are big enough now for my needs) and #3 in the cloud on iDrive. I have the backups automated. I have survived 2 disk failures and a virus attack.
After reading about the problems, complexity and expense of multidrive arrays, I decided this was safer and simpler…and definitely less expensive. An essential part of the system is security software – antivirus, etc.
You can tie yourself in knots and spend hours obsessing over this. My needs are as a hobbyist with only 40 or 50K of images. If I were a profession I wouldn’t even consisder doing anything without safe cloud back up!
I suspect that there is more that one good solution to this….
I use a safety deposit box to store my backups. I needed it for legal papers. Costs about $ 140 CDN a year. (50 cents US). I can back up my most recent files to OneDrive that comes with office. I got stuck by an online service I purchased through ZDNet. One of those too good to be true offers. $ 99 US for 10 TB, for life. After a few months of aggravation to upload my images, the site claimed I uploaded a Disney movie. I know I didn’t. So a questionable organization has all my images!
Thanks for raising this topic.
A superb discussion Matt! I like your KISS technique for backing up your files and pretty much follow the same routine. I had noticed those G drives lurking in the background of your videos, and wondered how you used all of them!
I use an Apple Mac Pro workstation as my main computer, which has four internal hard drives – a 1T that has the OS and all the software including PS CC 2023, Photo Mechanic Plus, LR Classic, Fotomagico etc, then three 2T HD’s. Two of them are designated for photo files and the third 2T is dedicated to video I am starting to shoot more of these days. I use Apple’s Time Machine to backup onto a WD 8T dual RAID drive, once a week, which works perfectly for me.
Much like you, my WD RAID drive is left unplugged and used once a week to update new photos added and edited photos too. This keeps the run time down and extends the HD’s life.
I have also lately been doing some “house cleaning” too, deleting old files and duplicates… as my hard drives were getting full!
One suggestion. If you are not already using one, I highly recommend using a UPS – an Uninterruptible Power Supply. APC – the American Power Corp probably makes the best on the market, which contains a battery backup and built-in surge protection system.
I have my computer, printer, film scanner and modem all connected to it. It has saved me several times when the power suddenly went off while working on client photos. The changeover from local electricity to the battery backup is instantaneous, so fast, the computer doesn’t notice or go off. We have had four power failures in Montreal, one lasting 64 hours during a mini-ice storm in April. I was able to post on Twitter and work on photos. Typically, the run time is 20 – 30 minutes if the power fails, enough time to finish work, safely backup your work and shut down the computer. You can find them on Amazon.com.
https://www.amazon.ca/APC-Back-UPS-Battery-Protector-BR1500G/dp/B003Y24DEU/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3G3B91RBBANF0&keywords=APC%2BBR1500G&qid=1658843074&s=electronics&sprefix=apc%2Bbr1500g%2Celectronics%2C74&sr=1-3&th=1
Hope this helps!
Frederic in Montréal.
Thank you for your perspective. It goes to show that not everyone is the same. To go even further along the scale of how important digital photographs are to individuals, here is one photographer I encountered. They wanted to understand how to get their digital images into LrC. When I asked them where their images were, they brought out a 10″ Goldfish bowl of SD cards (almost 200 cards). I was stunned and asked what this was. They responded by saying “I enjoy taking pictures, but not much else.” “When my card is full, I throw it into the bowl”. From what I can tell, they don’t even look at their images let alone back them up or post-process them. Here is someone that just likes pushing the shutter button. OK, go ahead and yell at your computer. I couldn’t help them beyond showing them the process of importing from an SD card. What they did after that, I’ll never know. Have a great day!
thank you , that is very much what I do, one extra step is I BU to a third drive once a month that I used to take off site, keep at work. Now that I am retired I do not have that option
What do you know, It’s not rocket science after all! Thank you very much.
Thanks so much for this. I was just dealing with a storage capacity issue on my photo storage drive, and trying to puzzle out a sensible and easy way to manage it. Your frank approach and the way you keep your focus on the creative work at hand was reassuring.
Great discussion and great system. Glad you have time to cull your images. I find that task tedious so unfortunately every 3-5 years I need to get larger drives.
Agree with your KISS. I run a RAID system since it is incredibly easy with OWC hardware and software. Set it up and forget it. I have looked at NAS system and it made my head hurt.
Playing with computers can be fun but complicated system are a rabbit hole. I avoid them at almost all costs. When I need to transfer files from my travel laptop to my desktop, I use the sneaker-net approach. Copy the files onto a flash drive or portable drive and walk from one computer to another.
Sounds like a commonsense process Matt. The only things that would make me nervous are the undisciplined backup timing and ‘daisy chaining’ drives.
For a few dollars you can apply a program that does your backup daily at a scheduled time (just the new or changed files). I won’t name a program here, since there are many and your trusted friend could suggest one.
The daisy chaining drives brings back memories of freezing my hands working on my roof gutter mounted Xmas lights back in the day when if one went all those further downstream wouldn’t, work either. I just prefer a 12 port usb hub with switches for each port. Peace of mind and individual control. Yes, the hub could fail but not very likely.
This isn’t advice Matt, just information. 🙂
Hi Jay. If I needed more discipline I’d be better about it. Nothing I do with my photos is mission critical. They are always backed up at all times. Maybe some changes I make, may not get updated because of the undisciplined approach, but we’re not talking about anything important – and worse comes to worse, it’s always on Backblaze. As for daisy chaining, I don’t know that it’s a problem. Thanks!
‘Man after my own heart’, here! Keeping things simple & de cluttering photos is the best way forward for a photographer- keeps you creative & knowing where things are to drop into in an instance. I too back up on 8TB but not to the cloud, which I think is time to sort out. After following you for some years now, watching your workflow etc & then trying others, I always go back to this method. Thank you for this reminder Matt. Be creative!
Good info, however, I have an older Mac OS, with an older edition of LR6 and several HD’s of photos that will not connect with it. So, I have only the thumb nails which obviously can’t be edited or processed in any way. I want to get the latest LR classic (I just purchased a new Canon mirror less camera) but don’t know how to proceed with my large, inaccessible library. I have been out of the game for a few years and look forlornly at my HD’s. What should I do? Thanks
Alex W
Thanks for the info of what you do. I once almost lost my entire phot database. That scared me enough to become paranoid so I now have.
1) My main drive. A 36 TB Raid drive from OWC Thunderbay. Highly recommended
2) My Time Machine backup. Backs up every hour.
3) a 3rd. drive which backs up using Carbon Copy like you do. Love the program. Set to back up once a week.
4) use Backblaze for cloud backup
I also have all my music and movies digitized so the total size of my data is ~20 TB. I sleep much better at night
I’m sure there are many other configurations/brands that would work just as well.
Have you heard any rumors of the cloud going away? also looking at buying a couple of larger external hard drives I found a 10TB Lacie with a five-year warranty in aluminum case for $299 or A WD 16TB for $249 Which would you buy?
Thanks Matt
Hi. I don’t know what “cloud going away” means.
As for the drives, I don’t have experience with either of them so it would be a guess. Good luck!
I have used a two G Drive system for many years and NEVER had a failure.
Also, I have Carbon Copy Cloner.
Works great.
Fabulous!
It just so happens that I am in the process of replacing 4 external hard drives.
Your comments make things much simpler.
Thanks
No, TimeMachine is able to save all drives connected to the same computer. In my case, the HD + the disk of the original Photos library is saved on a 3rd disk making the total TB of all the connected disks.
In the System settings, TimeMachine, click on the + sign and choose the disks that will be backed up by TimeMachine. Personally, I run it every hour. And CarboneCopy as a second line of backups, so I have two different paths if, unfortunately, one fails!
Thanks for this Matt! My backup workflow is very similar to yours I’m happy to say. But you have shared Backblaze which sounds like a step above Apple’s Time Machine, since it includes any hard drives attached as well (I’m also a fan of CCC). I’ll have to check this out. Thanks!
FYI Time Machine can include drive s attached directly to your Mac. Also if you have several drives on and of, as long as the TM drive is large enough for all …
Great information Matt. As usual, down-to-earth and informative. Thank you for sharing…
I’m with you regarding the confusion and plethora of options out there. As an old retired guy with now over 100,000 images, in spite of occasional editing, I’m even more distrusting of technology augmented by my tech ignorance. So I use 4, 8TB backups via “time machine” on mac. I try and back up after a major photo trip and occasionally for just around home shooting. Theoretically, It should drop on oldest prior backup every time it needs to do a new one, which seems to work most of the time. Like you said, I just had one die.
My question is; does solid state offer a significant advantage regarding durability for back ups? I use a 2TB solid state backup for travel. Now I’m thinking maybe an I pad and just using my cards as back up and taking enough for the shoot with the 2TB for backup. Any ideas?
Hi David. Not having one I can’t speak to it. But other than price, I think SSD is better in most every way.
Hi Matt,
Many thanks for all that information. I’m with you on all the technical stuff, but there is one thing that I would appreciate your thoughts on, and that is archiving folders from Lightroom. I have folders for each year (I know, old school) with subfolders. My PC hard drive is becoming near full and I want to keep the folders and Lightroom adjustments. What is the best way to put the photos and Lightroom adjustments onto an external hard drive?
Michael
I do something similar. I like the newer drives with the USB C connection because they are faster at transferring the data. I have had numerous hard drives fail, both Western Digital and Segate. I agree, it isn’t a matter of if, it is a matter of when they fail. I have been copying the data manually to the second drive so thanks for the tip on the backup software for the Mac. The Time Machine only backs up from one drive so won’t do multiples.
Hello JD;
With Time Machine I back-up 2 drives on my Mac mini; the on-board 3TB SSD + an external 2TB Seagate Drive (Slim) HDD both go to a 4TB HDD. In Time Machine you click on Options and Select which Drive(s) you want it to EXCLUDE. Hope this helps or check this comment from Yves Crausaz on July 24, 2023 at 11:36 am
Thanks, Matt. Very helpful. What do you find easier for reviewing and deleting old photos, Bridge or Lightroom?
Hi. If they were in LR I’ll delete from there. Not everything is so I’d just do it from bridge for those.
It’s just like what we say about cameras — the best one is the one you have with you. And the best backup solution is the one you have in place and use regularly.
Good stuff, as usual, Matt.
Hi Matt — thank you for the ultra-simple and useable back up strategy. Too may back-up workflows for photographers either involve a lot more technical expertise than most photographers have or are way too labour intensive. One point: I was happy to hear about your eagerness to delete tons of your old photos. As a landscape photographer, I bracket waaaaaay to much. Also, when I review my pics a couple of years later I see that only a small % of my pics are keepers. I’ve started to do the same and it feels great deleting thousands of pics you know would have never seen the light of day.
I agree about NAS. I had a knowledgeable friend set one up – but I didn’t really want to take the time to understand it. It was an expensive doorstop. If people want to “nerd out” BackBlaze reports quarterly on external hard drive reliability. And for Costco members, you can’t beat their prices on reliable hard drives.
At last, a sensible and realistic dissertation re backup from an authentic person. Thank you so much Matt.
As much as the cloud provides a means to back up, I live in a fire prone area of northern CA. So, besides backing up my files and folders on a routine basis, I also choose to always have one hard drive in my safe deposit box, and it gets changed out once a month. This may seem like a pain to do, but I know that the bank is not in the fire zone, and it gives me piece of mind. One of my drives also sits in my go back, in case we have an evacuate quickly. Many of the members of our local photo club do the same.
I do exactly this for the same reason: KISS. I do use more—but smaller drives so if one fails, fewer things “lost”. Love Backblaze.
I use something similar with a twist, One OWC Mercury Elite 16 TB, but as I have it as RAID 1 comes down to 8 TB’s, the other is 8 TB no raid as back Up, another, yes you guessed, Western Digital 8 TB’s off line, no Backblaze yet but you convinced me so thank’s a lot, if Matt uses it, more than enough endorsement. Carbon Copy Cloner is a marvel of software.,
As usual thank’s for your wise thoughts
Thank you! Lots of comments to read through, but I did not see anything concerning Sandisk SSD Portable hard drives I started using them a few years ago, and the price has suddenly plummeted. Wondering if anyone knows why. Maybe coming out with wireless backup drives? Are you aware of any portable backup SSD drives?
Thanks for the information. I had Western Digital, but found they could not be switched between my Windows PC and Mac laptop without reformatting; hence I swapped to Seagate which can be used in either situation without reformatting. I don’t know whether this is still the case
Try formatting the disk as ExFat. That will readable in Mac and PC. Anyway that is what I do and it works fine for me.
Great Matt. Thank you for the explanation as someone who has asked you this very question in the past.
Good grief! I’m so glad you wrote this. I take such grief from my fellow photographers because I do the same thing you do! The less complicated the better. Thank you!!!
Thanks!! Can I assume that after you upload your new photos to drive one, that you import these same photos but you do not move them again, or make copies of them, but simply use Lightroom to reference them in their drive one locations?
My computer is reaching it’s end (won’t run on Windows 11). So, I know I need to start saving my $$. I’ve been thinking of migrating to an Apple, which I think you use. Why Apple and not a clone? Is your Apple at the top of the line? And, I think their monitors are super anyway. Let me know your thoughts if you’ve the time.
Thank you, Matt, this discussion wax very timely. I already have several of your classes and I really like your approach to keep things simple.
Are your drives SSD? Do you still like G technology drives? Do you also use Time Machine and if not why?
Matt, thank you for sharing this. It is always helpful to know how other folks back up their photos. I do my backups manually and I didn’t know there is a cloning app? So I learned something and will certainly go find one. It will save me lots of time in the future. I currently back to two drives that are never on line and I do back ups monthly. If all the drives are always powered up, they could all fail at the same time and that is a possibility.
Are your drives solid state?
I have several of your books and quite often over the years have opened them looking for an editing technique that I perhaps forgot.
Thanks for all that you do!
Hi. No they aren’t SSD
Though I may look into them if I ever need more
I like your simple set-up. Mine is similar although I only have two 10 TB G-Drives and a WD drive for my Mac backup. Everything goes to cloud backup with BackBlaze. Question: Do you use a docking station for extra ports? I’m thinking I need something bigger so just curious.
Hope you are enjoying your summer!
I actualky have the same drives…as well as probably 20 others in the closet. I got thru roughly 12 TB a year as a sports photographer. I just set a new drive up August 1 and away we go. With the drives labeled and organized, I have some sort of idea where aphoto might exist if I can identify the season etc…I shoot mainly for 4 schools and also keep all my galleries backed up with Back Blaze and on photoshelter- thank God for unlimited storage!
This sounds workable and well thought out.
Great overview. Thank you for posting it. It was timely because I’m currently updating my hard drive backup system.
Thanks for the information.
I worked in IT for 10 years (as a volunteer at a nonprofit.) Your process works for you and that’s what is important. One area I would recommend you consider is a that all your drives are the same age and could all fail or start to fail at about the same time. You might consider replacing the drive(s) you occasionally take to the field with a solid state drive. Given the G-Tech drives are 7 years old I am assuming they are spinning disk drives. The G-Tech drive you take to the field will most likely fail sooner than the others because of the additional handling and temperature changes it experiences. The solid state drive would be lighter and smaller for travel and all your drives would no longer be the same age.
Brilliant, simple, honest!
Deleting unnecessary photos are good for the environment to – it saves energy. No, I am not making i up – data centers uses a lot of energy.
And I totally agree – it feels good to do a little ‘housecleaning’ 🙂
As a long-standing Windows user I use the (very) old Dos-based XCopy command in a Batch file to perform by backups from my primary to my secondary drive. This command has a multitude of switches enabling, amongst others, the copying of only those files which have changed, the creation of new folders, and the specification of file types to be excluded from the backup.
Good job. I agree totally and I have the same options you have excepted that when one of my hard drive failed , I replaced it by a SSD . They are light and seem more reliable. Thank you again. I began to follow you when you published an excellent book about masks and translated in French.
Synctoy ( Microsoft) is a free, updated copy version that lets you add new to backup drives,contribute, or sync images and associated files.
The nice part is it lets you preview the changes before you “run” . You might like to try it on something simple and see if you like it. 🙂
I used SyncToy for years – Microsoft stopped supporting it and it’s “broken” in current updates of Windows 11. Did they fix it? I loved and understood it and was sad when they abandoned it b
For Windows, I’ve used FreeFileSync for a few months now. It works great and is available for Windows, Mac & Linux. It supports two-way (updates to the latest file from either drive), mirror (makes the target drive identical to the source drive), update (updates files to the latest but doesn’t delete files on the target drive that are no longer on the source drive), and custom rules. It even handles the daylight savings time change issue. And files can be updated based on changes in date/time, size, or content.
Highly recommended. https://freefilesync.org/
Great information and tech free just what I like.
Very good Matt, always nice to know how others hold their data. Thank you for tasking the time to pass this on.
Thank you Matt
Great advice!
Glad someone else shares my opinion of online reviews. I purchased something from an Amazon seller and was offered a second item free if I left a positive review!!
Hi Matt
I just had to upgrade me 11year old 27″ iMac, operating system just could not keep up with Adobe or the Mac OS either
Like you, all this years have been a CCC guy, has never let me down
Everything now is just about full, except for the new Mac Studio Ultra that replaced the iMac (all my images are on external HDDs, (and cloned)
The question is, what I do now, looking about 10TB external HDD I guess,
or
LaCie 10 TB 1 big Dock External Hard Drive docking station X 2?
Regards,
………… Gary
…………………AU
Hi Matt,
I only process photos, and have close to 4Tb taken up with 38K of images. My Lightroom Catalog is stored on my MacBook M1 Pro in “Pictures”, and backed up on a Time Machine external drive. The images are stored on a LaCie Rugged 5Tb external drive which I back up monthly and keep offsite.
Additionally, in real time the the 5Tb drive (with the images) is backed up to a LaCie RAID dual drive where one drive mirrors the other( in the event of the failure of a drive). The backup is executed by Intego anti-virus software that has an excellent Personal Backup module.
Perhaps its overkill, but nevertheless, my RAW images are auto backed up along with their Jpeg version when I publish to SmugMug. The Raw images stored by SmugMug are not accessible to the public.
When restoring Lightroom and the Lightroom Catalog, after a computer service/replacement, Time Machine has done a perfect job.
This above is my insurance, and I don’t need to remember to back up, except the added precaution of the offsite redundant monthly backup of the raw and processed images. With 38K of edited images, I can sleep at night, and in a catastrophic scenario, all can be recovered.
And one last point, Adobe support have told me on more than one occasion that storing a Lightroom catalog in the cloud is not reliable in the event it is required for a backup.
Cheers,
Adrian
Pretty simple comment, Matt, thanks. I’ll check out Backblaze – that KISS-thing, ya know.
Hi Matt. Sergio from Mexico. We met several times in your master classes in Kelby’s photoshop world some time ago. I always do de copy/paste from one drive to my back up drive. But reading about carbon copy, you are saying that if I do a new shooting and lightroom most of those pictures and keyword them also, carbon copy will recognize all this changes and copy them identical to the back up drive?
Gracias, Sergio
Hi Sergio – Carbon copy will clone one drive to look exactly like the other. That’s it. The other changes are stored in your LR catalog which should also be on a drive where the computer is backed up. Thanks
Nice article. you seems pretty much cover with your setup. Simple and efficient. About 2 year ago I had 3 drives 4tb each, one with for the Time Machine, one for my photos and arts projects and one for backup. something happen with 2 of them ( not the Time Machine) and were erased. I was able to recover a lot bur, lost over 9 thousand photos, 27 of my arts with their photoshop projects and believe or not the main photos of them also. since that got a Synology NAS with 2 10 Tb drivers as raid that backup my external drivers. I thought about get a cloud service but I still skeptical about it. Anyways like they say, backup, backup and backup. Thanks for your input.
Paulo Crus.
https://www.paulocrus.com/
Hi Matt, you are one of my trusted people. Love your work and sense of humour. Just quickly scanning the posts, I can’t see any reference to SSDs. I have a 4TB NVME SSD to hold my photos for LR/PS and another for back up when I’m travelling. They weigh nothing, take up almost no space and are very fast. I use a MacBook Pro M2.
They aren’t cheap but the cost can be reduced by getting an SSD without an enclosure and buying a cheap case.
I love your attitude and philosophy expressed in this article. I can so relate to it! The advice you’ve offered is very helpful and easy to understand. Thanks.
Since your business I’d photography, I wonder that you do backups weekly. That’s saying you’d be satisfied wit only 6 days if work lost. Obviously better than years’ worth. But why not set your drives to back up daily at 3:00 a m? Of course your online backup is probably more current.
Hi. Photography is not my business. Teaching and making videos is. I would bet you shoot way more than I do. If I lost every photo I have, my life wouldn’t change other than I’d be bummed. But I don’t have clients. My photos aren’t worth anything to anyone other than me. So it wouldn’t cost me a thing if all photos disappeared.
Thank you
This is very amusing: you and I do “almost” the same thing with some minor (and one less than minor) differences. I also have G-Technology drives, which are only 4 TB (you obviously take more photos than me). I have one for all my images and important documents and a 2nd as a backup. I also have a third 4 TB drive I use for Time Machine. And, like you, I also use BackBlaze. I’ve had this setup since 2012.
The one big difference is that I do not use Carbon Copy Cloner; instead, I use Chronosync. I do not know if CCC has this one option (amongst many) that is critical for me: it can do “mirror.” This means that if I delete a file on Drive 1, it will be deleted on Drive 2 (there is an option to store deleted files in a folder called Archive,” but when _I_ delete a file, I really do not want that file. Also, Chronosync uses BitSum to make sure what is copied off of one drive it’s pasted into the 2nd drive. (Again, I do not know if CCC also has that, sorry.)
And I know a different maxim on the same subject; I’m sure you’ve heard it as well: “There are two kinds of hard drive users: those who’ve had a hard drive crash, and those who haven’t had a hard drive crash yet.”
thanks
I enjoy your comments.
You have always been a “trusted friend” regarding photo choices.
When I travel, and the world is my oyster, all that matters is the images and the quality of those images. This could mean I may never be able to recreate those images. Back ups have to have a strategy. I back up from camera storage to a 4TB ThunderBolt 3 m.2 flash drive.(bus powered) So I can edit on the plane if needed. That also gets duplicated to a 16TB RAID5 m.2 flash drive storage system (AC powered) Utilizing a 4xPCIe 3 lane gives me about 2700MB/s transfers. Before I retire for the night, one of those copies is backed up to a 10TB spinning hard drive. (AC powered) These drives are encrypted in case they get stolen or lost. Also I never keep them in the same luggage.
A great article, Matt, as always! After my main ext. drive crashed a few years ago, I was able to just rename a back up disc so that LRc would recognize it. I also give friends and relatives a cc and rotate up to date ones every few months. Steve
I just open a DOS (Powershell in Windows 10 and Terminal in Windows 11) as an administrator and use the following command:
xcopy %1 %2 /D /S /R /C /Y
where %1 is the first drive and %2 is the second drive. For example:
xcopy f:\*.* g:\*.* /D /S /R /C /Y which then copies all files on drive f to drive g that are newer.
Simple is great. I think an additional backup, stored out of your house or office, assures your future. Think in terms of disasters such as fire or theft. Many will rotate this with the other backup, but not doing so is much easier and still allows you to resurrect almost everything.
Outside backup. Yes, that’s good, but this is why BackBlaze is good. There’s nothing you have to do. It just does it.
Normally I’d agree. But backbkaze does the trick. There’s no way I’d ever be responsible enough to ever continuously replace hard drives outside of my home 🙂
Hi Matt, some years ago when you took some time to describe your back-up system you were using Super-Duper to clone your drives. I bought the G-Drives similar to yours and Super-Duper on your recommendation and am still using that system. Are you willing to share why you switched to Carbon Copy Cloner? Have you found it to be superior in some way? For example is it faster or more stable with the new Apple silicon? Thanks for your response.
Hi. A few years ago super duper wasn’t working on the OS I was using, and he wasn’t releasing updates. So I switched.
SuperDuper works with Ventura now to make bootable copies. It did take a while when Apple changed the way boot disks were formatted and the internal backup tools worked. https://www.shirtpocket.com
I’ve looked at switching to Carbon Copy over the last 15 years but SuperDuper keeps working for me, so…
Thanks for keeping it simple, Matt!
This article from you is Fantastic and exactly what I needed to know! I don’t delete enough and have multiple 5TB drives that seem to not work well after awhile. I’ve been looking for a perfect drive the will work forever and it is helpful to know that it doesn’t exist!!
Thanks Matt, this was very informative. My approach is pretty similar to yours with a periodic local backup and a continuous cloud backup. I would add two things to your perspective, the first of which you touched on:
1) Use case – you’re a professional photography educator and photographer. Your livelihood depends on the reliability of your data storage and quick recovery of the data. You need to be confident that you are covered. I am a hobbyist photographer. If/when I have a failure it will be inconvenient and I’ll be bummed, but I ‘ll be able to recover. At worst Backblaze to the rescue, plus a system recovery flashdrive. Match your investment in time and money to your risk tolerance.
2) Backblaze publishes and distributes a drive failure report monthly. All over the world BB uses thousands of HDDs and SSDs from various manufacturers and of various capacities that they analyze and report on. The drives that they use are generally available to us in the marketplace. That be a resource for real-world use results that could give insight to your readers when looking for such information on storage devices. If you are a BB customer, you can sign up for the report from their Website.
I have a back up drive for my computer. However, I’m most thankful for the cloud. I’ve had a G-Tech external hard drive crash and die with a lot of my photos dead inside it before I started saving to the cloud. And I no longer use G-Tech. If you know of any way to get my photos off that G-Tech drive on on my computer I’d really appreciate the info.
Hello Carol; I have had a drive crash, in fact a few over the years. When I was using a PC I had a DVD project that got corrupted data and I used CDRoller to recover files; it handle a great variety of formats to read from and write to. They were terrific to work with. Pretty basic screens, not fancy; but it did a GR8! job for me. In mid 2023 CDRoller cost was $34 (USD)
More recently I had a 3TB SATA Back-up disk crash; for that I used “Disk Drill”. A pretty fast process it provided as well. It creates a directory of lost partitions, files, and can reconstruct damaged files. There is a free version which will allow up to 500 mb. … which is not a lot, but the program is not real expensive to go “Pro”; you have to ask yourself, “well what are those lost files worth to me?”, anyway, eh. At this time, mid 2023, it cost $126. It’s not a good thing when your back-up drive dies. Originally built for Mac OS, they now have a version for Windows.
Thanks Matt for sharing your non-techie description. I know just enough to make myself dangerous. I just bought a Seagate 12TB external drive to use for my sole source to store my photos on. Your article is going to drive me to purchase another one and try backblaze. I have lost a hard drive before, two chapters into my dissertation. Thankfully my editor and chair of my committee both had the latest version so I was safe there….but lost hundreds of photos…ugh. So thank you for the helpful advice.
I like it. I use a procedure that is nearly like it, but I do not have as many pictures as you do (I bet), but I do tend to save more older images purely for nostalgic reasons. Good to know someone way more professional thinks similar to me.
Do you know a reputable company to attempt to restore a hard drive which stopped working?
Hi Carol. Take a look at OnTrack data recovery. They have been in business for years and are very reputable. (Ontrack.usa.com). They will give you a free evaluation and quote, but you may have to send them your drive. They will provide shipping label at no cost, i believe.
Thank you Matt. I am the same as you in this regard. I hate deciphering all the tech specs so I relied on you! I still have my G Drive like yours and it’s almost full. Went through and deleted over 6,000 photos and it felt great! Now I’m using a tiny 2 terabyte Samsung for home and travel. The only thing I’ve wanted to do but haven’t is set up the cloned backup. Thank you for the revisit.
Hi Matt,
Your email reminded me I hadn’t backed up my files for a while. I’m now in the process of copying them across to a spare HD. That’s my method and that’s why I’ve got time to read your article fully and reply to it!
Agree completely with your comments about Hi Tech philosophy.
Greetings from North Wales – UK.
I agree wholeheartedly with your KISS approach. If something becomes a burden, you won’t do it. So KISS is an excellent approach. My setup is very similar to yours except for some brand names (OWC drives, two units each with two 4TB drives), ChronoSync backup software), and Backblaze. Ten years and haven’t lost a file. Simplicity and redundancy are the keys.
How did you build the box your monitor is on?
$19 from amazon 🙂
Matt, SUPERB! Thank you so much for this down to earth,no crap, no trying to sell anything,opem and honest content, which as a reasonably long time follower and Matt K customer I have come to expect and respect from you! Greetings and love from Scotland! Matt if you ever get over here and photograph the Worlds greatest senecery….do look me up and I;; show you around, but please be advised….WE cab experience the four seasons within twenty minutes!
May the FOCUS be with YOU Matt!
Thanks! I may take you up on it, but it’ll be for golf not photography. These days, if I travel I like it to be with my clubs not my camera 😉
Dumb question, but when you bring the image into Lightroom or open in PS do you copy it to your Hard Drive or do you work on the image in Photo 1. And if you save a layered PSD, do you save that directly to Photo 1? This is where I get into trouble and have images saved everywhere…
Hi. Everything gets copied to my main Photo drive. Raw files and any PSD I may save from them.
Hi Matt;
I take great care in backing up my photos and I hate to ask you a technical question but do you concern yourself with corruption of files on your hard drive? The usual storage formats like tif and jpg don’t have any way of detection, one article I read strongly recommends storing images as DNG files. What do you think?
Hi Paul. I don’t worry about corruption. I guess it’s possible but not something I would protect against and I don’t know how DNG would protect any better than a raw file. If a raw file can become corrupt a DNG can as well right?
Hi Matt, How do you configure your hard drives. ie APFS ets
Hi. I don’t really know. However they came out of the box
How long did the initial priming of the Backblaze database. (ie the initial copy).
About 2 weeks for me
Great philosophy, Matt.
We do tend to complicate our lives needlessly.
Thanks for sharing.
To me the whole key is: Have a backup system (any type) and USE it. I have had many people ask me to help restore their crashed drive as they don’t have a backup.
Whatever it costs to build a multilevel backup solution, it is far less than losing EVERYTHING in the event of a disk crash or theft.
This was perfect. Thank you for sharing your process. It was valuable.
My back-up system is about as anal and forgetful as yours! My goal is weekly backups but do not always get there. I have one main hard drive for all my images. That is backed up to a separate hard drive of the same size (4TB). I also have personal and business files on my laptop’s hard drive. Those files are backed up to another separate hard drive. Then both of the back up hard drives are backed up to my single 10TB hard drive. All the hard drives are Seagate and the software I am now using is the Windows RoboCopy. It is pretty slick.
My computer is the MSI top of the line gaming laptop. Not for gaming but for the graphics card and the clarity of the screen itself. I still use Spyder to twice a year adjust the colors on both my laptop and my Dell HD monitor.
By the way thanks for the suggestion to use a Cloud as the ultimate back up. I’m going to explore that.
Matt,
I have been using your system for about 2 years now and it has been working flawlessly. I guess one never truly knows until there is a disaster, but the system is simple, high quality, and not outrageously expensive. I sleep much better now as well.
Thanks for all you continue to do for us.
Thank you for explaining your system !!
Good common sense information
Hi Matt, thanks for sharing. I suppose I did notice those drives over the years and “yes”, in the back of my mind wondered how frequently you did your TimeMachine backups. And as you’ve now confirmed – you don’t. No big deal. I do appreciate you sharing your approach and I agree with the KISS approach, all drives die, as well as not fixing it if it isn’t broken. This article only confirmed to me that you focus on what is really important and don’t get wrapped-up in all the the other distractions. You have a very similar approach when it comes to your training which I really enjoy. Thank you again for demystifying topics that could easily become techno-rat holes.
Thanks Mark. If I had one main message I like to get across… it’s what you said – so I’m glad you noticed. I see and hear from people every day who focus on everything else but a great photo, and I think they’re missing something so hopefully I can help 🙂
I found my drive with all my photos was not very fast when using LRC. I saw a YouTube on building an external ssd drive. I bought a case rated for TB4 and installed a 4 TB card in it. I measure about 25 Gbs read and write speeds. I put my catalog and the photo files I’m currently working on in that drive. It has made a significant speed improvement.
Hi Matt,
Just curious your computer?(I know you said it in a previous post)
I ask because when I bought my M1 Mac Studio, everything I read said that this particular Thunderbolt port was obsolete. I had to but a new monitor for this reason.
Hi Mike. I had to use an adapter to plug it in.
As for computer specs, here you go: https://mattk.com/photography-computer-and-monitor-recommendations/
Hi Matt – I like hearing the different ways people manage, store and backup their image files. Briefly, my images are stored on a NAS system that backs up to Backblaze.
My question to you: What do you do with your images and LR catalog when you travel? And then what do you do to merge or sync your travel images and catalog with your main LR catalog at home?
Hi Jay. I don’t really travel with my LR catalog photos. If I’m traveling it’s usually on vacation and I’m probably not working on photos in that case. But if you had to, you could copy folders over to a portable drive. Then go to that folder in LR and right click and choose “Update Location” and point it at the portable drive. When you get back, repeat the process back to your main drive.
Hi Matt, I d, basically,o the same thing as you do, the only difference is that my desktop(main computer for me) has 4 hard drives; 1 for data, my personal data; 1 for my operating system(C drive), plus whatever my system saves on the c drive; 1 to backup all my photos along with the catalog and finally 1 for a copy of my data drive. Separately on external drives, I keep a second backup of my data and another of my photos.
I use a program called Acronis to backup my “C” drive because it’s the only, one that I’m aware of that backups up all the C drive files.
I’m pretty sure that you didn’t want to hear all this, but it did make ME feel better.
I forgot, but I also make a CLONE of my C drive, that way if my C drive ever completely fails, I can just pop in the cloned C drive and be up-and-running in a fairly period short time. Sometimes I like to think I am a tech person …but I’m not.
Nice article, thanks!
Thanks for your information. I really appreciate your simple explanation on how you use hard drives to store your photographs. I have wrestled with the idea of changing my simple system (very similar to yours) based on articles written by enthusiasts and other photographers recommending all kinds of systems/networks/raids/NAS, etc. Your system sounds simple enough for my work and its good to know a professional like you can also use simple methods and make it all work.
Thanks again for the insight !!! I love your tutorials and keeping us up to date on latest PS and LR changes.
Thanks for your article Matt – while I’m a techie, I like to keep things simple. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a RAID 1, 5, or anything in between. I like stuff like backups to happen automatically so I don’t have to worry about anything. I have a Synology NAS which was very, very easy to set up (I used their default configs for everything). It’s a 4 drive system, and they make it so easy to upgrade capacity as needed. And all my backups happen instantaneously and automatically when I bring new photos into my system. Once per quarter I check how much free space I have and that’s it. I’ve had one drive fail over the years and I was back up and running in a very short amount of time. For those who shoot tethered into a laptop, Seagate has great software that automatically monitors folders you specify on your machine and automatically backs them up in real time – I always have a backup of every shot I take during my sessions.
Thank you Matt, I enjoy your thoughts on backup drives. I also appreciate your honesty about all of it!
You are a legend, may God continue to bless you.
To add to the information of this already informative article: I use Backblaze and love the unlimited backup of all drives connected to my Mac Mini. And twice now over the last several years, one of those external drives bit the dust. So I ordered the restore drive from Backblaze as a USB hard drive for $189. It came in the mail in about 3 days being shipped overnight by FedEx, (apparently they needed 2 days to copy all the files onto the drive.) I could have kept their USB drive, but opted to copy it to another drive I had and shipped their drive back to them for a full refund of the $189 . So the backup restores cost me nothing.
I like your KISS approach. It’s exactly the approach that I use for backups.
I continue to be amazed that Adobe does not provide true backup for Lightroom Classic. There’s full backup for whatever I download from my camera into my iPad when traveling. But, once I get an image into Classic on my MacBook Pro for serious editing, I’m on my own for backing up that image.
I understand why Adobe does not want to process images across the net. But, I wish they would just provide a backup directory where you move files and a copy is saved: It’s no more complicated than moving files to an external disk.
Hi Ken. Adobe does provide backup for LR Classic catalog, as well as your photos as you import them. There are options for both. Maintaining a multi drive backup system is different, and no program really does that.
Also, that’s why they came out with the LR “Cloud” version that everyone refuses to use because they refuse to pay more money for cloud storage to backup. But it will do exactly that. Constantly backup your photos, settings, and ensure you can use your photos and access them on every device possible with no catalog issues. They gave everyone exactly what they wanted, but most people were just set in the ways of LR Classic, so they don’t use it.
Thanks Matt for this simple exposee. If you ever do a photography workflow video I would be keen to see it. I am a long term user of Photoshop Lightroom and use it for basic editing and tagging of the subjects (who, what, when where etc).
I have a Seagate NAS for storage and I back everything up to the Dropbox cloud. At least this saved my photo library when I had my ‘catastrophe’ resulting from installing a Windows update on two laptops and ended up with two blue screens. The NAS was made for Windows 7 but after reinstalling Windows 11 on the laptops I was unable to install drivers for the NAS as Seagate has ceased support for them.
I may have better luck if I can get hold a Windows 7 PC and use the installation discs.
Currently I am reconnecting the library to the back up files stored on Dropbox.
I have a new Seagate 8tb external drive and will rebuild my photo library there using Lightroom to do the ‘moving’.
Hi Ian. I do photo workflow videos all the time on the Blog here. Feel free to ask specific questions but there’s not much more to say other than…
1. Load photos in to LR
2. Edit them (I don’t believe a particular order really exists so do whatever you like, when or where you’d like)
3. Save a JPG if I’m going to post or share it.
Thanks, Matt. I’m going to look into Cloning Backups for my PC. I’m using a Seagate back-up at present, but sometimes don’t back up like I should. Every two or three years, I buy a new backup, update the current one, then store it offsite just in case something happens to the home backup. The cloud would be a definite way to go, but is the cloud safe from intrusion?
Your: “That means I have tens of thousands of photos of over/under exposures that will NEVER get used.” is definitely a statement I would plead guilty to. But, deep within some file of my photos are some photos that current programs can enhance now that couldn’t be solved back then. My problem is taking the time to tell the difference!
Consider something like ACRONIS Imaging that lets you schedule drive backups so you don’t have to remember.
Hi Paul. For me, I believe a little different. Most people’s poor photos from 10-20 years ago are not poor photos because of exposure or image quality issues. They’re poor photos because they captured something that wasn’t worth trying to edit or salvage at the time. No amount of technology will take my poor photos from 10 years ago and make them good. Plus, for me, a lot of the photos were me over-shooting some place. Once I got the good photo from the sunset, the hundreds I took before and hundreds I took after don’t really need to be kept, if that makes sense.
Thanks, this was a good read! As far as Backblaze, I’ve been using them for years, have had 2 drives go belly-up in all that time. They just copy everything to a new drive, which I paid $200 for, and they mailed it to me. It was well worth the money and time saved, and I kept the drive. You get the $200 refunded if you return the HDD. I also love that I can access and download any of my files through BB no matter where I am!
RAID-1 isn’t that hard to deal with and if a drive fails, you can replace it and recover from the good drive.
Raid-5 (what I use) is likely overkill and pretty complicated.
Good to know I use the same 8T two drive system with Backblaze! I have yet to buy a PC cloning system (looked into it once and, yet another subscription I didnt want) so I copy one drive over the other every so often. I contemplated an “UnRaid” system but haven’t yet done it. Thanks for sharing your system. I agree on keeping it simple!
Thanks for the information. I basely follow the same procedure.
I use a raid system and it’s much simpler and cheater than what you are trying to explain. Used it since the 90s
Thanks Matt. I have a similar approach and also use Backblaze as my offsite answer. I use WD’s My Book external hard drives. I work off of drives in my desktop, which are in a RAID configuration. The periodically, I copy all the images to both externals. Right now I have a 10 and a 16TB external. When one gets close to being full I buy one larger than the largest one, so that I’m staggering the purchase. It seems that that they keep making bigger ones and this simple solution has worked so far.
As far as trimming down the files, I know I would never take the time to go back through. I take different approach. Don’t do this at home folks but I normally do my first cull off the card, before importing into anything. Then I copy the keepers into a large SSD drive on my desktop called Working images. Whenever I get to it (always behind) I further cull, rate, process a folder on the Working images drive and move them to my other drive in the computer. By working off the SSD the process should be faster and it’s a way for me to impose some limited discipline on myself, to get those folders off the SSD to make room for more. It forces me to do what you’re doing, but in smaller increments.
That’s largely how I do things now. But I have decades of old stuff to go through. Today, I load the card, delete the bad ones and then bring in the good stuff. It is 100% false that you can’t delete off the card, but for some reason that old wives tail keeps carrying forward.
I really enjoyed reading your HD configuration and appreciated the simplicity. I do something very similar and it confirmed the KISS method is good enough! Liked the fact you go back to old photos to delete for more space – something I need to force myself to do. Your no nonsense, easily understandable methods are so appreciated! Thanks for sharing!
This was a wonderful article, Matt! So mole works best for me, too. Thanks for sharing.
Mark, i appreciate your videos and this text. Thanks.
If you have Amazon Prime, their Photos App allows unlimited storage of just about all RAW formats as well as jpg, and it’s included in Prime. The good thing is that you can use it from multiple computers under one account. For video, Backblaze’s all-you-can-upload account is a real winner.
I just grabbed a Western Digital Network Attached Storage array (NAS) WDex2Ultra. It has some very good features, one of which is the ability to set up remotely-accessible “share” folders if you collaborate with others – or if you are on the road and want to push your files back to the home server. It attaches with gigabit ethernet. I got the 8 TB version for about $350 (2 drives at 4 TB each). It can be set up for RAID 1 configuration, which means all data is “mirrored” to the second hard drive – so my actual storage is 4 TB. You need more storage just get bigger drives. WD also has bigger units, capable of 4 drives or more if you think you need to add in the future, go small now and add more drives later.
If you think about it, the RAID1 means you have a local backup. Then use remote backup service to mirror all date into the cloud and you now have all the redundancy you need. It also works with Apple Timecapsule and you can create a disk partition for just that backup. Lots and lots of options.
Your “local backup” is managed by single commands, meaning an accidental “delete” is hard to undo. It’s only a backup for a drive failure, not for a mistake. Have a real backup, too.
Sounds like what I do on a much smaller scale. I also have rule that I never retrieve anything form my 2 drive unless I really messed up somewhere and keep that as pristine as as shot images. I also use Western Digital drives as well.
Never delete photos for any reason! As technology advances, the ability to fix or correct everything from out of focus, to dark, to light, blurry, etc., will be able to be fixed in the future.
Look at the current denoise, and sharpening technology that has recently emerged. I have been able to take old photos and make them into superstar quality.
Storage is cheap, but memories are forever.
Hi. I’m sorry but this isn’t good advice for many people reading. And I wouldn’t want people not cleaning up drives for the wrong reasons. Clutter and keeping thousands of bad photos isn’t a good practice.
The photos I delete are not good photos – Or they’re from me over-shooting a location (something which just about everyone here does). No amount of technology will make them good. I’m not deleting them because of some feature I wish existed… I’m deleting them because they’re bad photos.
Matt I also use G-Drives but with a couple of twists. Mine are Thunderbolt 3 drives and I am on PC not MAC. I believe yours judging by the cable are Thunderbolt 2. Thunderbolt 3 (now 4) have much higher transfer rates.
We started with 16Tb and are now using 28Tb drives.My wife who is also a photographer as a duplicate setup to mine. I have huge video files and projects along with all of my photo projects. My Primary drive is where all the files are stored and every night my backup program (Syncback Pro x64) mirrors the Primary Drive to the backup drive at 12:01am. Once every other week I connect a third drive, mirror to that drive, disconnect and I move that drive to a large safe in the middle of the house. Another room because 22 years ago my office was hit by lightening and the magnetic field was so intense that it scrambled everything including the hard drives on my PC and my laptop and they were disconnected because I heard the storm coming! The backup drives I had at the time in a drawer were also scrambled! I was saved by that third backup which at the time I kept at my bank in a safe deposit box.
I am very diligent about my photos keeping the RAW and edited versions. I have a directory structure that works for me and it is very easy for me to drill down to the photo(s) that I need.
The only issue I have every had with the G-Drives is I had to replace the cooling fans in two of them. I do not use a cloud based backup because the time needed to recover everything in case of a disaster would be weeks. Many of my video files are 6Gb in size! RAID is also not a viable solution for me because I like you adhere to the KISS principle. It is much easier to have an automatic backup each night and I can always do a manual one at any time.
What a comfort. Thank you, Matt. That’s more or less what I do, and I’ve always wondered if it was enough.
What you say and how you say it always makes good sense to me. Thanks for this.
Matt, I have arranged my system similar to yours as described. To keep the backup HD up to date I have used Super-Duper. I believe I saw that you used it then. Is there a functional reason for changing from Super-Duper to Carbon Copy? i.e. does Carbon Copy give a more accurate duplication or faster speed? {perhaps it works better with Apple’s new Venture operating system. I am not computer knowledgable so try to glean hint from reputable places.
Matt. Great article nicely positioned for any photographer (pro or fun) who treasure their images and want to keep them safe.
As I get older, I get less patient because my time on this planet is limited, I don’t want to waste it on waiting for 30ms+ the hdd spent on spinning up. I have now switched to 4TB SSD as main, with HDD (plus cloud) for nightly automated incremental backups. SSD is at least 2x more expensive than an HDD, but the instantaneous response is worth it.
Thanks Matt.
Very timely as I recently hit about 90% capacity in my 4Tb external hard drive and did the same thing. I went through and deleted a ton of my images that I know I won’t use. Those that were rated zero stars, and even some “1-star” images.
Now I’m down to 75% of capacity! But will need to replace these 4Tb soon
My question is about the Lightroom catalog.
With a new hard drive, are you copying over to the new hard drive all the old images, and then add to that new hard drive with all your new images? And just keep using your existing LR Catalog?
Or maybe you’ll keep your existing images on the existing “full” drive, and use that kind of as storage for all images through that date. And add a copy of the LR Catalog for use with these “prior” images. You won’t see those images (or use that Catalog) again unless and until you need to retrieve a “prior” image that sits only only on that hard drive. If this route, you’d just have to remember that the great pic of XYZ from Dec 2022 (for example) is on the “storage” hard drive, along with its unique LR Catalog. This doesn’t seem ideal to me.
Though it is a lot of data to copy over, I think I lean to copying all existing images over to the new hard drive, and continue using the existing Catalog
But that’s my question!
Hi Mark. Obviously I’m not Matt, nor do I have the level of experience Matt does. (Understatement of the year). I follow Hudson Henry and on the LR Catalog, he uses one USB connected drive for the Catalog and a separate USB Connected (or internal drive separate from the OS) for the initial photo library folders, which he archives over time to a NAS, in his case. But the LR catalog – he uses one catalog for everything. He has LR set up to backup EVERY time to a different hard drive. In his case – a drive on the local machine separate from his main USB attached LR catalog drive. I have been following this pretty successfully and I do like it. I have multiple backups of the catalog, based on date that I quit and saved. (And then follow whatever backup / storage strategy you choose). I too, will be interested in hearing Matt’s approach. I have seen others who prefer to separate out catalogs based on projects, dates, etc.
Hi Matt,
I also load my photo shoots into external HDs and work off them, rather than clutter my computer with a whole shoot. I have just recently discovered WD 2TB and 4TB “teensy” SSD drives, since I use one to transport images from my NH to my Sarasota home. As another non-techie, I couldn’t believe how much faster my processing (ACR, PS and ON1) goes from that drive than other WD or Seagate drives. Definitely more, but not prohibitively, expensive.
Thanks. A nice article with great advice for the vast majority of us photo enthusiasts.
BTW, the Thunderbolt connector looks like the “2” version. Recent Mac’s use Thunderbolt “3” or “4” (look like USB C).
I have some Thunderbolt 2 devices – and use a “2” to “3” dongle to connect them to my M1 Macbook Pro.
Good to hear how you backup your data. Everyone uses their own method and will most likely not change.
I use a very simple backup method. I have two internal hard drives on my computer.
First HD is for the OS and program files.
2nd hard drive is where i store all my personal files photos etc.
I have an external 2 TB drive connected via usb connection.
The backup software is a utility called KLS BACKUP.
U can configure what type of backup it will perform.
On the first of every month it does a full backup of the folders i choose on the user data harddrive.
It then will perform a differential backup for the rest of the month then the cycle repeats.
Doing a differential backup every day gives me multiple backups of the file that has changed since the last full backup. Which means i can restore a file from
any day i choose.
Thanks Matt for the article! Every once in awhile I do start thinking about those things and you have reminded me of some ways I can get around some problems that will be coming up.
What you have said makes sense.
Thanks again for your honest advice
Matt, your article will be very useful for so many people. I’ve been using both Carbon Copy Cloner and BackBlaze for years and they are great. I’ve reinstalled my entire Mac with CCC and recovered accidentally deleted files from BackBlaze. I do the annual plan with BackBlaze so only $70. My brother, who works for Lindblad Expeditions, lost almost all his files on his hard drive so he paid the $189 for them to send him all his files on a hard drive but the great thing is that they give you a full refund when you return that drive.
Matt,
Thanks for this information. It was helpful as I also have my photos on one drive, that backs up to a second drive. I’ve been toying with going to Backblaze to do an additional backup just in case. I’m like you I don’t understand most of this stuff, and appreciate knowing i’m on the right track.
Matt, this is all good information. I AM a techie though so I have comment to make. As a former designer of IBM PCs I can tell you that when a drive fails it is always because of 1 component. And if 1 component fails that is a good sign that ALL of the components from that batch will fail around the same time. So you don’t want to buy 2 of the same drives at the same time, they will fail about the same time. Either buy them from 2 different manufacturers or buy one then buy the second a couple months later (from a high volume seller, if you buy from the guy on the corner they may still be from the same batch). Only keeping one drive powered up all the time and the second only for a few hours at time also helps alleviate this problem.
Thanks for this practical info. I enjoy and respect your work. I frst met you at a Kelby Lightroom seminar in San Diego in 2015 or 16’
For anyone interested, these Western Digital (formerly G-Technology) external drives now are marketed under the SanDisk name (Western Digital purchased SanDisk a few years ago).
Hi Matt.I’ve been using CCC for my Mac too. It quietly runs in the background, and use Time Machine as my additional back up. I usually eject Time Machine and my Lacie drives most of the week, plug it in on Fridays, for a day or two for back-up. Since we both live her in Fla, the lightning capital of the world, I have some peace in mind that there will less likely be a sudden interruption. BY THE WAY I purchased CCC at 1/2 off. There are deals out there so for those who wish to get it, it might be worthwhile to check it our with discount promotions at certain times of the year.
Matt, very helpful article. Any idea what your friend would currently tell you to get?
Right now I don’t know anyone very passionate about a hard drive. I’d probably end up with a western digital of some sort because I know the name. It’s just a hard drive and it’ll be backed up.
I had the opportunity to pay a 3rd party for salvaging/restoring a 1TB external drive about 10 years ago. It cost me $2,000.00 USD! Only about 80% was retrievable. The data, critical by the way, was duplicated onto another new drive which failed a year later. DO NOT THINK IT WILL NOT HAPPEN TO YOU!
This is another super useful tip from you. My question is if your 8TB drive fills up and you could no longer delete shots (all those bracketed shots have been deleted for example) could you split your Photo Library on 2 or more External Hard-Drives? if so, how would you do this?
Hi Vito. Lightroom doesn’t care how many drives you have photos on. You could split them into as many drives as you’d like. Just put the photos where you want, and in LR Right-click on a folder and choose “Update Location”. Thanks.
Thanks for this information! It is very helpful! I am in the process of figuring out a system that is easier to work with because I am currently in the ‘copy and paste from one hard drive to another’ situation, and it is driving me crazy! I think this system would work well for me! You are my hero of the day!
Indeed a very un-tech article 🙂
Can you explain how you USE Photo 1? Is it where all your lightroom photos are located? Do you have a desktop machine and therefor it is OK to simply have all the photos on the external drive (no need for mobility), or do you use a laptop in which case you may have wanted to have your recent working photos on the laptop SSD and use the external drive just to move older stuff to?
If you use it for your working photos as well, doesn’t having an external hard drive slow down things significantly relative to using an internal SSD?
Hi. I make descriptively named folders for my photo shoots and load the files in. That is what my LR catalog refers to. I only use one computer (a laptop). Speed and performance have not been a problem. As for mobility, it hasn’t been a problem since I just don’t work on photos if I travel or go somewhere with my laptop. If I do, I can always temporarily move a folder on there if needed. Thanks!
Very helpful. Thanks
One option you might not be aware of is a manufacturer called Synology. They make NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive enclosures of various sizes. I have an 8 bay enclosure from them. I started out with 8TB drives. You can put one in and a 2nd one next to it to mirror all of the imagery onto the second one as backup. As you fill up the 8 drive slots, you can then replace your drives with larger drives. Just pull one out and follow their upgrade process. I have replaced the 8TB drives with 16TB drives over time. I’m getting close to filling up my last 16TB drive and will need to start swapping them out for something like Seagates 22TB IronWolf drive, or decide if a new NAS enclosure is a better way to go as everything eventually wears out and fails.