Digital Photography Storage

Hi all -

I know that there are a lot of tech-savvy as well as photographers on the boards here, so I am coming to you in search of advice...

I am currently at about 24k photos on my laptop (Macbook Pro ~5 years old) and quickly running low on disk space. I do have a WD external hard drive, to which I am 99% sure everything has backed up to. The photos are from a variety of cameras, but mainly a small cannon power shot, and a Rebel XSi.

My question is:
1. Are there any forms of backing up photos that you use, that allow for frequent access, and that do not affect the original quality of the photo files?
2. Can I trust that they are all properly backed up and delete them from my iPhoto program to free up space/bring some speed back?
3. I have the option to upgrade hard drives to a fairly large one for a decent price. Do I just do that, and continue to back up on the WD, and keep them on my computer as well?

I am not tech savvy whatsoever. I apologize for the ingnorance in this field if these questions are "duh" kind of answers. My photos cover the last 10 years of fairly extensive travels, and are arguably some of my most prized posessions.

Any advice/help/guidance, per usual, is greatly appreciated in advance. Thanks You!


Julian

 

There are tons of different ways to back stuff up. I run 2 Externals HDDs (one older and one newer) and they are just about mirrors of each other (minus some unnecessary music files on my 1st drive). I have had computers fail and external HDDs fail. I feel a lot better running a double backup on my pictures. You can transfer them to DVDs (about a 10 year shelf life per the manufacturer) but that takes up a ton of space, and isn't the best way to do it. We used to use the DVD method with all of our music files back in the early 2000's. However, HDDs on computers were smaller then so it didn't take too many Pro Tools sessions to fill up my HDD.

The cloud is great, but you are not in control of their system. Everything could be fine or everything could get hacked and taken down... think PSN a few months ago. It doesn't hurt to have your own person backup.

The wife just picked up a 1.5 TB External HDD for $80 @ Best Buy

 

I have over a dozen TB's of storage for photos! I have a RAID5 setup with 2TB drives in my tower and a NAS box with a RAID 5 setup. I also have several TB external drives and other internal drives that I have swapped out and put into a safe. I use the RAID setups for things that I need/want access to (but still protected from single drive failures), and everything else gets copied onto a drive and thrown in my safe. Everything is on at least 2 different drives, and all customer deliverable photos are online as well.

All this extra precaution is due to contractual liability with my photography business. For personal use, I would suggest getting a 1 or 2 TB external drive. They can be had for under/around $100 these days. I would sign up for the MicroCenter mailings and check them for sales. They almost always have one brand or another one sale. NewEgg also has a lot of sales.

EDIT: I've also had numerous hard drive failures. Backup is definitely a good idea, even if you're not "freeing up" space.