Weekly Photography Tips - Image Storage
When first starting out very few photographers give much thought to where or how images will be stored. You simply download them to your computer, post process if needed and share or print them. At some point you will begin to run out space on your hard drive and then start storing them somewhere else like an external drive. Now you have images in two different places and may have difficulty finding a particular one that you may need later.
The sooner you can plan your images storage the better off you will be. For safety many photographers are now using the 3, 2, 1 method. Have 3 copies on 2 different drives and 1 in the cloud. That way you won't be caught looking for an image that has been accidentally deleted. For me this is accomplished by having images on a large primary drive, backup copy of my raw files on another and I use a cloud storage service that duplicates my primary.
I use Lightroom to help me with file organization. It will automatically save images in folders based on year, month and day. It also saves a copy of my raw files to a secondary location fulfilling the 2 requirement of the 3,2,1 plan. Lastly I use BackBlaze to constantly save a copy of my external drives to the cloud. In the event of a failure I can simply download.
When choosing storage devices keep in mind that you will need more capacity that you think so whatever size you are planning double it. Take if from someone who has had to frantically search for a backup copy of an image and had to copy large quantities of files to a new larger drive the earlier you plan your storage the better off you will be.
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