A lot of people have recently asked me about what size of external Hard Disc Drive to buy and what sort of strategy to adopt in backing up your valued digital images, I therefore recommend you read the below information;
To be honest there is no real excuse for not backing up your digital image files, however if I am to be honest, I speak to quite a lot of photographers who sometimes forget to back up their digital images as they see this as a bit of a boring task, whereas they would prefer to be out there taking piccies.
All of my own photos are backed up at present. I have over 3 terabytes of personal storage. This sounds like a lot, but as personal storage devices or external Hard Disc Drives are so cheap you really cannot afford to be without one or even two.
Even with very large 10MB huge RAW files from my Nikon DSLR a 1TB external HDD will hold about 100,000 images. Most people don’t have 100,000 images so a drive like this is more than enough.
In fact, I would recommend that you actually buy two of them, use one as a constant back up at home, and use the other for a back up to your back up so to speak!
I have tried many different external hard drives, Maxtor, Cobra, Western Digital LaCie (LaCie’s are the worst) and Seagate’s have always performed the best for me.
The hard drive you have your photos on now *will* fail. Guaranteed. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. So do yourself a favor and if you’re work is not backed up, start backing it up.
Some people have said, well why not just back up your images onto DVDs or CD’s. I personally don’t like this strategy because it’s too much of a pain, because of that it doesn’t end up getting done as often as it should. With an external hard drive it’s portable and you can just drag and drop whenever you want to back things up. I organize my photos by day, so I can just drag over each day’s photos onto a back up drive.
You have been warned; get yourself a decent sized external Hard Disc Drive for your treasured digital images NOW!
Peter Killey