Shoot Large Files, make sure you have room to back them up / external drives better than DVDs?

Digital photography brought a whole lot of good to the photographers of all caliber, but it brought some changes along with it.  Change isn’t a bad thing however adopting proper practices can be difficult.  Film shooters used to be able to buy cheap binders and sleeves to protect their negatives, quickly label them and file them on shelves or in drawers and cabinets.  Because film had an inherent cost of first purchasing the raw product and then paying to have it processed, most photographers had a limited number of negatives to deal with and sort through to find specific photos.  Digital photography has completely changed the game and technological advancements have helped and hindered our ability to store digital photos.

Rapid technological advancements have brought the price down on storage media drastically.  When I started shooting digital about seven years ago a 512mb compact flash card cost more than $500.  Today a car that is 16 times bigger costs under $40.  At the same time digital cameras have larger, better and more powerful sensors in them.  Luckily, the price of hard drives, especially large ones has continued to drop over the years.

Storing your digital photos can be a bit more complicated than a binder with sleeves for your negatives.  Here is my method to backup and store data while still making it easy to search and find.

• Create a folder with the date, name of event, people or occasion and the location
• Inside that folder create a folder for RAW files.  If I shot JPG, I’ll create an Unedited JPG folder
• Create an Edited folder
• Create a Web folder

The folders are pretty self explanatory, the RAW or Unedited JPG folder is where files go straight from my memory card.  I never write over the originals and always save them unedited.  The Edited folder is where all my photos go after I’ve edited them in Lightroom or Photoshop.  The Web folder is where the resized JPG photos go with my watermark on them, ready to be shared on my website, Facebook, Twitter or emailed to a client for soft-proofing.

So for each photograph I shoot, two more digital files can be created.  As you can imagine, this eats up a lot of hard drive space.  My primary computer is a Macbook Pro, so the hard drive is not nearly as large as a desktop computer and storage concerns are always high for me, but this applies to every photographer.

I utilize 1TB external hard drives for photo storage and keep the event folders organized by year.  The price for a quality 1TB external hard drive with a good warranty is well under $100 today.  By comparison, a DVD holding 4.7GB of data costs around 25 cents.  It takes roughly 218 DVD’s to hold as much data as a 1TB external hard drive and would cost around $55.  Dollar per gigabyte of storage, DVDs are cheaper!

The reason I’m willing to pay nearly double to store photographs on external hard drives at the increased rate is for search-ability and simplified location.  Additionally, many shoots I do consumer more than 1 DVD of data.  There simply is no easy way to store 200+ disks that I can easily and quickly search through and find exactly what I’m looking for the way I can on a hard drive.

Both external hard drives and DVDs can be prone to failure.  With an external hard drive, the disk drive itself can fail, data can be lost, electrical current can ruin the device, so one and so on.  DVD disks are vulnerable to cracking from putting in and removing from jewel cases, scratching , destruction from markers writing on them and some compatibility issues with readers in different computers.  Both can suffer from environmental failures, such as a house fire, water damage, misplacement of theft.

Backing data up is my other main reason for utilizing hard drives. For true data backup and storage, it’s far easier to buy a second external hard drive and copy one to the other and store it in a different physical location; one at home and one at the office for example.

When you purchase that new 18 or 24MP digital camera be prepared to also buy some storage devices.  I say devices in plural because you will be surprised just how quickly one fills up.  DVDs for content storage are nice, I just haven’t found a fast, easy way to sort through them when I’m looking for specific images.  What DVDs are good for is delivering images to clients, friends or family because emailing a few gigs of photos is far too painful and slow, regardless of how fast your Internet connection is.

For me, the size and speed of access for external hard drives will always be better than disks, however each has their place in photography.  Worth noting is that as technology evolves, be prepared to upgrade, move and shift your photos.  Ten years ago computers still had floppy drives in them, today you’ll be hard pressed to find one that can read the seemingly archaic storage media.