I have short films, projects that never got made, personal photos, ones of friends, clients, old family ones … i do some writing and store different documents. I want to have a Mari Kundo type hard drive.
Do you guys have any tips? Or some industry standard I’m not aware of?
After a few years of trial and error, this is my setup / workflow:
On a higher level:
- One 12Tb HDD on local PC holds the photo’s folder (see below, with 3 subfolders). This HDD gets replaced every 4 yrs.
- This folder gets backupped (one way mirror via Pure Sync) to a Synology NAS where the backupped immediate gets a 2nd copy to a 2n HDD (this means I have 3 copies in my possession: one on the local machine, 2 on the NAS).
- This NAS gets periodically backupped (grandfather-father-son) via Synology Hyper Backup to cheap cold Google Cloud Storage “in case of disaster”. The NAS HDD’s are replaced every 5 yr.
- The albums folders (only 500Gb) gets mirrored periodically to a cloud service (in case One Drive) via Synology Cloud Sync (also a second “in case of really big disaster”)
On a lower level:
- The 12Tb HDD holds:
A. a decharging folder in which all pictures post 2020 reside on a year/month/day basis
(these pictures go into collections via Light room, so no subfolder stuff necessary here)
B. a folder with subfolders per holiday / event / shooting session for everything pre 2020
C. an albums folder with a few hundred subfolders with lighter JPEG exports in it (holds let’s say “the finished product”)
I work in Lightroom where all pictures are accompanied with ther XML file, so in case of disaster (Lightroom settings lost), at least the work I have done on one specific file can be recovered
Definitely like this and the hard drive replacement guidance. I’ve had bad luck when it comes to hard drives. I want to get a NAS setup and maintain my files better. Currently at a breaking point, my two laptops are full, I have two external hard rives that are unusable, one won’t read from a drop lost everything from 2007 to 2009 I keep it around hopping one day in afford to recover it. Then another hard drive that wiped and every time I format it it wipes and acts like a new hard drive. A third external that works but also full.
I have Gopro cloud and a full Google Photos. I just dont have the funds to upgrade, I was hoping Black Friday would be more forgiving but put the kids and wife first so my content creation remains on hold.
Well. In fact there are 2 paths. The first path is to go purely Cloud. It won’t cost that much (Google Drive 5Tb). Problem is working with Lightroom, and having grandfather-father-son type of backups. But this wil work for most people. I sure will.
Second is one system (like mine above, which is just my way of doing things), but be prepared for the cost (3 x HDD + some subscriptions + learning curve (Google Cloud Storage, Hyper Backup, etc…).
So all raw files head over to folder A, then sub folders for the selected photos into folder C? Or do you work out of folder A?. Do you also store the catalog in the subfolders in folder C? Ex. Start shoot raw goes to A, selects goto C into a sub folder called startshoot with the date, then inside that sub folder is all the images and some where a catalog? And exports there as well I assume in another sub folder labeled exports under startshoot?