I know digital photography has made taking photos easier and the ability to store hundreds of images on a disk rather than in a suitcase full of developed hard copies is much more convenient but why!?

I've just been updating my media storage drive as it was getting close to full.

Even after deleting watched movies it was still amost full so had a quick look at the photos folder

Hundreds of thousands of images going back anything up to 5 years.

Most of which were taken at motorsport.

Most of those at Castle Combe

Most of those of the same championsip round after round.

Leading to hundreds of almost identical photos that i haven't looked at for years.

Resulting in a hard drive that is now almost full.

If it was still the 90's i'd need an entire room for my developed photos.

Despite knowing all this I just couldn't push delete.

Other than a select few, that are honoured and grace a "wallpapers" folder that Windows 7 rotates for me to raise my work day, most have probably only been seen when I filtered through them immediately after the event.

Why am i bothering to keep them?

Same here - got 60GB and counting and with my Nikon D90 a JPEG Fine and RAW image takes up close to 20mb per pic! Hence why i am now buying a HP Microserver so i can store and back up!

but why?!

what do you/we hope to ever do with them in the future?

So you can look back at them when you are old and grey and remember the "good old days"?

I never delete photos, I have them backed up on 3 HDDs but like yourself, I rarely look at most of them!

yeah i can understand sentimentality over the right photos.

The 1200 photos from a holiday to the US I will look back over and enjoy.

The 5000 photos of cars from the last 5 years at Castle combe? :S

"oh look dear, remember the day we watched that crappy 205 race at Combe? no me neither!....Oh look here it is a lap later"

Would it be possible for you to get an external 500 GB hard-drive and off-load, any none-essential stuff ??

Good old E-Bay for the following.

About £40 got me a Samsung 500GB hard-drive, that slips into your pocket, has a short USB connection cable, and uses laptop/PC for it's power.

Brilliant little thing.

Not sure how many photos in total you would get on a 500 GB external hard-drive, lots I suppose.

I've got a digital photo frame with a 4 GB pendrive connected to it, and can honestly say never seen the same picture twice.

Because you've now tipped the balance towards "that's too many, I can't be bothered to sort through them so I'll just try to take less in future".

But then you'll constantly be paranoid about missing a shot, so you'll still be just as bad as before, giving yourself even more to look through and decreasing the chances of you actually ever doing it proportionately.

I'm only a point and shoot "casual" photographer, and I still do it.

Yep we have something like 40,000 photos from the last 6 years. I even keep the blurred ones of our daughter, no idea why!

I have a few too many aswell...

While taking them off my card, I will do a quick RAW edit but just on the photos I know I want to keep.

Then any further editing while I browse my picture folders.

I dump a memory card onto my computer after about 250 photos, but out of them I will only keep around 50.

I flick through my photos quite regular, and i fancy one of the digital photo frames you see now.

Digital photography makes it too easy to take a picture of just about anything when before with only 36 exposures you'd be a bit more chosey what you took.

Then you end up with so many flippin pics you can't be bothered to spend a week going through them.

How much can you get on 1 DVD_R ?? Might be a way of keeping them without worrying about HDD space?

How much can you get on 1 DVD_R ?? Might be a way of keeping them without worrying about HDD space?

Would take a few nowadays considering that a DVD holds 4.7GB and the average SD card is now 8 or 16GBs!

I don't think Space is the issue, just more the question why we keep so many!

Optical media doesn't actually last either so no good for a long term back up contrary to what many people think.

Yeah it wasn't a space issue I can readily purcahse another harddrive to store them on it was more the why

Stuff we never look at again and isn;t necessarily that good (otherwise we'd look at it i guess)

i fancy one of the digital photo frames you see now

This I did for a while until the cheapo frame died.

I then hooked up a redundant 19" LCD monitor to an also redundant laptop to create a giant photo frame but the arse about of pluggin it all in and strating it up every evening means i don't bother now.

Lol... The way to go is RAID digital storage... it's relatively cheap and reliable. (if a drive fails you don't lose the images)

When you have terabytes of images... it's the only way to go.

Edited 17 January, 201214 yr by Antofa

I have a very large collection of digital photos as I don't delete any of them which sounds possibly daft but looking back there's some blurred shots, ones with obvious problems or just dull every day ones that I still like to look back on. A couple of years ago I lost my dog, he'd been the one to get me into photography in the first place and when he was gone it was actually the boring, every day shots I liked more as those were just typical shots of the dog which I didn't think anything of at the time but because the dog was gone, I missed just seeing him lying in his bed or walking up the hall.

I'd point out that RAID isn't a backup system and shouldn't be used as such, always make sure photos are backed up onto a separate drive (or drives) and kept away from the main data drive.

John

I have a very large collection of digital photos as I don't delete any of them which sounds possibly daft but looking back there's some blurred shots, ones with obvious problems or just dull every day ones that I still like to look back on. A couple of years ago I lost my dog, he'd been the one to get me into photography in the first place and when he was gone it was actually the boring, every day shots I liked more as those were just typical shots of the dog which I didn't think anything of at the time but because the dog was gone, I missed just seeing him lying in his bed or walking up the hall.

I'd point out that RAID isn't a backup system and shouldn't be used as such, always make sure photos are backed up onto a separate drive (or drives) and kept away from the main data drive.

John

I'm not sure then that you know what a RAID system is... I'm a professional photographer and store my images on a RAID1 configured network attached storage system NAS - multiple drives configured so that when one decides to throw in the towel, a replacement can be sited in its place and no data loss incurred. It's by far the safest form of storage and negates any copying from one drive to another, or worse using optical storage, which is notorious for failing... Like I say I have terabytes of images... and really couldn't afford a loss. It's what all large utility companies use for their billing system often on Sun servers.

I'm not sure then that you know what a RAID system is... I'm a professional photographer and store my images on a RAID1 configured network attached storage system NAS - multiple drives configured so that when one decides to throw in the towel, a replacement can be sited in its place and no data loss incurred. It's by far the safest form of storage and negates any copying from one drive to another, or worse using optical storage, which is notorious for failing... Like I say I have terabytes of images... and really couldn't afford a loss. It's what all large utility companies use for their billing system often on Sun servers.

You need a separate backup as well, RAID is just fault tolerance. What if both drives fail? It can happen. Or a power spike takes them out. Or the control board fails which contains the striping information.

RAID is not a backup system.

And yes all company servers have RAID on servers - if they have any sense that is, but they also have backup systems off to cheaper disk then to tape or optical media, preferably offsite.

You need a separate backup as well, RAID is just fault tolerance. What if both drives fail? It can happen. Or a power spike takes them out. Or the control board fails which contains the striping information.

RAID is not a backup system.

And yes all company servers have RAID on servers - if they have any sense that is, but they also have backup systems off to cheaper disk then to tape or optical media, preferably offsite.

plus one. Raid is just for speed and fault tolerance. No substitute for backup. What if its stolen or lost in fire? That's why said utility companies will also use a tape back up. We have an automated tape system which is computer operated and barcoded and cataloged. These are then taken offsite every morning so at most we can loose 24hours of data if the server disks and tapes were lost before they were taken off site.

I'm not sure then that you know what a RAID system is... I'm a professional photographer and store my images on a RAID1 configured network attached storage system NAS - multiple drives configured so that when one decides to throw in the towel, a replacement can be sited in its place and no data loss incurred. It's by far the safest form of storage and negates any copying from one drive to another, or worse using optical storage, which is notorious for failing... Like I say I have terabytes of images... and really couldn't afford a loss. It's what all large utility companies use for their billing system often on Sun servers.

I know full well what a RAID system is, that's why I also know it's a common belief that RAID is a backup system when it isn't. As correctly pointed out by the replies above, a RAID system can protect against drive failure while maintaining uptime and improving performance in some cases but it doesn't protect you if there's a software corruption (it will be written to both drives), if both drives die or the unit is stolen. You may think that's just hypothetical but I've seen RAID arrays collapse because of multiple simultaneous drive failures (any sort of power spike can wreck multiple drives) or when the monitoring system hasn't flagged a failed drive which has only been discovered when another drive has failed and it's too late. That's why I pointed it out as you genuinely would not want you to find out the hard way why a RAID system is not a backup system as it's not pleasant telling people their data they thought was fully protected is gone.

Similarly as above for the servers I'm in charge of they all run their own RAID arrays so they can tolerate a drive failure and improve their performance but every single day their data is backed up to a tape system and removed to go to off site storage so when someone accidentally deletes a file or there's a catastrophic failure it's just a case of requesting the tapes back and restoring the data. It's the same for every company I've worked for and I'd be surprised if there's any big companies who don't maintain some form of offsite storage. For home use I keep my data backed up to separate drives which are kept apart from each other so if anything happens to one of the drives, the data should be safe on one of the others.

John

Edited 26 January, 201214 yr by JohnMcL7