So, I have a terabyte sized hard drive on my desktop. A terabyte. That’s 1,000 gigabytes. When I bought this computer 3 years ago, I thought it would be years before I used up all that space. I have always backed up my images and documents to Mozy Online, which I am very happy with.
My computer is great. It runs well even though it has 5 versions of PSE, 2 full Photoshops, 2 Lightrooms and 4 Quickbooks (for my accounting business). Well, it ran well until last week when every process slowed to a crawl.
I just happened to check my available hard drive space and found that I had 7 gigabytes remaining.
Holy cow. How did that happen? Stinking Raw files, that’s how.
So, after talking to the guys at the discount electronics store down the street, I decided to go with an external hard drive as a solution. Aside from the storage capacity, my number one goal was speed. I wanted to be able to process images in Lightroom, Elements or Photoshop from this external drive.
I bought the Western Digital 2 terabyte USB 3.0 external hard drive. It absolutely amazes me that you can buy 2 terabytes of storage space for $150.
Here’s the cool thing: it’s a USB 3.0. Now, I didn’t know what that meant last week, but I do now. It means fast. Super fast.
Here’s the uncool thing: I didn’t have a USB 3.0 port on my computer.
The computer guy said that he could install it if I left my computer with him for 24-48 hours. Yeah, right. He said it way really easy and I could do it myself. Hmmmm.
I rocked it! I did. Turned off the computer, disconnected all the cables, opened the desktop and popped the port in.
(Now, if you’re thinking about trying this at home, make sure to look in your computer’s manual to make sure it has a slot available for installing this USB 3.0 port.)
And, after I got the port installed, I plugged in the hard drive and transferred 400 gigabytes worth of images to it. Wanna know how long it took? 4 hours. Absolutely unbelievable. I tried this on an old USB 2 drive we had around the house and the estimate was something like 2 weeks before the process would be complete.
So, here’s the thing. This external hard drive is not my backup. It holds my working files. So I bought a second to use as my backup. And, I always want to have “offiste” backup as well, in case of fire or robbery. So I’m going to continue to use my trusty Mozy online backup.
So now, I have my external hard drive that has nothing but images. I have a second hard drive that serves as a backup, and I have Mozy. Of course, my 2nd drive isn’t really necessary, except that Mozy is having to re-backup the images that I moved from my internal to my external drive and that takes a while. I wouldn’t sleep well at night knowing that my precious pictures weren’t backed up somewhere.
While Mozy is very slow on it’s initial backup of any drive or set of files, I highly recommend it. After the initial backup, I hardly notice the subsequent processes.
I lost 6 months worth of images a few years ago – some of them were very important to me. Backing up is the most important step in my workflow since then. And the price is right for Mozy – $4.95 per month for UNLIMITED backup, $103.95 for 2 years worth of unlimited backup, or $54.45 for one year of unlimited backup.
And you can save 20% by using coupon code HOLIDAY through Monday, November 29, 2010. $84 for two years worth of unlimited backup space is, I think, a great deal! This might be the solution for you especially if you don’t have a USB 3.0 port on your computer.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
you should probably mention though, Mozy uploading from your compuer on a regular basis is VERY costly through your Internet provider. My bills were three times as expensive, and I finally figured out the culprit: Mozy!
I so agree with you that you need both an on-site and off-site backup. I had only Mozy when my hard drive failed completely, and it was AWFUL getting all my files back. They still aren’t right. I blogged about it here:
http://workingwithdelight.blogspot.com/
This isn’t spam; I’m just a real person who’d like to pass along the mistakes I made so others won’t have the same problems.
Hi Tamsen,
I never would have thought of this, since I pay a monthly flat rate for my internet access, regardless of how much bandwidth I use. Thanks for pointing it out! And everyone else, keep in mind that Mozy does upload your backups via the internet, so you might be charged depending on your internet service provider.
Erin
I have delved into the computer myself on occasion. What a sense of accomplishment you have after it is done. I remember being quite proud of myself! Yay for you.
Haha! You are exactly right, Betsy. I was quite proud!
I’ve wanted to get an external hard drive to move and download all my photos to but am unsure how it all works. Could you expand on how you go about getting the photos from there that you intend to edit? Actually, I’d love to hear about the whole process from start to finish.
Thanks for all the helpful info.
~ingrid
ingrid´s last [type] ..Thanksgiving Desserts
Hi Ingrid, it’s pretty simple actually. Once you have the hard drive installed, you would open an image as normal by going to File/Open. Instead of navigating to your normal hard drive location for storing photos, you would select your external drive.
As far as getting the pix on to the external drive, most drives come with software that will allow you to move files and autoomate backups. But I just copy and paste my files from one location to the other. It’s really just like having a separate folder set up on your computrt.
As I said, speed was the most important consideration for me. I don’t want to work on files that take 5 minutes to process a crop or to save.
Oh, the pain of losing files, especially photo files. I used an external Western Digital My Book for my photo files from August through November. The week before Thanksgiving, it crashed. I’ve never lost data before, so I didn’t have it backed up. Three shoots that hadn’t been fully edited and burned to disc, gone. Photos from some of our “last time” events in Cub Scouts (my son is in 5th grade, so there are lots of “lasts” right now), gone. All of the pics that I had taken for his school, gone. Fortunately, I have a friend who was able to use his Mac and retrieve them, but I now use Carbonite, put my pics on my main drive so they’ll be backed up, and only move them to the external drive once I’ve edited and burned them. Experience is a hard teacher; fortunately for me, this time she gave me some grace…..
Pam D´s last [type] ..My blue eyed boy…
2 Western Digital – 2 terabyte externals and my computer is a terabyte. I keep the images I’m editing on the scan card I used at the session, put a copy on one external and edit them on my computer. Once they are complete, the edited images go to the 2 externals. I haven’t purchased the on line service yet. Probably have to do that this year. :/