External Hard Drive

External Hard Drive Best for RAW

#1 Brianschild

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Posted 04 February 2013 - 09:34 AM

Hi,
I just bought a Mac Book Pro and a G Slim 500 GB external hard drive. My fear is that since I shoot RAW I did not get enough back up. I live in Madagascar and take lots of photographs. Can someone please help me choose the right external hard drive for me?I am back in the States for just a few more days, so quick help will be much appreciated
Brian Schild

#2 smax013

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Posted 07 February 2013 - 08:07 AM

Brianschild, on 04 February 2013 - 09:34 AM, said:

Are you storing the photos on the MacBook Pro and then using the external drive as a backup of the MacBook Pro? Or are you just using the external drive as the storage drive for the photos?

If it is the former, then the external drive need only be as big as hard drive in the MacBook Pro.

If it is the latter, then the size of the drive will depend on how many photos you are talking about as well as what kind of camera you use (which will essentially tell you a typical RAW file size). For example, if I assume a RAW file size of 50 MB, then that means in round numbers you could put roughly 10000 photos on a 500 GB drive (it is actually less due to how drive manufacturer's "market" their size). And I believe 50 MB is more than twice the size of most camera's RAW files.

I will note that if it is the latter (i.e. you will ONLY have the photos on the external drive), then I STRONGLY suggest you get a second drive to backup the photos from the first external drive to the second external drive. The point is that if you care about those photos, DO NOT have them only on one drive. That is a recipe for the universe screwing with you and bricking your drive and you losing all your photos.

[soapbox]Back up = good...No back up = bad[/soapbox]

#3 icerabbit

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Posted 07 February 2013 - 09:56 AM

Seconding smax.

Ideally you should have a clone backup or time machine backup of your macbook pro to an external hard drive.

Then in addition to that, you will keep two backup drives for your photo collection. Not just one. If you care about your data, then backups & copies are the key. It is not a matter if a hard drive will fail, but when. Recently our NAS music system went belly up, without a backup copy of the drive ... and it has taken a while to rebuild it from DVD backups and audio CDs.

I've personally lost lots of photos & videos at one time; while consolidating and editing separate libraries when a deleted OS X shortcut to another system erased the other library followed by a dual hard drive failure and data corruption during the recovery process.

I don't advocate getting the biggest hard drive possible. If 2-3TB is all the rage now, I'd tend to stick with 1TB.