Back up storage space?

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mrgooch

mrgooch

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I just acquired a 40GB hard drive I plan to use as a back up. Do you think it will be to small? I shoot only for personal use.Please don't suggest I buy a larger one as I just dropped a bundle building a new computer and there is nothing left.
 
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That's a tiny drive. You can do the math, yourself. How many gigabytes of images do you have? How big is the catalogue file? You'll have to back up those two things, for sure.

If you just got a new machine, did you build it with at least two drives? You don't have to have a drive have nothing but backups on it. As long as you have a copy of your catalogue on each of two drives and your images on each of them, you should be pretty safe.

Hal
 
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Ya can get a 1 terrrabyte western digital portable hard drive for around 100 bucks on amazon. Thats what I use.
 
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My question would be as backup for what? it is likely that your new computer HD is 10-15 times as large that the 40 Gb HD and probably larger. I tend to look at Backups as a part of a system wide program for preserving critical data and this includes you LR catalog, presets preferences and master image files. In Windows that might mean almost everything inside your C:\users\{yourUserNameGoesHere}\ folder. For that reason, I would not recommend storing any critical data outside of this folder unless it is on a separate EHD. A good system wide backup scheme will utilize software to automatically backup data and incremental changes to individual files so that there is a redundancy. I would find a 40Gb HD probably inadequate for any system wide backup scheme. It might make a goo secondary HD for moving seldom accessed image data files off of the primary HD to free up space there for more recent data.
 
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I am talking about storing a second set of photos in case of a crash on my 500Gb primary drive. I do have an external USB 300Gb drive but don't like to have to remember to take it out,plug it in and backup.
 
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If you have space in your computer to mount the 40 GB drive, you could probably take the hard drive out of the external case and mount it inside your computer. Then you wouldn't have to go to all the effort of plugging it in when you want to run a backup.

Hal
 
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Hal I think you have things confused.Take what hard drive out of it's case? The external drive I have is a USB drive.
 
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The 300 GB external you don't want to have to plug in. ;) It's in a case, but generally they are just ATA hard drives like your primary hard drive.

Hal
 
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mrgooch said:
I am speaking of a portable one.If there was a USB connector inside I would place it inside and use it.
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USB External HDs are nothing more than an enclosure for a standard SATA HD with enough components to adapt a SATA connector to a USB connector. If you remove the case from the USB, you will see a standard 2.5" or 3.5" HD fitting inside the thin aluminum or plastic enclosure. All of my USB HDs were salvaged from old computers or old NAS Servers. You can buy a 2.5" enclosure for about $20 USD or a 3.5" enclosure for about $30USD. and put the HD of your choice inside. If you have a Desktop, it has additional slots for additional HDs. If you have a 300GB EHD, remove it from the case and install it into an empty bay in the Desktop. You may need to buy a SATA Cable or an adapter for the power supply.

Backups work best when they run automatically on a schedule and you can forget about them.
 
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Thank you for the information. It sounds like something I would like to do. Opening it up is no problem for me it's getting the cable connectors etc.
 
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I agree with the guys here. 40GB is really too small for a back-up especially when you'll be backing up some of your personal photos. I suggest a 500GB HD and it's really cheap to buy these days.
 
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