What do you do when you run out of space?

[d2creative]

I have a 250gb internal drive and a 300gb external that is used for my nightly backup.

I'm down to about 30 gb on the internal now and about 67 on the external. So what should I do now that storage is getting low? Should i eventually just remove both and get two new drives, keeping the current ones in storage? What about all my photos that are on there that I *might* want to access?

[Stephen H]

Do what we just did: bought a new computer for Christmas.

If there's stuff that you don't often access, but might want to, move it all to CD's and off the hard drive.

[d2creative]

Originally Posted by Stephen H

Do what we just did: bought a new computer for Christmas.

If there's stuff that you don't often access, but might want to, move it all to CD's and off the hard drive.

Ya, i just did too.
But i cant keep the old one.

[Duffy Pratt]

Buy two new external drives. Take your photos off the internal hard drive and back them up onto one of the external drives. So now your photos are on two external drives. Put one into storage somewhere away from the house, and keep the other near the computer for access.

Then start again with the other new external drive and the internal drive.

Duffy

[ndsimm]

Hard drives are too cheap not to go out and get another one. You should be able to get another 250-300 GB for less than 100-150 dollars. Hard drive cases are anywhere from 30-50 bucks and you could get one of those and just swap the drives between them as necessary
I just got two 320GB drives about a week ago from Fry's for $120 for both

[petert]

...and I'm reminded of a friend's quotation...

"Diskspace is like toilet paper... you never want to run out!"

You didn't mention if you're a Mac or PC user... not that it really makes much difference. The only additional suggestion I'd make is that if you're going to take your current drives and make them external, put all your non-immediate data there. I've got some USB and Firewire drives on my Mac... and they are slow!

Happy New Year!!

[Daniel Bates]

I'm putting all my old files on a 500 gig external. When that gets close to filled, I'll probably have enough money to get a RAID array for backup purposes... but I'll keep putting files on external hard drives.

[LoungeLizard]

Well, since the universe is ever expanding, just get another external drive! Keep backups!

I keep my working photos on my internal drive. That drive is regularly backed up to an external drive. When I'm done working with them, they get backed up to TWO identical external drives (my acrhive and my archive backup) and removed from the internal drive (and it's on-going backup). Oh, and the archive backup is kept offsite (or should be!)

I think I now have about eight external drives!

[Wes]

With drive space gettng so cheap you should be able to add additional storage for next to nothing. Newegg has 500Gb SATA drives for less than $150. You could add a 1Tb for less than $300. Buy an additional 1Tb of external drives for backup storage and you'll be set for a long time to come.

OR.....

For a bit more money, you can add a Blu-ray DVD burner (Plextor has one for $850 at Newegg). You can burn 50Gb discs for backup and then free up the space on your HDD's. Personally, I wouldn't do it because the technology is still so new, which means that it's still very expensive. I'll go this route myself, but only when I can buy the drive for less than $300 and the media comes down in price. But, hey, it's an option if you want to spend the money.

[Dobick]

I know that I run into this problem from time to time, and inevitably it turns out that the things that are causing the largest storage drain is the multiple copies of the same files in different formats, etc...

But for backup purposes I try to only keep the originals backed up, and then keep the real winners as well. I try to be selective in what I am keeping.

As far as a technological solution to the problem, as has already been mentioned, hard drives are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Buy another one, and make it external as an interim solution, until time comes to buy a new computer, and then make sure that the new computer has multiple SATA plugins so that you can add hard drive space internally. I recently bought a parts for a computer, (new motherboard, processor, ram, video card and hard drives) The mother board has four SATA plugins, so I bought three drives -- 1 for the system partition, (which has 200 gb partitioned for random storage), 1 strictly for photo storage, and 1 for music, and program download storage. When I run out of room on these, I will still have room for another disk to plug in to the board.

It may sound complicated, but it really isn't all that tough to do.

[d2creative]

My new mac pro that is coming has 4 sata drive bays.
I'm thinking of running everything off the original drive but store all photos on a second drive. Then install a third drive for backup. That way when drive 2 and 3 fill up, I can just swap them both out with new ones. Is this a good idea? Or should i use one internal and one external?

[dreemes]

I have a Netgear SC101 network harddrive set up in a storage building to backup files to so I don't have all my "eggs in one basket" should my house catch on fire.

[Tapper]

Several decent options now.

Most modern motherboards have raid controllers on them. Use them to set up mirror sets of disks - two disks with the same data on them.

You can also do one of the many NAS systems (network attached storage), using windows file sharing or iSCSI to attach with. iSCSI can be done (albeit slowly) to a remote offsite server as well.

External drives are cheap now too.

Basically, it's a question of time spent maintaining your copies.

Personally, I suggest having 2 or 4 drives in your computer, set up to do mirroring only (not raid 5 or raid 0+1). Then, attach an external usb drive or NAS box, and backup to it weekly. Then, take the NAS to work with you. This gives you three full copies of your files, one in an offsite location, and consumes very little time keeping them current.

Beware of todays hard drives. Most of the "on sale today" SATA or IDE drives fail at very high rates compared to just a few years ago. Never trust one, ever. SCSI disks are usually more reliable (and expensive), and the newer SAS drives are supposed to be similar (and much faster). Not sure how well SAS does so far, but I installed a few hundred of them this year in my data farms, so I'll know pretty soon. USB drives are easily broken as well.

[photo_doug]

I expanded both my office and photo computers and went with SATA drives. I've got up to four slots on each of the board I have and I believe that I can actually expand with another board if necessary.

They seem very fast, weren't that expensive , play well with the rest of the system and very stable.

[amadjuster]

I would strongly suggest you also invest in a DVD burner, if you don't already have one, and then copy your older files to them to clear out hard drive space. Murphy's Law says your HD with the most files will crash. That is BAD. You can burn to the two sided DVD's and this will really get you to organize. Having huge HD's means more anguish because we all get lazy and just don't believe it can happen. How many here REALLY backup? The best thing I ever got was Ghost 10.0 because it works in the background and you don't have to start anything. Still, I am putting my photo files on DVD as archives.