Questions about purchase of external hard drive to back up digital pics

[Edelweiss]

I am looking for an external hard drive to back up my 7000+ digital pictures. I hope a computer technology guru on ADKHighPeaksForum can give me some advice. How many GB's should I be looking for given my propensity for taking LOTS of digital shots. Is a firewire connection preferable to USB? (My Mac has both.) Someone suggested I look at these brands: Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, but are other manufacturers just as good if I can get a better deal? Are there any reputable online stores which you've dealt with in the past that also offer good service and great deals?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Joanne

[Rivet]

Why not use a DVD burner?

[Neil]

Why not use a DVD burner?
Funny you would mention that. I just bought one and burned a ton of pics onto some DVD's which I have stored in my office. I think there is even a dual something DVD that holds 10G of data.

The case here is that with 7000 (and counting) pics at say, 4 meg each she's still going to have a lot of discs to manage.

If you have already decided on the HD then my advice would be to get one with as much capacity as exists. Do those things simply plug in with a USB cable (making them easy to reove from your premises)?

[TFR]

HDs last longer than DVDs...

I have a 120 GIG USB Drive, it's faster than my PCs HD. I use it for backup of this sort.

[Neil]

HDs last longer than DVDs...
Do you mean the discs themselves or the writing mechanism?

[hawk]

Joanne, I think a 100 GB drive will be plenty large enough. I also agree that you should burn the pics to cd or dvd for archives as well. thats keep them safe in case of a drive failure.

you can access your photos much faster on the Hard Drive.

Every year burn your pictures to new cd/dvd's since the media will eventually deteriorate whether you play them or not.

As far as usb vs firewire I can't answer that, I have never had firewire or heard from anyone that does, either was.

I do know that USB 2.0 is more then fast enough for my needs.

I just checked my photos folder on my hard drive. I have about 4500 pics, and some are real high res uncompressed tif files and I am only using 3 gigs of space.

So using that as an example a 100 gig drive should hold 150,000 pics.

[Edelweiss]

Thanks for the info everybody. I already burn copies of my pics on CD's. For convenience and time savings I will probably get a DVD burner since my I-Mac G4 doesn't burn DVD's. The external HD was meant to create another redundant copy. I wondered, Hawk, how long CD's and DVD's last and you answered my question. Now comes the fun part - getting a good deal on the best equipment with the most memory I can afford.
Thanks again for your help!
Joanne

[TFR]

Do you mean the discs themselves or the writing mechanism?I mean that Hard Drive data generally is readable much longer than DVD Data (or at least that was true with CDs). I'm not sure what actually fails in a hard drive, the motor, or the platter, etc...

BTW, Darren created a new group for Photography over on VFTT.....

[jbreen]

I picked up a 120gb firewire drive a few years ago and it does an excellent job at backing up my two iBooks - fast too. The drawback is I use a Windows laptop for work which cannot use firewire so that is backed up to CDs. Using the drive to transfer files is also out of the question, so I would look at USB just for the portability and versatility. If you format it so Windows reads it, it will still be readable by OS X, but not vice versa.

As a tertiary backup, you can also for $100/yr get a dot mac account and backup up to Apple's servers.

Jim

[Mavs00]

Joanne, one thing to note. Since you are using a mac (and iPhoto), make sure to burn the DVD/cd's correctly so that they immediatly get recognized as an iPhoto library. How do you do that, beats me, I'm too much of a moron to figure these things out.

I'll ask Katie, she knows how and have her respond. btw, I just got her a 80 gig portable hand drive. It's about the same size as an Palm Pilot device and it connect via Firewire2.

[Antlerpeak]

Joanne, one thing to note. Since you are using a mac (and iPhoto), make sure to burn the DVD/cd's correctly so that they immediatly get recognized as an iPhoto library. How do you do that, beats me, I'm too much of a moron to figure these things out.

I'll ask Katie, she knows how and have her respond. btw, I just got her a 80 gig portable hand drive. It's about the same size as an Palm Pilot device and it connect via Firewire2.

Just a few thoughts, hard drives as well as cd/dvd media can and do fail from time to time. Placing all on a single drive runs the risk of losing all if there is a massive failure of the drive. If the pics are on a collection of cds for example and you lose a disk you only lost a portion of your total collection.

I have mine burned to cds. As they are fairly inexpensive and I do not have much blind faith in the media I made copies of each disk. If one fails I will immediately make another back up from the surviving disk. An 8mp camera tends to create quite large picture files. I have not counted but you still get a lot of pictures at the 3000k plus size on the disk.

I would think if using an external hard drive to store photos I'd still want a back up in some form.

[Edelweiss]

Joanne, one thing to note. Since you are using a mac (and iPhoto), make sure to burn the DVD/cd's correctly so that they immediatly get recognized as an iPhoto library.

Tim-
I just finished making copies of my pics, organized by year, on 6 DVD's. (Yes, my Mac DOES burn DVD's as well as CD's!) I used 13.5 GB of memory for 7686 photos. (I take pics using HIGH or FINE image quality and 2272 image size in jpeg or tif format.)
I burned them so that they could be viewed in Windows or by a photo processing company, but they will also be recognized by I-Photo. I thought this would be preferable to burning them so that they can be viewed in I-Photo only.
Still researching external hardrives.
Joanne

[Edelweiss]

Hi All-

After reading all of your informative, thoughtful posts and doing more research, I purchased a Seagate dual interface (USB and Firewire) 300 GB external hard drive for $149.00 through Amazon.com. It uses "BounceBack" software which works well with my Mac. I can backup my entire hard drive or use the cafeteria style option. I can back up manually or set it to schedule automatic back ups. It's quiet and sits unobtrusively to the side of the computer. I'm very pleased with the purchase.
Thanks again for your help!

Joanne

[TFR]

Hi All-

After reading all of your informative, thoughtful posts and doing more research, I purchased a Seagate dual interface (USB and Firewire) 300 GB external hard drive for $149.00 through Amazon.com. It uses "BounceBack" software which works well with my Mac. I can backup my entire hard drive or use the cafeteria style option. I can back up manually or set it to schedule automatic back ups. It's quiet and sits unobtrusively to the side of the computer. I'm very pleased with the purchase.
Thanks again for your help!

JoanneI don't know if you have another physical location to store the drive, but I keep mine physically separated from the PC, unless I am doing a backup. This is another step to protect against fire, theft, or other catastrophe.