a bit of a scare

 While on my little break, I had a heart-stopping moment when I thought the hard drive that stores all my completed photo and video projects for some reason wouldn't mount onto my Mac and had died.

I tried several times and re-boots until it eventually spluttered into life.  Of course, I have a back-up but when you're down to potentially just one copy of something it can get a little twitchy.  

Anyway, panic over I decided to buy an external Solid-State Drive (SSD) to keep them on.  They are much more reliable and faster to read to and write from than any spinning hard drive, and I figured that I'd now have three copies of my most important media.

And now while the files are transferring over to my new drive, I started thinking about how far I (and no doubt all of us) have come in terms of data storage.

imagine losing some of your data...

I can remember my first "bunch of beige boxes" PC and the minuscule amount of storage I had, and needed!  I think it was a 32GB hard drive.  My system now has more RAM than that!  And I used to back it all up to a number of CDs and floppy disc drives (remember those?!).

I then graduated to larger and larger internal drives, reaching 1 terabyte (TB) eventually, before deciding that it was far better and safer to store my data on an external drive; then two; then... you get the picture.

Fast forward to today, when I have over 20 TB of available storage spread across six different drives.

...or even all of it!!!

All my current year's photo and video raw files are on their own respective SSD, and as you'll have read my completed projects are on a third.  I then have two spinning hard drives for my archived photo and media data (6 and 8 TB respectively) and a further 2 TB drive housing my music and movies.

This requires a back-up strategy of course, and mine means that at no time from capture of an image or video right through to completion am I left with just one copy of anything.

As I still have every single digital raw image or piece of video I've ever shot since 2011, I don't think I could sleep sound at night knowing I could lose it all with the loss of a hard drive.

I'm already thinking ahead to what I'll do when my archive drives are full.  

I could just disconnect them from my computer and keep them, along with their back-ups, in a drawer somewhere and just buy new drives.  Or I might build some sort of network-based storage (NAS) which can be set to mirror data automatically for ultimate peace of mind.

Who knows, but I'm fast approaching the point when I'll need to decide.

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It's that time of the year when I get all creative and film a new trailer and video intro for my YouTube channel.  You can watch this year's effort by clicking below: