Free Space Drought

dermaus

Regular
Location
Pacific Northwest, USA
Name
Jeff
My 4.5 year old HP desktop computer has all but bought the farm. It's slow, kicks me in the nethers anytime I ask it to do something other than just sit there and make noise, tells me my copy of Windows isn't genuine and, quite critically, its 750GB hard drive is about 90% full - about 70% of which is made up of images and videos.

I'm pretty sure that a new computer of some sort is in order, but finances are a bit tight right now. Just wondering what others here do for storage of their precious images and videos when things get a bit tight and squidgy. I've copied about 99% of my images and videos to an external terabyte hard drive with the idea that I would then delete them from my computer's HD, freeing up over 500GB of space, but I'm feeling very anxious about doing that.

I also know, as a 900lb gorilla in the room, that I need to cull quite a number of my images, but working full time as well helping raise a 13 year old, 4 year old, and 11 month old zaps away nearly all of the time to do it.

All ideas are appreciated!
 
Try Amazon Photo Storage in the Cloud - 12 bucks a year for unlimited photo file storage and recognizes all sorts of formats including RAW. For video you only get 5 GB - for more than that, you'll have to ante up to the 60 buck plan. I uploaded all of mine, but I sorted and culled them first. Made it easier to search for.
 
storage is getting cartoonishly cheap. you can usually find a 1TB for around $50....and 2TB for not much more. I'd get 2 and have the same stuff on both. Then you can rest easy and delete them from your computer. Both drives won't fail at the same time. Heck, mine only get plugged in once a year....they'll probably live forever.
 
I have redundancy with external HD + SmugMug, which provides unlimited photo and video storage for $65/year, iirc. I've also started to back up the "really good" shots on a separate external HD, as much for convenience as safety. Sadly, this drive will never, ever be full.

I'm with you dermaus, I can't hit the delete button on my computer until I have the dual back-up thing working. I don't think it wise to trust a single external drive.
 
Thanks for all the great ideas. I'm really liking the second external hard drive one. I had an annoying experience with my current one having to do with backing up and permissions so I'm a little leery, but that's more so my technical ignorance than the hardware.
I recently tried online backup with Crashplan, but when I realized that my initial backup was going to take at least three months, I quickly scrapped that plan!
 
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