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I am thinking of getting an external hard drive for my photos but Im not sure what size to get.My first thought was to get as big as possible ie:-1 terabyte,but then what if it goes wrong thats a lot of pictures,so next thought was to get a 250 and then another when I fill that one.

What do you think?

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Canon 7D
Canon 580EX 11 Speedlite
Sigma 10-20mm
Sigma 24-70mm
Sigma 70-300mm
Kenko x2 teleplus

NEVER rely on only ONE hard drive to store your pictures... you should always have one copy on your pc/external HDD A or one on external HDD A and one on external HDD B

Trust me, I'm exchanging half a dozen external HDDs every day where I'm working - the failure rate is around 2-3%...

So if you want to store your pictures only externally, get 2 drives and double store your pictures. Get whatever size you can afford... the other, pricier but more comfortable option is a network access server (NAS) with 2 HDDs in a RAID 1.

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Canon EOS 5D Mark II | Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM | Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM | Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM
...and a lot of lighting stuff. -> complete list of equipment

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It depends on your paranoia level, but certainly I'd agree you should aim to have at least two copies of important photos, kept in different locations to help prevent loss of any photos ever.

With that in mind, it depends on how you want to work. For example, I used to store photos on my main computer and manually copy it to an external HD occasionally. Now I have a dedicated photo HD in my main computer and I use software to backup to another same size HD in a networked computer. But it could as easily be an external drive too.

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.

yeah at the moment, storing them on my normal PC HDD and ocasionally copying them manually on an external one is what I do, too.

Pretty soon, I'll do a RAID 5 though (probably with 3-4 1TB HDDs) so I can just store my pictures and if a disk screws up, I can simply exchange it with a new one without any data loss I guess I'll still ocasionally save them on the external HDD... you never know.

I guess I'm a little paranoid myself, as I get at least 2-3 people every day who are pretty devastated when I tell them, that there is no way (~1000$+ data recovery institutes aside) to recover their family pictures from that external HDD which just decided to commit suicide with a headcrash

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Canon EOS 5D Mark II | Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM | Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM | Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM
...and a lot of lighting stuff. -> complete list of equipment

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I use my main drive in my laptop with special software to write a backup to an external hard drive. And for the storing all my pictures in two different places (physical) I make a backup on my Ipod once a month.
So when I'm at home all my copy's are in my house, but when I'm away I always carry my Ipod with me.

Ok It ain't ideal in the highest paranoia level, but I can't do better, I can't be bothered with doing it better.

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www.pimvandevelde.com

I think storing your pictures in 3 different disks is enough. Of course if your house burns down, they're gone - but as long as you don't make a living from those pictures, who cares? All I'm saying is that hard drives go bad pretty frequently, so storing the stuff on 2 drives minimizes the chance of data loss to a VERY level

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Canon EOS 5D Mark II | Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM | Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM | Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM
...and a lot of lighting stuff. -> complete list of equipment

Website
Blog