Future proofing storage space - brainstorming

[Stephen]

I would appreciate feedback from other PSu users, however crazy, please. My current tunnel vision is based on what has been working well for years, but it’s approaching limits.

(original text has now been corrected below "My PSu database is")
My images catalogued in PSu now fill 4TB of a 5TB external drive, so by my standards, already full. This drive is regularly backed up to an identical drive. That accounts for just 2 of the drives which I take on travels which is most of the time.

I could delay this plan by moving older files to another drive, but as they are smaller, that would not save so much space. 5TB appears to be the largest ready-made portable drive on the market (discounting a tiny 8TB SSD I saw for $999)!

* The database grows by approx. 0.5TB annually, so how to progress? *

1. Put all new files on a new drive and duplicate to yet another one? That would be 4 drives just for images & backups! Then I will run out of ports to connect 2 of them to the laptop together with a trackball.

2. Put all old files on larger 5” (internal) drives in a housing, which will then not be available during travel? Inaccessibility for a random file or series which might be needed.

3. Go down the NAS route, which I have never tackled before? I’m often in areas with bad internet.

4. Put a 3” (internal) drive into an external housing? These are available much larger than 5TB. It would be a custom build, but would PSu and Mac support it?

One further thought is that I used Capture One C1 and some versions hard encode the location of work-in-progress files in sessions. I usually have a lot of unfinished sessions. They can be remapped if the drive changes, but it has to be done on a file by file basis, which is quite crazy and time consuming procedure. So best not to change drives IF possible.

Thanks in advance for any ideas and a Happy New Year to everybody!

Stephen

[Hert]

Hi Stephen,

The biggest space saver is lowering the preview size in PSU. The default since V6 is 1440px because for V6 that always suffice. In older versions the default preview size was calculated based on your monitor resolution. So if your preview size is currently higher than 1440px then I recommend to lower it to 1440. If you decide to lower the preview size then you'll have to rebuild all the thumbs/previews. After that compact the catalog and you should see a decrease in catalog size.

[Stephen]

Thanks Hert and sorry for my mistake. My PSu catalog is not 4TB. I was referring to the size of all catalogued image files on my hard drive. I would prefer to keep all images on one single drive and not to split them, IF possible.

A Happy & Successful New Year, Hert

[Mke]

As I have no need to share over a LAN, for my main PC I chose a motherboard with an inbuilt ('fake') RAID controller, rather than a NAS device. It's currently providing 12TB of storage, split into two 6TB logical drives, each consisting of two 3TB Western Digital Red physical drives in RAID 0 configuration. If I was specifying it today, rather than 8 years ago, I'd probably choose their 6TB hard drives to double the capacity.

You'd need to choose the correct motherboard to do this (made a reputable company for compatibility in case it needs replacing at any time - I choose Asus), or buy a separate (relatively expensive) hardware RAID controller.

Of course I don't have this available when traveling.

[Stephen]

Thanks

Mke,

I fear that would be difficult or impossible on a Mac and of course it doesn't cover travel, as you mentioned. But it was useful to hear a different approach.

How do other users here store a large number of images?

Happy New Year to all!

[G8DHE]

I have 4TB of RAID protected storage on my server with access from the web as needed and then a subset of files (mainly last years worth) on my laptop for when I'm out and about and someone wants to see something when I don't have network coverage. PSU is on the main workstation and laptop and have remote access if needed over and above web access.

[Stephen]

Thanks for the feedback. I sometimes need to collate images by theme, taken over many years. Some of them maybe not yet even be processed, so web access in not practical. I always have a backlog as priorities often change. I must probably accept, again, that being on the forefront -- or "bleeding" edge of technology can be very expensive. I often needs things which are not yet available --- bad or good --- but demanding nonetheless. C'est la vie.