External hard drive

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
November 1, 2021
2 replies
432 views

It seems many people work with photos on an external hard drive. Why use an external hard drive instead of keeping the photos on the PC or Mac? Is the reason just about the size of the photo library?

I have been using Bridge and Adobe Photoshop Elements 19 to work with scanned geneaolgy photos on a Windows PC.

How to

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L

Lumigraphics

Legend

I have 350,000+ images in my Lightroom library. Over 5TB.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Hi Douglas,

Yes, it's for space reasons. Currently I have about 1-3/4 TB of images and I have a single TB of hard drive space.

As it is I keep all my images and all my extra documents on a 4TB hard drive. I have a 2nd 4 TB hard drive that I back up the first one to the 2nd one at least once a week. I also have a 3rd 4 TB drive I use as my Mac's Time Machine drive of just my hard drive.

I do not know how much you do with Photoshop Elements but I'm using the regular PS and it likes and wants a lot of caching space. I keep my Mac's 1 TB drive only about half full so there is a lot of room for PS to do what it wants.

Oh, lastly, I also use a Cloud service (BackBlaze) to back up my computer and the primary drive so incase the house burns down I still have all of my files.

I hope that explains why I use external drives, it's similar with most others who have external drives.

douglasm33532919Author

Participant

Thanks Gary! I thought that might be the case, but none of the YouTube videos I watched to learn how to use Bridge better ever stated why they were using an external hard drive.

I am not a professional photographer, just a family historian who has about 1,500 genealogy photos and about 7,000 family photos. Not the many compared to most of those in the Community.

gary_sc

Community Expert

Those genealogy and family photos are more important than you could ever imagine. If you do not have a backup system now, please get it as soon as you can. I also STRONGLY suggest you have both an external hard drive back up (and back up to that hard drive at least once a week or just after a big update) AND a cloud system. The former is when your hard drive crashes the latter is when your house burns down. I'm not saying those things will happen, I'm just pointing out what's needed so you can sleep at night. [BTW, if you're Mac based I can recommend a backup software, if you're PC, I'm sure others can.]

However, the chances of a hard drive crash are significantly more likely than your house burning down. I've lost 3 hard drives over the past 36 years and never lost a thing.

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