I work with photos and videos and cannot comprehend downsizing to 2TB. Or even finding time to go through and selectively cull old footage. I shot a simple one-day drone-only vineyard job last week that generated 140GB, not including graded renders and photo edits afterwards.
On any given day, I will have 5-7 external drives connected, plus a NAS box. There are another 15+ drives (2-5TB) in the drawer beside me. SSDs as drives I actively work from and platter drives for backups or rendered footage.
I feel like the secret is to nailing the workflow at ingest/render because it’s painful trying to going through en masse and a year later.
Edit: I’ll add that I think one problem is that in shooting with a drone, there’s less to cull. Everything is in focus. A high percentage of the photos are usable in media libraries for the client and about 95% of all video shot is. My wife is a photographer and far fewer shots make the cut because of focus, or a facial expression, etc.
If you are doing it for a client (?) then you just need to back it up and charge them an appropriate fee. There is not much cognitive load as to whether it is worth keeping or not as the client decides.
With hobby stuff and especially family photos it becomes hard to decide whether to keep it all, spend time curating it, maybe down sizing it. If you can get all your memories in 2Tb or less it makes backup management way more easier in terms of disks and time taken to back it up etc.
I should probably just add a 10% line item for drives and archiving.
But also a good amount is speculative - shoot a location and then try to sell the content to various parties. Sometimes sell stuff a year or more after shooting it.
Keeping one copy isn’t onerous or expensive, but the mental baggage of shuffling around multiple copies gets a bit much.
I don't think this "I [...] cannot comprehend downsizing to 2TB" in the top-level comment is really a useful comparison to the article (or rest of the thread) if you're talking about data that is from clients; not your own. Of course you can't "comprehend" that if it's not-very-compressible sensor data that you need to keep on someone else's behalf or for your business (the speculative part, that's a business investment).
Fair point, but my main initial comparison was of photographer versus photographer/videographer in the clutter/hoarding sense. I would have a lot more than 2TB that is just personal holiday content over the years. The video content from one camera on one holiday last year is 290GB and I wouldn't want to cull much of it because unlike a traditional camera on the ground, there's nothing out of focus, not 10+ shots trying to get everyone unblinking, etc.
Here is an idea: have "forever" directory and "for 3 years" directory. Stuff lands in "for 3 years" directory by default and gets removed automatically.
"Forever" is only for stuff you personally think it's exceptionally well made.
Why do you keep 5-7 external drives connected at all times instead of a NAS with all that storage, RAID5/6 or equivalent, and 10 Gbps network interface? Also the 2-5TB drivers in the drawer look like a pretty big risk of failure, the size suggests they are all old drives. I would rather build a NAS with 12TB drives (cost effective, larges is quite expensive) and plenty of redundancy, maybe a 0.5TB nVME or SATA SSD as cache for better speed. The only problem with such a setup is speed, unless you go for multiple RAID5/6 arrays the performance will be quite limited.
Because I work with those drives from multiple locations and don't want to cart around the NAS box (which I use as an extra backup instead). Home, office, location, while away, etc. Current method is survivable, it's just a lot to keep track of. Maybe there's an alternative I'm not considering though.
The 2-4 connected SSDs are usually projects I'm actively working intensely on that day or week, or they're annual Lightroom drives where I still need to access 2021-23 pretty regularly.
The 2-3 platter drives have slightly older projects, or edited/rendered files that I need to regularly send/shuffle/folio/etc but that don't need to be quite as fast. Or they're drives I'm assembling to post out.
On any given day, I will have 5-7 external drives connected, plus a NAS box. There are another 15+ drives (2-5TB) in the drawer beside me. SSDs as drives I actively work from and platter drives for backups or rendered footage.
I feel like the secret is to nailing the workflow at ingest/render because it’s painful trying to going through en masse and a year later.
Edit: I’ll add that I think one problem is that in shooting with a drone, there’s less to cull. Everything is in focus. A high percentage of the photos are usable in media libraries for the client and about 95% of all video shot is. My wife is a photographer and far fewer shots make the cut because of focus, or a facial expression, etc.