If you’re a photographer, you likely know the struggle of trying to find space on your computer so that you may empty your memory cards and continue to snap photos. Current cameras have great resolution and speedy shutters. With all of the advancements in subject tracking and high-speed continuous shooting, there are more keepers than ever. All of this means that you’re likely filling up hard drives or your phone’s memory faster than ever.

Let’s take a moment to talk about data management. If you talk to a legitimate IT folks, they may talk about how these precious drives fail all the time. It doesn’t matter if they’re solid state or spinning disk, all will fail eventually.

Some quick things to think about:

• Storing precious data in one place is not enough. If your images only live on one hard drive, it only takes one failure to wipe them out.
• Older drives have a higher likelihood of failing. This means that your old, portable 1TB drive that you bought 8 years ago is more likely to fail than a new 4TB drive that probably sells at the same price today.
• If in doubt, the 3-2-1 backup system is what most data professionals rely upon. I’m just a guy out here brightening folks’ days with my pictures. Hospitals don’t rely on my data to save lives. But, I’d still like to hold onto my images as long as possible.

Some things to consider as a photographer:

• Your memory card counts as one place where your data lives. If you have images on both a memory card and a hard drive, you now have the data stored in two places and would require two failures to eliminate your data. Back up your data when possible and carry extra memory cards. If your camera takes two memory cards, use the duplicate write setting to maintain a backup. Just be careful to check the contents of memory cards before formatting cards in the camera.
• Hard drives and memory cards are cheap. Your time and mental health is valuable. The stress of losing data can be a lot. When in doubt, buy another hard drive.

Use your resources. Hard drives are cheap, but the housings for hard drives are even less expensive. The image in this post is of a OWC RAID two-drive housing that I got from work. In simple terms, it is a housing that holds two hard drives. Your computer can manage these multi-drive RAID housings in many ways. When I got this from work, it had two 2TB Seagate drives in it. Those drives are too small for me, but I got a couple of replacement, and inexpensive, drives from newegg.com. I will use the housing to create a mirrored RAID drive. That means that the computer will see both drives as one and write identical information to both – one drive fails, there will be a backup.

Consider buying drive housings and drives separately. You can look up failure rate data on specific drives and cherry-pick the ones with the lowest failure rates. You can also re-use the housing when you buy a new drive. As an example – when you upgrade the internal storage to a higher capacity. Just be sure that you’re looking for “internal hard drives” in your search and check that the connection/dimensions of the new drive match the housing that you have. They come in all shapes and sizes.

Have some fun with it. Once you land on a drive, you can pick some fun housings. I have a few M.2 drive housings that I like to use for my portable drives. These little NVME M.2 drives are insanely fast – they’re the same type of drives that gaming computers and PlayStations take. The also come in lots of sizes. I’ve got a silly looking little 1TB drive that has a built-in USB C connection. That makes it really nice for travel.