Advice on Macbook / Storage for Work

[oligopoly]

Hi all, I’m after some advice to help my wife, who works from home as a photo editor. She uses an iMac to work on clients’ photos (using Photoshop CC & Lightroom) and then uploads the finished work to Dropbox for them to grab. Then they upload the next job to Dropbox for her. In addition to using Dropbox to archive all of her work photos she also has a few external hard drives – one as a backup, and 2 or 3 as archive. She’s now looking at a Macbook Pro – partly to add convenience/portability (so she can work in the kitchen/coffee shop etc.) but also as she says she wants to keep her work photos separate from her personal photos. She was disappointed when she found out that you can’t generally (or at all) get a Macbook with a 1TB or larger hard drive built in. I’m struggling to help her see that saving photos on a hard drive is kinda old-fashioned practice and that saving to the cloud – or even a NAS – would be preferable going forwards.


I feel she should just delete work that’s, say, 2 years old, which would help reduce the amount of stuff she needs to store, but I think she’s reluctant to do so. Any advice or comments on her current setup and whether my thinking might be best ? I’m sure others are in a similar situation. Thanks all.

 

[wittyphrase]

You can get the MBP with up to 2TB storage. It's expensive, but you can. I'm sure there are plenty of professional photogs around here, but those I know and even myself as a hobbyist are reluctant to rely on a single method of storage for photos. Backups of backups. Some folks I know buy relatively inexpensive internal HDDs as archives and they access them as needed with a docking station. I'll yield to a professional to speak authoritatively on how long they tend to keep work photos.

 

[maflynn]

I’m struggling to help her see that saving photos on a hard drive is kinda old-fashioned practice and that saving to the cloud – or even a NAS – would be preferable going forwards.

Going with a cloud solution means you need to ensure the provider is provide adequate security and backups. DropBox is something that I would recommend to use for that purpose. They have a great track record and you (and/or she) already uses that. Going with a NAS solution has limitations as if she's not plugged into the home network, she'll not have access to her images. Some NAS providers offer a "cloud" service to access your NAS, but I thought I read there's been some security issues.

I prefer having my photos stored locally, but that means configuring the MBP with a large SSD. The other solution is to use a portable external drive which are dirt cheap at this point.
[doublepost=1485438085][/doublepost]By the way, I use hard drives to archive my images, there's nothing wrong with the "old fashion" storage solution. You don't need performance for saved images, just the ability to save them and access them when you need too.

 

[oligopoly]

thanks guys. Yes we pay for a large storage option in Dropbox, so makes sense to use that. On top of external hard drives too perhaps. So it seems that maybe her approach isn't so old fashioned after all! I guess the message is just to do whatever works.

 

[maflynn]

So it seems that maybe her approach isn't so old fashioned after all! I guess the message is just to do whatever works.

I have two or three external drives, because its a lot faster to get my data off an external drive then trying to pull it down from the cloud.

Somewhat different, but consider cloud backup solutions. Do you want to restore 1TB of data from a hard drive that is connected to your computer via the USB port, or download the data on wifi (or wait for them to send you a series of DVD discs which won't work for you because the MBP has no optical drive).

My point is not bashing cloud providers but sometimes the old solutions continue to be the best.

 

[oligopoly]

I have two or three external drives, because its a lot faster to get my data off an external drive then trying to pull it down from the cloud.

All sound advice, thanks. I think the key thing here is my wife shouldn't ever need to pull 1TB off a hard drive or cloud - it is really just to back up each small job (if that makes sense). I think a combination of external drives and dropbox is probably best then, maybe pushing the majority out to the latter.

 

[maflynn]

ver need to pull 1TB off a hard drive or cloud

Nope but the need could arise to work on an image that is on the cloud but she has no wifi available. Of course this is a moot point if you're using DropBox because it stores your files on your hard drive and the cloud. But then that requires you having a large enough SSD to contain all those files.