Oh bollocks. If you're going to act like an ass and get called out on it, don't try to come up with a high-minded excuse instead.
Your own snide remarks about mine and possibly other posters about TB vs GB doesn't deserve a serious answer. However:
There's at least two obvious reasons to someone who was genuinely curious as to why someone would choose 2TB drives as backups.
Firstly they only cost ~20% or $140 more than 1TB drives, so unless you're incredibly tight, it simply makes sense to buy the larger drives.
Secondly, perhaps reprazent runs uses his backups as part of a schedule that incorporates longer term data archival based on the traditional multiple full+differential sets because that's what his software makes or lets him do. Maybe some people don't think about backups along these lines, but you have demonstrated consistently that you are sufficiently well informed about IT matters to have thought of this as a possibility instead trying to belittle him.
My question is not really a technical one - it's to do with the concept of taking and keeping so many photographs, that's what I find difficult to understand. I estimate that I may have a total of about 2-3000 photos that I have taken and kept over the 30ish years that I have been taking them, and I guess I take "photos to keep" at the rate of 1-200 per year now (plus a load of other "temporary photos" that get deleted not long after). And even with that small (apparently by current standards) number of photos there are many that I haven't looked at since I took them. I guess I'm just trying to understand why people take so many photos and what they do with them. It seems like the world is accumulating digital detritus at an astonishing rate.
If anything, the decision to purchase a 2TB hard drive vs a 1TB drive is less to do with technical requirements than simple economics. By buy a 1TB hard drive for 500 when you can buy a 2TB hard drive for 650? For the cost of a medicore meal, most people can future proof yourself for an extra year or three.
In the case of reprazent, he mentions Lightroom. If he's a serious user of it (and it sounds like that he is), then he is likely to be using it's file management features that make it easy and practical to manage/evaluate/sort thousands of images quite quickly. The tech has made it easy to manage images, whereas in the distant past actively managing and using serveral thousand negatives, prints or slides, would have been a massive pain.
I don't use Lightroom, so for me photo management is quite laborious.
I have a fairly sizeble collection of images. In terms of number of files, but moreso in terms of data (I have very large files as storage is cheap). I keep them partially to trigger my own memories, and partially because I assume that one day my kids or grandchildren might be interested enough to have a browse through them. I have quickly looked at most of my older photos once in the past year, and my estimate for this 'older' set is two thousand.
And of course there are the smallish number of photographers that get paid for their work- they have to archive many thousands of images for many years.
Last edited by jgl; 29-09-2013 at 09:59 PM.
You'll think they'll have time? Seems to me they'll be too busy taking their own photos...
They' probably have time for it at least once in their lives. To at least browse. I know bugger all about my own family history so I'd like to leave more than the garbled orally transmitted story to make it further down the generational stream.
Even if they don't care, I care enough to keep the records for myself. Partially for memory, but also because I enjoy the act of photography itself. I've interacted with at least one other person on this board who seems much happier discarding memories as quickly as memory allows, so I guess there are all sorts out there.