If you are saving you raw images only to your computer’s hard drive you will eventually be very upset when you run out of space or, worse yet, have a hard drive failure.

The first thing you should be doing is importing your images from your camera directly to an external hard dive.

• First and foremost an external drive will be used less than your primary drive, which means it will last longer.
• Second, external drives often offer larger storage capacities. They can easily be swapped out for another drive when you fill one as well.
• Third you computer will actually run faster. This is because you are not using the same hard drive that you computer is using for processing.

There are several options when it comes to adding external hard drives. There are desktop models, portable drives, and more recently solid state drives (SSD)

The general structure we follow is this…. We have 2 desktop 8TB external drives per year.. a 2020 and a 2020 backup. Smaller sizes are available. Typically 4TB or 5TB. While traveling we used to carry at least one portable external drive the was 4TB. Now we have upgraded to portable SSD drives. SSD drives are more durable, shock resistant, and read/write faster than standard hard drives.

Once home, we transfer the files from the SSD to the desktop drives.