I mostly make short videos of family trips using drone footage and other media. I’m running out of space on my drone’s memory card and my computer. Do you delete the uncut videos once you’re done with them, or do you archive them on something like an external hard drive? I usually save a 4K version for YouTube and a 1080p one for social media, and those take up a lot of space.
My laptop only has a 500GB SSD, with 300GB set aside for storage, and my drone’s card is 256GB. What do you guys do?
I use a 64TB NAS to stash all my footage. Honestly, I probably won’t look at most of it again, but it’s there just in case.
Noah said:
I use a 64TB NAS to stash all my footage. Honestly, I probably won’t look at most of it again, but it’s there just in case.
Same here. I save almost everything to my NAS and make sure I never rely on just one card as the only place for storage.
Noah said:
I use a 64TB NAS to stash all my footage. Honestly, I probably won’t look at most of it again, but it’s there just in case.
Exactly. But when I need that footage, I NEED it. If I can’t find it, I’ll be annoyed for weeks.
Noah said:
I use a 64TB NAS to stash all my footage. Honestly, I probably won’t look at most of it again, but it’s there just in case.
NAS storage is so affordable now. I recommend getting a 4-bay unit so you can expand it with bigger drives as your collection grows.
I save every single file in full. Storage is cheap, so I use a home NAS. On the road, I upgraded my laptop with two 2TB SSDs and use 4TB external SSDs until I get home to transfer to the NAS. Always keep backups in multiple places—if you only have one copy, it’s not really a backup.
@Charlie
Two is one, and one is none. Always have a backup!
I only keep the footage I actually turn into videos. The rest gets deleted.
I save everything. You never know when it might come in handy. For example, my drone footage recently proved useful after a hurricane hit—it showed the pre-damage state of things I wouldn’t have thought to photograph. It also helps track my progress and how nature changes over time. Spending $400 on redundant drives is worth it in the long run.
I use a 2TB SSD for now. They’re under $100 and do the job fine, but I might look into something more reliable later.
Costco had 5TB drives for $120. I’d recommend getting two and setting them up with RAID mirroring.
I store everything on my NAS. You never know when you’ll need it, and you’ll be glad you kept it. You should think about investing in some external redundant storage.
I store videos locally on an 8TB drive and back them up on a 14TB RAID server.
I use two 1TB external hard drives. One is for photos and videos. To stay organized, I create yearly directories, then folders for each month, and subfolders for events with dates and names (e.g., ‘01-22-2025 Clear Creek narrows’).
If it’s not on social media or something I care about, I delete it. I don’t keep raw or full-length footage.
I have a 20TB external drive where I store all my footage after editing.
I upload everything to the cloud. That works best for me.
Why did tape storage fall out of favor? It could hold tons of data back in the day. Now you can get tapes with up to 45TB, but is drone footage compressible enough to make it worth it?
Tape drives are crazy expensive—thousands of dollars. For that price, you could build multiple NAS setups.
I compress everything with Adobe Media Encoder, upload it to the cloud, and delete the raw files.