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 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.
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 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 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’).
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?