MacBook Air out of storage room- best way to store pics?

[NHDave]

Originally Posted by thelopez2

You say tomato I say potato and I'll refer to SSD as a hard drive.

You'll be refering to it incorrectly, but what ever floats your boat

[RD5050]

Originally Posted by brooklyn1234

I have a MacBook air that is about a year and a half old- I was cleaning up my system a little today and realized I only have 7 GB free . The majority of my storage is being eaten up by photos and home videos. What is my best option for storing these (and deleting them off my computer) so that I can free up some space? I was looking into external hard drives, but I've heard that those sometimes don't last too long and I would hate to lose my data. What about all of the icloud/online things? I don't know much about those.

Thanks!

I would just get a large external hard drive as a backup.

The size you should get depends on how much storage space you think you will need?

Nobody here knows what that storage space size is except you, based on how much data you have now, and how much you plan to have in the future?

Since you will likely just use it to store data, your external drive will be rarely accessed, in comparison to your MacBook's internal drive.

So your external drive should last for many, many years.

If your data is very important to you, you might consider getting two external drives, and have a second one as an additional backup?

Then after copying your videos off your laptop's drive onto the external drive(s), just delete the majority of them from your laptop's drive, and only leave the ones you are currently watching.

Your photos are not likely the problem, so I don't see any reason to delete them from the laptop. Just make a backup of them onto the external drive, and keep them on the laptop as well for convenience.

Then after deleting the videos from your laptop, defrag your drive, so it will run faster. If it's nearly full, it probably has a lot of fragmented files.

[thelopez2]

I guess I made an assumption that the OP is using iPhoto. This is what I used to see that iPhoto and virtual machines where using most of my space.

Disk Inventory X

[tpk-nyc]

Originally Posted by brooklyn1234

I have a MacBook air that is about a year and a half old- I was cleaning up my system a little today and realized I only have 7 GB free . The majority of my storage is being eaten up by photos and home videos. What is my best option for storing these (and deleting them off my computer) so that I can free up some space? I was looking into external hard drives, but I've heard that those sometimes don't last too long and I would hate to lose my data. What about all of the icloud/online things? I don't know much about those.

Thanks!

Unless you have a truly enormous number of photos, your likely problem is the video, not the pics. I have a Macbook Pro with a SSD and use multiple storage options.

First, you must backup your system with Time Machine and an external hard drive. It’s quick, inexpensive, and there’s no reason not to do it. When you buy an external hard drive, make sure you get one with the right connection for you machine. You don’t want to use USB if you have a faster connection like Firewire or Thunderbolt.

Second, register for iCloud and sync all of you media (iPhoto, iTunes, etc.). While you’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick edit of your photo and trash the obvious mistakes, useless pics, etc. Many of us have multiple or bad photos that we never bothered to delete. Also, if you’re in iPhoto, make sure you delete them from the Library, not merely an Album.

Finally, you have to deal with your video. I suggest uploading your edited and finished videos to a site like Vimeo. You can password protect them if you want. Then move all of your raw video files to an external hard drive. Firewire and/or Thunderbolt connections are fast enough that you can edit video directly from an external hard drive (without bringing the files onto your laptop).

Note: You didn’t mention it, but another culprit may be your media files in iTunes (audio, and especially movies/TV shows). Syncing with iCloud allows you to archive the larger files and free up space on your machine.

[RayinAK]

Originally Posted by thelopez2

I used a bunch of the older WD drives and have never updated the firmware, but I guess I should. I tried to google this issue but just ran across a bunch of issues with Mavrick update erasing data on external usb drives in general. Can you point me to some reading material about the WD issue.

Is the firmware update you are talking about on the actually hard drive or the enclosure?

There is a problem between Maverick plus other Mac OS' and WD hard drives. WD drives come with what is called "Smartware." When I connect a WD drive to my computer and use Disk Utility to reformat or partition it, the software in the drive won't be deleted since it is embedded in the drive as a firmware.

What WD did was to create a new firmware that prevents Maverick from deleting data from the drive, and only computers using Maverick are affected. Since I use Maverick, I downloaded the firmware upgrade from WD, and upgraded each WD drive I have.
http://wdc.com/wdproducts/wdsmartwar...Generic&os=mac

[Kees]

Originally Posted by brooklyn1234

I have a MacBook air that is about a year and a half old- I was cleaning up my system a little today and realized I only have 7 GB free . The majority of my storage is being eaten up by photos and home videos. What is my best option for storing these (and deleting them off my computer) so that I can free up some space? I was looking into external hard drives, but I've heard that those sometimes don't last too long and I would hate to lose my data. What about all of the icloud/online things? I don't know much about those.

Thanks!

I have a 128 GB MBA I bought last August and I paired it with a 2 TB Time Capsule.

AirPort Time Capsule - 2TB - Apple Store (U.S.)

It also serves as my router... 802.11ac WiFi is nice.

[winkosmosis]

You could use a Time capsule which is itself backed up to a USB hard drive