I have already deleted so much, old freebies I'll never use, a ton of kits I probably bought but just will never use and I still have almost 1 full TB of scrap stuff. Please tell me I am not alone?! I am trying to reduce how much I keep on my working drive (aka an external hard drive that has all my stuff I use most often) and these two folders are the second biggest only to my photo libraries.
I feel your pain! I switched over to two forms of cloud storage. iCloud and Dropbox. Dropbox is for the older kits I don't want to delete but seldom use. iCloud is for the newer stuff and my layouts. I save layouts as compressed jpegs. But have always kept the original .psd file which is huge. The extra storage = extra $$. I have resigned to this. If ever in the future I can't afford the extra storage, I will delete the .psd files that take up more than 100MG each. The compressed .jpgs are in the KBs - much smaller. I will add, I am not happy that I've had two hard drive failures resulting in the loss of GBs worth of digital kits and creations. But when it happened....it cleared up lots of space Last thing...seeking wine/shopping/and teeth brushing support group. I will be more than happy to join the wine shopping support group!
I tried to do backblaze once. It told me it would take more than 365 days to backup my files!!! I do have a personal cloud, but I never use it. I guess that does give me a thought to get it back working. Then just store the new kits on the working drive. How expensive is your dropbox (if you don't mind sharing)? I am sitting here uploading sticker files for my sister. I'm on the free one b/c I delete everything I share on there.
When my EHD gets pretty full I buy a new one. Copy new & active stuff to it and move forward. The old one becomes my backup. I don't have time or inclination to clean up or clear out. I also have a problem deciding to delete things so I just ignore them.
@Kat If you do try Backblaze again, limit the files it will backup at first. Don't select everything. In other words choose what is the MOST IMPORTANT for you not to lose. For me, that would be photos and finished layouts as far as digi scrapping items go. After that is done, add in the next item on your priority list. Although I will say I had to quit Backblaze because it caused me internet connection problems. I use multiple EHD's for my backups. One is a duplicate of my Digi Scrapping folder on my desktop. If I ever wanted to take my laptop and scrap elsewhere, I could plug it in and have all my current stuff. As soon as I download a new kit or photos, they are copied to that EHD. Another uses the WD backup program to do backups twice a week. Then I have 2 other EHD's that I will update to mirror my computer once a month. It is work but I have the time to do it. Out of curiosity I just checked the size of my Digi Scrapping folder that has my photos, kits, and layouts (full size jpg, pspimage files, and 600x600 size files) and it is 650GB.
The EHD is the cheaper route to go. But after two corrupted HDs, I use cloud based storage. I laugh now about clearing out space. When those HDs got corrupted, I was not a happy camper.
Same here. I have lost count on how many. My currently used ones are a 10 tb, 8 tb, 2 4tb, 1 5 tb and I think I have a 2 tb somewhere here that's supposed to be for time machine. lol. It's out of control. Several have duplicate files though in case one goes down.
I don't use PSD files for my layouts. I save my pages as TIFF and it is incredible how the file is smaller than PSD. for the templates I get when there are not only TIFF options, I delete the PSD version from the folder. you should try do your page in TIFF format
I’ve also had two EHD failures. I lost a lot of older kits but, honestly, have no idea what they were. I use Carbonite now, for all my current digi supplies, photos and layouts. When a designer retires, I move those supplies to a solid state external drive. I don’t keep any freebies for more than a couple of months. If I haven’t used them in that time, I know I won’t. Even so, I still have massive amounts of supplies which I know I should pare down further, I just don’t have the time to invest working on it.
@Kat You are not alone! LAYOUTS: 526 GB SCRAPBOOK SUPPLIES: 736 GB PHOTOS: 855 GB This doesn't include my design files. I'm a huge fan of Backblaze as I had an EHD failure and I had my files within a couple of days.
Oh yes, my photos library, well, it's bad. 2015 and on is over 1.5 TB. And I have photos from 2000 and on. I did limit to most important first on backblaze, lol, it was still way too much. I worry a lot about failures but I try to make three backups for the most important stuff and 2 of the rest. Just in case more than one goes down. It's hard to keep up with the changes though. I did try saving TIF vs PSD and honestly, the difference for me was not much. There were a few PSDs that were a lot higher but most were almost equal or just a tad larger. Maybe I'll revisit that with these new machines and see if I see enough difference to change. I have non scrapbooking PSDs too. I've been making a lot of different things lately like stickers and graphics. My photography stuff also has a lot of layered PSD files. I just changed over my working drive to a 5tb passport and made my 4tb the time machine back ups for both machines. Now I am just organizing and getting rid of what I can. Anyone have any good automatic backup programs or something that finds duplicate files on the same drive? I am on a mac mini and a macbook pro and just haven't found anything that works the way I want. I keep trying to get my husband to make something for me! lol
I would just get bigger storage. But I do back up all my stuff in multiple places (Backblaze, Time Machine EHD, Smugmug). Checked my stats and was surprised I have less than 1Tb of each, stash and layouts. I do not weed out my digistash; rarely do I delete anything, yet I've been collecting since 2007 (and for the first few years I took every freebie I found!) Stash: 405Gb Layouts: 502Gb This would have been higher 2 years ago. Early 2020 I deleted all my PSD files and intend to do so annually because I never want to go back and re-do layouts. Photos & Videos: 2.6TB (yes, terabytes, and this is even having deleted all the RAW files I had collected from 2012 when I learned to shoot manual on my DSLR through 2019)
I lied... my photo library is 4.5 tb. And my iphone photo library (which is not included) is 500 gb. Eeeeesh, lol