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Does anyone here use a laptop but work from an EHD?

tkradtke

tkradtke

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Dec 28, 2009
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I am currently dealing with the spinning beach ball of death on my macbook right now. I don't think anything is seriously wrong, I've just maxed out my space with all of my photos and such. When I used my desktop, I always worked from an external to keep space free on my computer. I tried doing that with my laptop when I got it... but I move around too much and was always accidentally disconnecting it without properly ejecting it. Made me nervous that I was going to mess up the EHD.

A while back, I moved all of my digi supplies to a low profile thumb drive that I keep plugged in all of the time. So far, that's worked great. BUT... what to do with all of my photos? I'm just not sure what the work flow should be that I can have access to the photos I want to work with (I do PL and stay somewhat current, so I do get them scrapped fairly quickly) without filling up my hard drive.

What do you other laptop people do in order to keep from maxing out, but still have easy access to your photos?
 
Wish I could help I still use a tower and then an external hard drive, an iomega
 
I have a laptop with an EHD connected all the time but I'm hoping to replace it with a laptop with a bigger internal drive.
 
I use a laptop with EHD. I try to back up everything on the EHD and keep the pictures I'm working with and mostly likely kits on both. So I don't have to have my EHD connected all the time -- only when I want to grab something. It's less space on the laptop to have just the month of pictures or whatever and few kits, and it's easy to quickly grab the EHD and copy a file onto my laptop if I need to. (I even bought a longer cord for the EHD and still was disconnecting it accidentally)
 
@lorryfach Do you have any issues with accidentally unplugging the EHD?

@carilyne That's along the lines of what I think I'm going to have to do.... move things back and forth vs. dragging the EHD around. It's just going to take a different mentality since I'm used to having everything readily accessible all of the time.
 
I use a laptop with an EHD attached all the time. I used to carry it to work to attach to my laptop there but data started getting scrambled even though I always waited for the it's ok to disconnect message. Two different versions of Windows though, but now I just leave it attached to my laptop. It's pretty fast though.
 
It happens sometimes but it mostly just sits on my laptop table so it's not too bad.
 
I use a laptop with an EHD - I have used both the large EHD (bulky in size I am meaning), as well as now a very small little EHD (1 TB I think, and about the size of a cell phone). I had the issue with it coming unplugged more frequently with the larger one because it was sitting on the floor and had a cord going all the way up to my laptop. My set up is basically always the same - my laptop sits on a lap desk thing (cushy bottom, with a hard top surface), and that sits on my end table next to my couch when not in use. So that lap desk fits my 17" laptop, my wacom tablet as well as my small EHD - so it is always sitting right next to it on the same surface, and even when I sit down and move it to my lap, nothing on the lap desk really moves around. I have found this to be a pretty comfortable situation for me! :) Now, it doesn't look so pretty sitting on my end table in living room, but hey - no one ever really sees it, and I do put it away if we have company over! Hope that information helps and that you find a solution to your storage problem - no one likes the little spinning wheel of doom!
 
I am very blessed to be married to an IT guy and our photos are on a home network. All our photos can be accessed by any computer that is on our network.
But I know lots of people do work off externals. I would just caution you because I have heard EHDs aren't meant to be active. They are meant to store. If you use them as a hard drive constantly it does make them wear out faster.
 
OH.OH.OH. {raising my hands in the air to get called on} I'm assuming you still have your desktop? And it's an iMac? If so... you can just share screens. I do this ALL the time. I leave my EHD plugged into the iMac and access it via screen share on my macbook. Easy Peasy.

ETA: or you can put them in iCloud. That's easy, too, but I like having access to everything on my iMac/EHD-connected-to-iMac b/c that's where I keep my products as well.
 
jenevang said:
OH.OH.OH. {raising my hands in the air to get called on} I'm assuming you still have your desktop? And it's an iMac? If so... you can just share screens. I do this ALL the time. I leave my EHD plugged into the iMac and access it via screen share on my macbook. Easy Peasy.

ETA: or you can put them in iCloud. That's easy, too, but I like having access to everything on my iMac/EHD-connected-to-iMac b/c that's where I keep my products as well.
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ooooooOOOOOOOooooooo.... this is something I need to look into! I do still have my mac desktop! Off to read up on this!
 
tkradtke said:
ooooooOOOOOOOooooooo.... this is something I need to look into! I do still have my mac desktop! Off to read up on this!
Click to expand...

Yeah and the bonus is it totally freaks the kids out when they walk by the iMac in the kitchen and the stuff on the screen is moving all by itself. LOL.

Once I even created a quick digital sign that said "Mom is always watching" and made it pop up full screen (and sort of blink) when I heard someone banging around in the kitchen. There was a gasp then laughter! :giggle
 
jenevang said:
Yeah and the bonus is it totally freaks the kids out when they walk by the iMac in the kitchen and the stuff on the screen is moving all by itself. LOL.

Once I even created a quick digital sign that said "Mom is always watching" and made it pop up full screen (and sort of blink) when I heard someone banging around in the kitchen. There was a gasp then laughter! :giggle
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That's too good. Would have loved to see that.
 
My husband can do that too with our network! He has been known to scare us by turning on creepy music from Saudi and making it play at home. I learned to turn the sound off on his computer. LOL!
 
I have used a portable ehd with laptops in the past as I had very small harddrives in them. My set up is very rarely off the kitchen table or my desk so it works for me that I've never had any problems at the EHD end - if I did have any issues it was because my usb ports on my old lappy were a bit iffy.
 
jenevang said:
OH.OH.OH. {raising my hands in the air to get called on} I'm assuming you still have your desktop? And it's an iMac? If so... you can just share screens. I do this ALL the time. I leave my EHD plugged into the iMac and access it via screen share on my macbook. Easy Peasy.

ETA: or you can put them in iCloud. That's easy, too, but I like having access to everything on my iMac/EHD-connected-to-iMac b/c that's where I keep my products as well.
Click to expand...

This sounds awesome!


I work off a laptop. We have a network like @Chel has. So, I can just grab pics from there. I do keep a
"current" folder on my desktop for stuff want to work on first. But if I need to grab something that's been stored away I can just get on the network.
 
I work on my desktop computer at home, but I use a laptop when I'm traveling or at the office (yes, I did just admit that I sometimes scrap at work!). Both my desktop and my laptop are Macs that only have small-ish SSDs internally, so almost all of my data is on an EHD no matter which one I work at.

My desktop EHD is one of the big, chunky ones and stays there permanently. I have one of the small Western Digital Passport drives for my laptop (it powers off of the USB port and doesn't require a separate power cord). I use software (Sync Folders Pro from the Mac app store) to sync my digi supplies, layouts, and the folders of just the photos I want to scrap over to the smaller drive. My big photo catalog is in Lightroom on the desktop EHD, and I export for Project Life and then also scrap traditional layouts from those photos. Once I'm done scrapping them, I delete the exported photos (but leave them in my Lightroom catalog for sure!!). Otherwise it would take multiple small EHDs just for my photo library alone!

The network solution would be awesome if you were using the laptop just in your home, but if you want to take it away from home and scrap, you'll need an internet connection wherever you are along with access back to your home network.

I haven't had any trouble with the USB cord on the smaller drive pulling out, and the drive is so small and light that it's not a bother. I've seen some people put a strip of self-adhesive velcro on both the back of the hard drive and the top of their laptop case. Then you can just stick the little drive on the back of the screen while you're working and not have to worry about dropping it.
 
Chel said:
But I know lots of people do work off externals. I would just caution you because I have heard EHDs aren't meant to be active. They are meant to store. If you use them as a hard drive constantly it does make them wear out faster.
Click to expand...

Actually, the internal guts of an EHD and the hard drive in your computer are the same. If you rip the case off, it's just a standard hard drive inside (even the little ones are just 3.5" laptop hard drives in a case). They all use spinning platters and a reader (except for external SSDs, which have zero moving parts), and all of them are prone to failure. My Mac Pro only has a 256GB SSD internal, and there is NO space anywhere in the case for another drive of any kind. I use EHDs exclusivesly for data, photos, digi supplies, and backups (multiple redundant) and have for years. They all have the same failure rate as far as the hard drive itself goes. EHDs are slightly more susceptible to failure in the USB port/power supply area if they are moved around a lot, but those parts are easy to fix and most of the time the drive itself is still fine.
 
jenevang said:
OH.OH.OH. {raising my hands in the air to get called on} I'm assuming you still have your desktop? And it's an iMac? If so... you can just share screens. I do this ALL the time. I leave my EHD plugged into the iMac and access it via screen share on my macbook. Easy Peasy.

ETA: or you can put them in iCloud. That's easy, too, but I like having access to everything on my iMac/EHD-connected-to-iMac b/c that's where I keep my products as well.
Click to expand...


OH GOODNESS.... I need to see if I can do this! This would be A.W.E.S.O.M.E!!!!!!!!
 
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