Over the past ten years, I’ve taken somewhere in the neighborhood of 54,000 pictures and videos on various devices.
That’s not a lot, considering I haven’t done much in the past 5 or 6 years.
Nevertheless, it’s about a terabyte and a half of data that has to be managed.
Now, it seems obligatory for those of us who have been around since before home computers, the internet, and the plethora of devices we now have that we must inevitably have an old guy or gal moment when we say the equivalent of “back in my day” …
This one I actually find fascinating when I think about it.
In the mid-90s, I interviewed for a job at a disaster recovery company. The company was located on North Broad Street in Philadelphia, in a building built during the Second World War. They stored tanks on the upper floors of the building because it could withstand massive air bombings.
The guy takes me on a tour of their facility, and in one room that housed like ten super huge mainframes he tells me “In this whole room, we can store two terabytes (2 TB) of data.”
For perspective, that would be equivalent to about 2 petabytes (2PB) today.
I have roughly 70 terabytes on my desk now.
So, this leads back to, I have a ton of pictures and videos that need to be organized.
Here’s what I do and my thoughts after close to 37 years of dicking around with computers.
Gear
I use a Mac at home and Windows at the day job. These suggestions are platform-agnostic.
Buy a name-brand laptop, Apple, HP, etc. Dell’s are OK but I find them cheaply made. At the day job, we go through a lot of them.
I’d only recommend a desktop if you’re doing extensive visual effects work in After Effects, Davici Resolve, Maxon/Red Giant, or similar packages. If you don’t know what those are, you’ll be able to grow into using them with these recos.
Get the fastest processor, biggest hard drive, largest amount of RAM, and upgrade the video card with the most you can afford. You won’t be able to change these in 3 years when you outgrow the lower-end machines.
Get an extended warranty. In the past 15 years, for my family and me, I’ve bought probably 6 or 7 Macs and 3 or 4 HP Windows PCs.
I’ve blown motherboards, screens, and/or power supplies in most of those machines. The extended warranty took care of the diagnosis and most of the repair. If the part wasn’t covered, at least the labor was. It’s well worth it.
I prefer the macOS because it’s more stable for graphics applications.
About 10 years ago, I got burned with a top-of-the-line HP workstation that was about 2 years old. I still had time left on the extended warranty.
Adobe dropped support for the driver version of my video card on Premiere Pro. There was an update from the video card manufacturer that would have made Premiere work on my $4,000 HP Workstation, but HP wouldn’t release an updated version of the driver.
That was when I moved back to Macs. I’ve known many people who had Macs for years with no problems; software always worked. Plus, for graphics apps, some things don’t run on Windows.
I love the integration with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, and AppleTV.
Probably the best feature is the Time Machine backup. You plug a dedicated external drive in, macOS configures the drive and Time Machine for you and it just runs.
I’ve had times when I had to reinstall the OS or move to a new machine in an emergency. I was able to do it in a couple of hours.
The greatest part was that all of my software activations transferred seamlessly. Some just ran, others I had to sign in, but I didn’t have to enter any keys. Plus, all my data was where I left it.
Yes, I’m describing a backup solution, but this is integrated into the OS, and I didn’t have to read a manual or technote to get it going.
These are some initial thoughts.
Next time, we’ll discuss some configuration issues and what to do about the horrible defaults.