Unplug your 2 TB Hard Drive that contains all that video you captured and put it away as a backup. Your time, effort, and the memories are worth more than the $100 dollars it costs for another big hard drive.

Hi Marczkiab,

My question is should I keep the original footage?

I think that is a real personal decision, and I think you will get some varying responses. Personally, I save all my footage that I take....it is mostly of our 2-year old twins and every moment captured is a cherished one to us. I can always decide later if I don't want to keep the footage. But until that time it's on redundant hard drives and backed up on Blu-Ray Disc which is in a Banks Safe Deposit Box in case of fire at home. So the footage is important to us...nuff said about that.

I think you have to ask yourself...If the footage you took could never be viewed again would you miss it? In my case I would miss hearing and seeing the birth of my kids...the list goes on and on.....

Storage is cheap....I purchased another internal 2TB WD Hard drive for $80.00.....That lasts me quite awhile.

So I think it depends on what you are filming and how important it is to keep it.

Just one perspective on your question.

Regards,

Kevin
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I'm with Kevin. It is a personal decision. For me, it depends on what the footage is. For home movies I usually use the important stuff and there is little left that is worth keeping. In my racing videos, I combine all available video into a form that I like and produce to HD. I trash everything but the produced video and then use the HD version for any future needs, like burning DVD's. __________________________________
CORNBLOSSOM

Hi,

I save my raw files on one WD MyBook Mirror and author my projects to another WD MyBook Mirror, before burning to blu-ray. Most of my footage is family footage so I could never delete the raw files. You never know what you might want to use them for in the future!

Dafydd is a recent purchaser of the MyBook Mirror :

Cheers,

Andrew
Alienware Aurora ALX R4 - Intel i7-4820 4.2 GHz - 32GB DDR3 RAM - Crucial 512GB SSD - 1TB Seagate HDD - 3TB WD Green HDD - 4TB WD Green HDD - MSI NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB

Sony HDR-PJ810 and HDR-PJ530

Just looked the MyBook Mirror up on Amazon. What's the advantage to this over buying a 2TB external USB drive to use for backup?

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Book-Mirror-WDH2U20000N/dp/B001B8RSAK

OK, so it looks like the MyBook Mirror is just an external hard drive with a USB 3.0 interface which is supposed to transfer data at 5GB/second.

Problem is my laptop doesn't support USB 3.0.

Buffalo Technology makes a device called "USB 3.0 ExpressCard Adapter" (http://www.buffalotech.com/products/accessories/interface-card-adapters/usb-30-expresscard-adapter/) which provides two USB 3.0 ports. Looks like the adapter is less than $50 dollars.

For us PD9 users is it worth going down the USB 3.0 road?

So more research indicates there's a bunch of these USB 3.0 adapters on the market that make all external USB drives faster.

Does anyone have experience with these USB 3.0 ExpressCard Adapters on a laptop?

Storage is cheap, keep everything. I've deleted stuff in the past that didn't mean much then. Now however I really wish I had kept the footage and regret deleting it.

If you use a little free program like Syncback it will look for changes in source files and only backup the differences. This makes backing up quick and easy.