Hello

I am posting this in the Mini 3 Forum but it could equally be put in any DJI Forum

I have many drones and now the Osmo Action 3 and indeed the Osmo Pocket so I now have a lot of video to keep. I tend to make my videos and upload the finished video to my You Tube channel but I still dont like to delete the source video. Even though I only shoot in 1080p I finish up with a lot of GB of original video.

I have been looking for a reasonably cheap and simple solution where I can store these videos and be managable and also transferable to new computers in the future.

I just bought two 240 gb Kingston SSD drives and a USB to Sata 3 adapter cable. The drives in the sale were £17 each. If I delete the unessary files on the Micro SD card I recon I can fit a lot of video on one of these £17 drives, Label it and put it in a box (old school I know but managable in the future). The box will be labeled DJI Source Video.

I am wondering how others keep all their video and pics etc from their Drones.

If you are a 4K person your issues must be far greater than mine.

Pic below of one 128 gb Micro SD card beingtrans fered to the SSD drive.

I use a SEAGATE 4-Terrabyte external drive (USB 3 connector) that I got from Argos several years ago. It's still only half full.It measures about 4x2.5x0.5  inches.

Blériot53 Posted at 11-26 09:45
I use a SEAGATE 4-Terrabyte external drive (USB 3 connector) that I got from Argos several years ago. It's still only half full.It measures about 4x2.5x0.5  inches.

I have a few of those but I want something that I can transport easily. Also old style hard drives can fail and I did not want all of my eggs in one basket.

Do you shoot much 4K data hog stuff ?

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-26 09:51
I have a few of those but I want something that I can transport easily. Also old style hard drives can fail and I did not want all of my eggs in one basket.

Do you shoot much 4K data hog stuff ?

This is a solid-state drive, not a mechanical one.  A bit like a giant thumb drive. It weight about the same as the Mini3Pro.
I do some 4K and it does look great.  But most of my older stuff is 1080

You can get something like this. I would opt for the name brand SSDs. A little more expensive, but well worth it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=ext ... _sb_ss_ts-doa-p_3_8

Is there much point in transferring to anything below 1Tb as external storage, you might just as well buy a load of 128Gb or 256Gb mSD cards and swap cards etc. They might be cheaper than 'hard drives'

Sean-bumble-bee Posted at 11-26 10:21
Is there much point in transferring to anything below 1Tb as external storage, you might just as well buy a load of 128Gb or 256Gb mSD cards and swap cards etc. They might be cheaper than 'hard drives'

No as I said these are 240 GB at £17 each so half the price of decent memory cards and all of your eggs are not in the same basket. Also micro SD cards are so small they are easily lost and you could never stick a label on a Micro SD card

4 of these is almost 1TB for £68.

Mobilehomer Posted at 11-26 10:15
You can get something like this. I would opt for the name brand SSDs. A little more expensive, but well worth it.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=external+ssd&crid=1A6F4AC4I5H7N&sprefix=external%2Caps%2C199&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_3_8

Those ones that claim to be 1TB and above for those cheap prices are generally fakes and offer no where near the storage they claim. A few videos on You tube about it. They are generally just cheap Micro SD cards. Stuck in a case

Fair enough but just for the record mSD and or SD card storage
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Water-R ... ronics%2C312&sr=1-5

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Holders ... %2Caps%2C971&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/KHD-MSD ... %2Caps%2C381&sr=8-3

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-26 10:44
Those ones that claim to be 1TB and above for those cheap prices are generally fakes and offer no where near the storage they claim. A few videos on You tube about it. They are generally just cheap Micro SD cards. Stuck in a case

The name brand ones are good. I have the 1Tb Samsung. It works fine. The cheap ones, I wouldn't throw at my enemies!!!

Sean-bumble-bee Posted at 11-26 11:03
Fair enough but just for the record mSD and or SD card storage
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Water-R ... ronics%2C312&sr=1-5

But Micro SD cards as I said would be double the Price of what I am describing

This is the one I am talking about. Just ordered 2 more

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingsto ... aps%2C95&sr=8-3

I use a qnap nas set in raid5, like a private cloud I can access from anywhere

i just keep adding drives. 2x 2tb m.2 980pros a couple large spinners im going to swaping out for some large sata 2.5 ssds . im a bit of a digital hoarder

Amazon had some good deals, whilst these are older mech drives, it means more space for the money, just tad slower is all, after all, your old USB 3 or are they even USB 2 on that Dell, ain't gonna get near the speeds of SSD so unless they are internal drives, its wasting money on speeds ya cant attain. One other SSD v HDD, SSD does not have the longevity.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate ... ingS_D_8c2fa30b_138
https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elem ... ingS_D_8c2fa30b_143
OTT on this one i know lol https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desktop ... ingS_D_8c2fa30b_146
Or browse the bargains https://www.amazon.co.uk/deal/8c ... _8c2fa30b_dt_sl6_9d

Alway check on camelcamelcamel 1st to see if the prices drops are legit....

For now, all i have done is add an SSD to my weather laptop as that is on 24/7 and over the years when a 1tb drive from my main laptop starts to play up, i swap it out and then use that drive as a backup attached to my weather lappy so i can access the drive from anywhere, currently, i have 4x 1tb. I am aware that its not ideal to use failing drives, they are only used as backups and downloaded movies/series. Any film i want to keep from my DJI equipment stays on my main lappy and mirrored on YT. 99% gets deleted anyway lol

FYI, you could just save it to YT and save money, if you dont want it all viewable, then set those to private, all YT servers are raid with redundancies so your movies should be in safe hands.

Hi there. Hope that you could get the best recommendation from our fellow DJI Pilots here about your inquiry. Should you have any inquiries or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach us. Thank you for your valued support.

Why do you want to keep the original?
I do processing and save in the cloud (Google Photo, YouTube), and then delete the source.

Bashy Posted at 11-26 19:04
Amazon had some good deals, whilst these are older mech drives, it means more space for the money, just tad slower is all, after all, your old USB 3 or are they even USB 2 on that Dell, ain't gonna get near the speeds of SSD so unless they are internal drives, its wasting money on speeds ya cant attain. One other SSD v HDD, SSD does not have the longevity.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate ... ingS_D_8c2fa30b_138

That old Dell is the fastest computer I have ever owned it is USB C and refurbished to SSD they are generally about £150 to buy and are incredible.

You tube is OK but I only put the finished video their and like to keep the source files
Those large Spinning drives you linked are good and I already have 2 no 4 gb of those but I wanted somthing portable self powered that I can sort through by hand and make up other videos if I so wished.

Also those big spinning drives are very much all your eggs in one basket

Here is a link to the refurbished Dell. If you tried one I assure you you will be amazed at the speed

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-Op ... aps%2C74&sr=8-3

Drone.Hunter Posted at 11-26 21:45
Why do you want to keep the original?
I do processing and save in the cloud (Google Photo, YouTube), and then delete the source.

So here you go. I make various videos to you tube over the year and then possibly I would make one video encompassing the whole year from some of the source material. I could not do this from the individual videos. Once you delete somthing it has gone.

Not a great believer generally in the cloud and even with a full fibre 600 mb/s internet retrieving them is not that quick and apart from YouTube most video cloud servers are expensive

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-26 23:38
So here you go. I make various videos to you tube over the year and then possibly I would make one video encompassing the whole year from some of the source material. I could not do this from the individual videos. Once you delete somthing it has gone.

Not a great believer generally in the cloud and even with a full fibre 600 mb/s internet retrieving them is not that quick and apart from YouTube most video cloud servers are expensive

Well, I understand that it is necessary to accumulate material in order to make a ready-made video clip later.
I thought you needed it in perpetual storage.
I have two external HDDs with a capacity of 1TB for various garbage and media files.

Drone.Hunter Posted at 11-27 00:28
Well, I understand that it is necessary to accumulate material in order to make a ready-made video clip later.
I thought you needed it in perpetual storage.
I have two external HDDs with a capacity of 1TB for various garbage and media files.

I want to keep it for ever also.... It is called memories. If you are young you may not understand

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-27 01:12
I want to keep it for ever also.... It is called memories. If you are young you may not understand

The family is big, everyone is watching and sharing through the cloud. So convenient.

I've built a homemade Raid 5 NAS using scrap computer parts and 8 x 2 TB drives.

I use this one on longer trips (It is very small) and some bigger ones at home

WD-4TB

I use the cloud to store family videos and photos, and the backup is on a home NAS. I store full discs like books.

this problem will keep coming up unless you address it permanently.  it's painful to have to keep re-addressing it (storage space) as files get bigger and you run out of room.  it's not just a drone problem but a mobile phone, camera, torrents, etc.

last year i went with this and technically, i should never need to tackle the problem again:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/p ... 1821_8_bay_nas.html

18TB
18TB
10TB
stats (current):  30TB available /16TB protection

3 bays are full and i have blank drives ready to add as i need them.

every video i've recorded has been saved and so far i have used 20TB.  this is actually not a lot compared to some of the professionals out there.  the synology nas is perfect for security, sharing, remote access, backup, portability, duplicate files....all kinds of details that are ordinarily a headache when dealing with harddrives and cards.

Lots of different way to address the issue. I suspect in 10 years time all of our ways will be redundant...... I still have a couple of floppy disks somewhere

SSD drives shouldn't be trusted to store data for long periods, and they are getting worse, as the manufacturers make them more analogue, with QLC.

I've had an anal retentive way of backing up movies for 15 years, but none of the 2.5" hard drives have ever failed, after all my efforts. I suggest just getting a twin drive, and marking the drive with a letter, so the twin drives have the same letter, and then do a copy every now and then.

A problem I have had with USB3 drives, in general, is 2 bit corruptions every 100GB of writes. I check by comparing the files. I have no idea how the errors get there, because it should all be checksummed on-the-fly. Seagate was a bit worse than WD. I think my laptop is a lot better. USB2 doesnt seem to do it. I've even seen it happen when copying from SSD to internal drive. Usually the corruptions are invisible while playing the movie.

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-26 23:30
That old Dell is the fastest computer I have ever owned it is USB C and refurbished to SSD they are generally about £150 to buy and are incredible.

You tube is OK but I only put the finished video their and like to keep the source files

If the standard PC spninning drives are too big then go for the laptop size of 2.5", these are the sizes of my drives that i have, i have 4x 1tb, like i said, each time one fails in my laptop, i remove it, grab the data off it that i need, then format it and they last a good while, I just put each one in its own USB 3.0 caddy, this makes the drive portable, powered by the USB 3.0 and it keeps them nearly the same size. Not to mention 1tb 2.5" are cheap as chips nowadays, e.g.  £30 + caddy for

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba ... aps%2C75&sr=8-3

Even a Seagate Barracuda is only £42 + caddy on amazon or you can buy a Seagate portable as is for £45

This way you keep the drives small, i would recommend these caddys,
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/prod ... e?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Or you could just use memory cards, they are tiny and good read/write speeds but for double the price of the 2.5" drives, but note that you do not need to spend on the U3's as they will be just for storage.

You could also add a hot swappable dock too, these can take 5" and 2.5" drives, e.g.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Docking ... 1zcF9hdGY&psc=1

Blériot53 Posted at 11-26 09:45
I use a SEAGATE 4-Terrabyte external drive (USB 3 connector) that I got from Argos several years ago. It's still only half full.It measures about 4x2.5x0.5  inches.

I hope you have 2

So far my problem only got worse as my new laptop has 'just' 1Tb instead of the 1,5 my previous one has.
I tend to solve this problem in bits.
Previously I had a synology NAS, but I did not like it. It was (on paper) a great solution, but I did not like the fact that it did not show up in my explorer like a normal HD.
Plus it constantly went to sleep and I had to move to where it was located and start it up (maybe it was my unit, but I could not find a solution).

So now I just got a couple of big HD's.
Mainly in pairs, because I never trust one.
I have a 500Gb working SSD to take with me.
2x 3Tb HD for backup video.
2x 1Tb HD for backup photo
2x 1Tb HD for backup music files.

The only one that is constantly on is the 500Gb and I will probably replace it with a 1Tb someday.
The others are only for backup purposes and connected when making or needing a backup.

This is not a permanent solution, but one with pretty low costs and low tech too. (like I don't need a big server or whatever).

PS, I don't keep my raw files, this is just for edited stuff.

Bashy Posted at 11-27 19:00
If the standard PC spninning drives are too big then go for the laptop size of 2.5", these are the sizes of my drives that i have, i have 4x 1tb, like i said, each time one fails in my laptop, i remove it, grab the data off it that i need, then format it and they last a good while, I just put each one in its own USB 3.0 caddy, this makes the drive portable, powered by the USB 3.0 and it keeps them nearly the same size. Not to mention 1tb 2.5" are cheap as chips nowadays, e.g.  £30 + caddy for

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-MQ01ABD100-5400RPM-9-5mm-Internal/dp/B009AYVNMQ/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=1tb+2.5+hdd&qid=1669603710&sprefix=1tb+2.5%22%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-3

You don’t need to keep buying caddy’s with my solution just buy one of these

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/prod ... 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Bigplumbs Posted at 11-28 00:12
You don’t need to keep buying caddy’s with my solution just buy one of these

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079QQJB9L/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I would take a caddy over those any day of the week, PC hardware is very susceptible to static, dust etc, whilst a caddy isn't IPX rated, far from it, but it is far better to have them covered than to be bare.

Montfrooij Posted at 11-27 23:52
I hope you have 2

Just the one for the moment. Backups are on a series of old hard-drives that I can slot into an external caddy as needed.

Blériot53 Posted at 11-28 06:55
Just the one for the moment. Backups are on a series of old hard-drives that I can slot into an external caddy as needed.

Check.
I try to have everything duplicate.
Except for my working drive. But that is only stuff that is 'also' on another drive.

Montfrooij Posted at 11-28 07:11
Check.
I try to have everything duplicate.
Except for my working drive. But that is only stuff that is 'also' on another drive.

I've lost so much stuff in the past, that I've learned to have at least one backup of everything.

Blériot53 Posted at 11-28 07:15
I've lost so much stuff in the past, that I've learned to have at least one backup of everything.

Same here.

This is how I've been doing it for the past 5 years. Mostly use everything for my travels.
Record on the drone, GoPro, phone.
Backup everyday on my USB drive.
When I get home, transfer footage to my editing SSD on my PC.
Finish editing and transfer it out of my SSD (footage, project files, etc) to my 3 back up hard drives (yes, 3 backups since I'm paranoid of my backup drives going out).
Clean up the microSD cards before the next trip.

Edit: I really should upload these on the cloud somewhere in case my hard drives get lost or stolen somehow.

Montfrooij Posted at 11-28 07:37
Same here.

NAS has been my best friend for the past several years. I started out with 4X6TB and last Christmas WD had a huge sale on Red+ drives. I'm currently at 4X18TB's and it's one less thing to think about and about two dozen external drives less which were sold or gifted. I keep some SSD externals around just for convivence.