New Mac - what to do about storage

[nofuse22]

I am currently running a near 10yr old IMAC with a 1GB hard drive. The hard drive is nearly full with 500GB of photos and a mysterious 300GB of “System Data” (anyone know what this is, and how i can clear it up without doing any damage?)

Question is - i would like to buy a new Mac, but am wondering whether it is possible to go for something with a smaller HD and store the Photos locally. I understand that the Photos programme doesnt like NAS and external hard drives. Has anyone got any solutions?

Most straight forward answer is to buy a 1TB mac and just copy everything across, but if there is a way of doing it without paying the apple hard drive premium that might be better… (if i completely replicate i am also sure that i will get the 300GB of system data…)

Thanks

[sparkyhx]

nofuse22 said:

I am currently running a near 10yr old IMAC with a 1GB hard drive. The hard drive is nearly full with 500GB of photos and a mysterious 300GB of “System Data” (anyone know what this is, and how i can clear it up without doing any damage?)

Question is - i would like to buy a new Mac, but am wondering whether it is possible to go for something with a smaller HD and store the Photos locally. I understand that the Photos programme doesnt like NAS and external hard drives. Has anyone got any solutions?

Most straight forward answer is to buy a 1TB mac and just copy everything across, but if there is a way of doing it without paying the apple hard drive premium that might be better… (if i completely replicate i am also sure that i will get the 300GB of system data…)

Thanks

Can't help sorry, but TBH I thought apple had sorted out most of the "doesn't play nice with none apple stuff" problems. When I got my NAS (synology) it was always apparent any issues were nearly always
on settups where there was an apple computer involved.

Cloud services?, what about icloud, then they available to mutiple devices any time you want. with periodic backup to an external USB hard drive if you want.

[NDA]

nofuse22 said:

I am currently running a near 10yr old IMAC with a 1GB hard drive. The hard drive is nearly full with 500GB of photos and a mysterious 300GB of “System Data” (anyone know what this is, and how i can clear it up without doing any damage?)

Question is - i would like to buy a new Mac, but am wondering whether it is possible to go for something with a smaller HD and store the Photos locally. I understand that the Photos programme doesnt like NAS and external hard drives. Has anyone got any solutions?

Most straight forward answer is to buy a 1TB mac and just copy everything across, but if there is a way of doing it without paying the apple hard drive premium that might be better… (if i completely replicate i am also sure that i will get the 300GB of system data…)

Thanks

Yep - I recognise this conundrum too!

I moved from an iMac to a MacBook Pro (14" M1). I have my Leica photographs (from when I used to take a lot of pics) stored on a local NAS drive - although a USB connected SSD drive would work equally well. My iPhone pics are stored on Flickr - although they're also mostly backed up on Apple iCloud too as storeage is quite cheap.

My MacBook Pro has 500GB of storeage of which I am only using 112GB.

The system data is a pain, I use the paid 'CleanMyMac' program with an annual licence - it's extremely good and entirely safe. It's very good at clearing all that junk.

HTH

[Gary C]

Plug a USB hard drive in.

[eeLee]

Tools: https://titanium-software.fr/en/applications.html
Onyx and Maintenance will clean your caches. Use with care.

Storage: I would go for a OneDrive solution with an annual individual or family M365 subscription. Do not pay MS rates, go get a licence elsewhere.
1Tb storage for you.

Something like this: https://amzn.eu/d/5uEiAqC

Migration path: install on old device, sync up, have files on demand on new device.

I run with about 300Gb in OneDrive and my daily driver has 128Gb SSD with still 40Gb free. My MBA has 256Gb and I assume masses free.

[nofuse22]

Brilliant, thanks all. Some very helpful suggestions there.

[tog]

nofuse22 said:

I understand that the Photos programme doesnt like NAS and external hard drives. Has anyone got any solutions?

My Photos library (the System Photo Library in Apple parlance) is on a M.2 ssd in a Thunderbolt enclosure stuck to my Mac Studio. Works fine.

[steveatesh]

I bought a Mac Studio with 512 internal storage, I attached a Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD by USB C and store and edit all of my photos on that via Capture One.

Absolutely no problems.

Backed up locally into two time machine drives too.

[bitchstewie]

USB hard drive
OneDrive
Google Drive
Dropbox

Loads of options depending on budget and requirement.

[JayRidesBikes]

I have a 500GB Macbook Pro and have been using a Western Digital 1TB passport for the last 12 months to store the majority of photos and files for editing, works a treat.

[nofuse22]

An external hard drive seems to be the easiest option given i would like to stay with Apple OS to sync with various iPhones etc

Have there been any issues with the Photos programme? Ie if you take a photo on your iPhone does it automatically sync in the same way as if it was stored on the internal drive? (I presume it does)

Also, do you manually back up (ie just copying the contents of the external hard drive periodically), or do you use something like Time Machine?

Thanks again!

[steveatesh]

I have moved the Apple Photos app to the external SSD and it works exactly as it would on the internal storage. IIRC you move it to the SSD then open it directly from there by double clicking on it and it then works from the menu bar. If That’s wrong it’s on Google how to do it.

As above I have two time machine backups connected to the Mac Studio, they back up the external SSD no problem.

[tog]

No issues. Apple give instructions for moving the Photo Library and then designating that library as your System Library, so it will sync with iCloud etc. (You can have multiple libraries if you want but only one can be the System Library and sync across devices.)

[megaphone]

tog said:

No issues. Apple give instructions for moving the Photo Library and then designating that library as your System Library, so it will sync with iCloud etc. (You can have multiple libraries if you want but only one can be the System Library and sync across devices.)

What I do. I have a new Mac and use an external HD for my photos, works fine.

[Gary C]

If you do get an external drive and its of the spinning rust variety. Make sure its safe from being knocked off the table or bashed about. While they are generally good, an external HD is more vulnerable to knocks.

[QJumper]

The mysterious 300gb of system data could be iOS system backups.

If you're looking for photo storage and have Amazon Prime, then that provides unlimited photo storage at full quality. Not sure how well it integrates with Apple though, so you'd have to check how tt works.

[NDA]

QJumper said:

The mysterious 300gb of system data could be iOS system backups.

If you're looking for photo storage and have Amazon Prime, then that provides unlimited photo storage at full quality. Not sure how well it integrates with Apple though, so you'd have to check how tt works.

iOS (phone) backups are usually identified aren't they?

I would never trust Amazon TBH. I invested a lot of time a few years ago uploading my music library to Amazon Music - only to find they decided, with little notice, to abandon the idea. Fortunately my library is fully backed up elsewhere, but I wouldn't trust them again to grow tired of an idea and leave users in the lurch.

[mikef]

It depends whether you want external capacity, or high-speed working storage

For capacity, I would go with a Synology or QNAP NAS, which gives the option of redundant drives

For high-speed Mac external storage, I use the following and can highly recommend both options:

• Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ZikeDrive NVMe enclosure with WD SN850X 2TB SSD, total cost around £200, 3600 MB/s read , 3200 MB/s write, USB powered

• OWC 4M2 Thunderbolt 3 external 4x NVMe enclosure with 4x Corsair P5 2TB SSDs (8TB total), total cost around £800, 2800 MB/s read, 2300 MB/s write, mains-powered

You can get more capacity with 4TB NVMe SSDs, but they are far more expensive