Get iphoto/itunes files off local drive? Maybe S3?

April 9, 2008 11:41 AM

I'm looking for some best practice advice in moving my iTunes music and my iPhoto images off my local hard drive. The 160GB drive on my Macbook is about full. I know I can use a USB/Firewire/Network-attached external hard drive, but has anyone had luck using a service such as Amazon's S3 for this. I know if works fine for storing the files, but how usable is it to actually 'get' the files?

I guess I could keep just select sets of photos and music on my local drive and store the rest of the files on S3. I would then just have to refresh my music from time to time?

What's everyone else doing?

posted by namith to technology (4 comments total)

A recent AskMe about remote music storage may be somewhat instructive.
posted by mumkin at 11:57 AM on April 9

If you were using S3 as your primary store, I think you'd find the latency in iPhoto to be intolerable. It would probably be annoying when writing music to S3, and OK for playback. I haven't tried this, so caveat lector.

Also, if you had, say, 80 GB stored on S3, you'd be spending $144/yr just to have it sitting there without accessing it. You could buy a decent external hard drive for that money. Shoot, you could spend 2x that, get a 500 GB Time Machine, and have local wifi access to your goodies.
posted by adamrice at 1:40 PM on April 9

An external hard drive enclosure and a 500 GB hard drive will only run you about $150, and you can use it for your Time Machine backups as well.

I bought the model linked, and you can basically plug it in and forget it. It's almost silent. Working with your photos and music directly from an online storage service is not financially or technically feasible right now.
posted by designbot at 3:01 PM on April 9

(Sorry that should be $130, not $150.)
posted by designbot at 3:01 PM on April 9