Hi,
This will alway be an issue ... I have gone back over old data and created master Bias, Darks and Flats. Then I deleted the the original .CR2 files. This has saved a lot of storage but generated a lot time to to create these files.
(never delete the original Lights).
The trouble with storage is building in redundancy. You can have a bunch of disks with data, but if one drive goes faulty, then that data is gone forever. The alternative is a raid5 NAS (Network Attached Storage), this become a bit expensive as you need a minimum of 3 disk drives and a raid 5 controller card. When setting that up, data is written across all three disks and if one drive fails then the other two have copies of the missing data. So if you have 3 x 1TB drives you end up with only 2 TB of storage. Many NAS devices are already configured like this, but are little costly.
You could also setup two drive as a mirror and duplicate the data to both drive, but if the system write garbage to disk1 then garbage is written to disk2 ...
I use USB3 portable drives for backups and projects and once the image has been pre-processed I copy it to the portable drive, because processing the image is not really disk intensive.
Perhaps the better solution is a two data disk system. Add a second disk to your PC for data and then once a week or when necessary copy the data to third disk which you can store in a different location. If you run Linux then you can schedule the folders to automatically duplicate the data via a "rsync" command (I am sure there is a Windoze command for this as well).
Remember that your data will grow to consume any storage available ....
Look up
John
