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Q. How much disk space is enough?
A. You can never have enough.
How long is a piece of string? Only you know how much is enough but here are some guidelines. Preparing one single Photoshopped picture for use at 640x480 resolution can easily run to 50 Mbytes of intermediate data. You do need to keep all those intermediate stages otherwise you’ll not be able to recreate or rework the job if you need to. For a very modest project that I turned round for a client in one week, I filled up an entire 1.3 Gig MO cartridge with the project data. In the end I delivered about 35 Mbytes of finished art. If you want to keep all your assets on-line and available to a team of artists, then you should be thinking in terms of multi-Gigabytes.
Currently, hard disk space is cheaper than the floppy disks required to back it up. If you have a 10 Gig disk, buy another to clone it onto. It’s almost cheap enough to buy a hard disk for every project.
Huge disks are now cheap. Since a Macintosh can support up to 7 hard disks (if you toss out the CD player and also use the internal disk too). You can therefore equip a Macintosh as an asset server and have 63 Gbytes on-line at once. That might sound like a lot but its not really, once you start to hold movie data on-line. If you need more space than that, you need to think about more industrial strength Sun servers or Epoch hierarchical storage systems.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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