External storage

[OrangeEmpress]

Can Affinity photo be connected to external hard drives for extra space? If not, is it being considered for future updates? I don't have a lot of computer space and I'm looking to switch from adobe and buy affinity

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @OrangeEmpress

Can you explain more about what you mean by “connected to”?

Also, which operating system are you using and where would you be purchasing your licence for the software from (Serif or an OS app store)?

[Fixx]

You can open and save files from/to external drives as you please. You though have no control over scratch disks, I suppose system handles that part and uses just startup disk for scratch.

[Andy05]

2 hours ago, Fixx said:

You can open and save files from/to external drives as you please. You though have no control over scratch disks, I suppose system handles that part and uses just startup disk for scratch.

Yes, opening and saving files from/to external drives is possible. But I'd strongly recommend, that you don't work on files which are stored on external drives. There are numerous reports in these fora about lost and/or broken files due to the kind-of incremental saving feature of the Affinity apps. 

[Old Bruce]

3 hours ago, Andy05 said:

But I'd strongly recommend, that you don't work on files which are stored on external drives.

There are reports abut Networked Drives. I don't recall any reports where the problem was a non network external drive.

i have had no problems with corrupted files and I use the external Hard drive almost exclusively for  my affinity documents as well as all the various camera raw files.

[Andy05]

15 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

There are reports abut Networked Drives. I don't recall any reports where the problem was a non network external drive.

i have had no problems with corrupted files and I use the external Hard drive almost exclusively for  my affinity documents as well as all the various camera raw files.

Well, good for you then. I lost several hours of work when using an external USB drive in the beginning. Maybe there haven't been reports in these fora (haven't checked), but I had quite some users reporting corrupt files with USB drives at facebook or reddit. 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Andy05 said:

Well, good for you then. I lost several hours of work when using an external USB drive in the beginning. Maybe there haven't been reports in these fora (haven't checked), but I had quite some users reporting corrupt files with USB drives at facebook or reddit. 

Do you man USB connected conventional HD's or SSD's, or USB sticks (AKA thumb drives)? The later are notorious for corrupting files after relatively few writes.

[Andy05]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Do you man USB connected conventional HD's or SSD's, or USB sticks (AKA thumb drives)? The later are notorious for corrupting files after relatively few writes.

Yes, USB (3.x) connected 2 TB Seagate conventional HDD (no SSD) in a standard external casing. Works without issues when copying stuff from and onto it, even huge files. Speed and error diagnose programs don't show any problems, even when run over night. Short, expensive/quality cables (no cheap $1 china USB connection cables with 10ft+ length).

[RichardMH]

Usual solution is to use the internal drive as a working drive and move files to external drives when finished. I have 2 identical external drives for this.

[OrangeEmpress]

15 hours ago, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums @OrangeEmpress  

@GarryP I mean like scratch disks like how in Adobe you can connect external drives to the scratch disks for more storage

 

[firstdefence]

20 minutes ago, OrangeEmpress said:

 

There is no option to specify/employ scratch disks in Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer nor Affinity Publisher, you would need to manage the disk space the Affinity products are installed on. 

[OrangeEmpress]

Thanks @firstdefence I don't have much internal space on my computer so I was curious about additional storage. Hopefully that becomes a future update tho.