I know there have been several discussions on how to back up your files, but I am still wondering about how I am backing up. In the past, I have used CD's to back up. Now that my volume is up I have an external HD ( I still use the  CD's and external HD for weddings and big events). I guess where I am still a little confused, because I have had my hard drive go down and I worry about having my pictures in one place. Say, you are loading the pictures on the external HD, then also putting them on the computers HD to work with, they are in two places if one fails, right?  Once you fill up the external HD you can just get a new one and keep going, but what about the set on your computer HD, what happens when this starts to fill up,  do you delete these and have only one copy that you started with on the external HD?  Sorry to ramble, but I feel like I am missing something easy that I am not doing and I am always worried about something crashing and being covered?

In a perfect world your HD will be more than enough for you, but we all know how that goes. I know this one personally...had a 80gb drive go kaput.

What you should do to protect yourself is to have the photos on a backup drive, independent of your working folder to ensure you dont accidentally alter the photo from it's original state. As well as DVDs in one or two locations.

As soon as you can you should always back that same data up on DVDs. Gold Standard DVDs is where you need to put them. They have a 100 year shelf life. You should keep backups on two separate locations. Never keep all backups in the same locations ie your home computer, DVDs in the closet. Should a catastrope happen to the one location, youre screwed.

What I do is I have one central external harddrive (500 GB) for all my photos. It doesnt move, but should I need, I can unplug and walk away with it in under 30 seconds. I backup on DVDs. I have my working photos on the computer harddrive. For all my Digital Family photos I have them backed up on DVDs and placed into the safe. I have no idea if they would survive a fire inside the safe but they will do better than on a desk. I need to keep DVDs in a drawer at work (locked) but have not gotten that far. "mom's house" would be my second thought for off location.

Hope this helps

Thanks a bunch, do you use your computer to burn the DVD or  do you have an external one? My computer is slow to do this and I have been told that an external one would work much faster?

I use the internals, theres no need for an external unless you are paranoid and need to burn right away in which case that would be inside the car from your laptop and my laptop has a DVD burner.

I would suggest any 20x for your computer, they price around 30-40 depending on the features. You can burn a DVD in about 4 minutes with that.

If you go with that I would try newegg.com and all you need to do is have the computer unplugged trade out the burner and boot up. You will be up and running right away

I'm glad someone posted this thread.  I need to burn just about everything on my external memory drive "today".   I have a dvd burner in my new pc that I have never used.  Not sure how much a dvd will hold, but I know it is more than a cd.  Now if I could just find my spindal of blank dvds!! 

That's funny, I was just sitting here thinking the same thing. Soon as I get off from the dayjob,( I am almost of out DVD's) , I need to stop and get them and then home to burn what I haven't already and that's alot.

Single layer DVDs are rated at 4.7 gigabytes, but you get about 4.4-4.5 gigs of data on them, which is WAY more than a CD.

-Postal

Ok, I am home now, I was going to try to backup on some of the DVD-R that I already had. This is what I use on all my ProShowGold shows with no problem. When I tried to save some raw and jpeg files, I got an error message stating it was unable to write It says Window encountered a problem with writing. Why would this be?