OK I am attempting to get my hard drive cleaned off to make room for new projects. I have completed client images, historical family pictures, 9 years of kid pictures.....What is your prefered method for  backing up and storing these images to insure that they are safe and secure so you don't feel like you are making a huge mistake by deleting them from your hard disk? I have been creating contact sheets in photoshop and printing them off on my basic ink jet printer and then burning those images and contact sheets to two seperate CDs for DVD's depending on the ammount and size of the images. I make a master disk and a back up.  I am placing them in binders on my desk so I can access them but I keep feeling quezy about that last step of deleting them. Am I just a crazy parinoid person or is there a better way to back them up? Should I have a secondary external hard disk for this kind of storage also? What do you do to keep your work and memories safe? Thanks!

Candice

I make back up of everything on CD's My personal stuff and client stuff... I Think that would be as safe as possible

I, too, am contemplating how to store my images. 

I know that it is time to get more hard drive on my computer - what I have is just about full.  Seems that many people talk about getting an external hard drive......  but, wouldn't it be faster and cheaper to get another internal drive? 

How much memory do you think is necessary to buy (I shoot in RAW)?

Thanks, Joan

Backup photos on a dvd. Make 2 copies when you do. One you keep and the other goes to someone you trust or a safe deposit box so if there is ever a fire or break-in you will not lose your photos.

Hard Drives are not a reliable storage device for long term, unless you are talking about a RAID array where you have redundant drives, Hard drives fail and/or get corrupted by time, physical strain or viruses and such. I backup all mine to DVD, but have been thinking of alternative backup solutions such as tape drives.

btw external hard drives are no better, in fact I've found in my experience they are more prone to damage since people tend to carry them from system to system, or if they don't do that, they place things on top of them, accidentally drop them because they forgot to unplug it when working on their computers, spill stuff on them etc. They are nice, but be careful.

I currently make 2 copies on CD or DVD and I'm getting ready to buy an external hard drive. They are very inexpensive and I think it's 110% worth it.

I have 4 hard drives on my PC. 1 runs windows and other programs, 2 holds music and junk... it came out my old PC and then 3 and 4 are both 200gb and one I have PS installed on and holds the photos I will eventually overflow on to the second one... I back everything up to CD/DVD (I am in the process of making a 2nd backup to keep offsite we just had a cousin those there entire home to fire and it has really woke me up, especially since we do weddings...) We have a laptop too but that is very temp for storage with only 40gb it fills up too fast. Oh and all four are internal HD's

I tend to be very over critical of my backups. What I usually do is burn 2 copies onto CD and I use external hard drives as additional backups. (2) 250GB drives are considered as one working set for me, What that means is the drives are mirrored. Once they are full, I tend to leave about a gig free I take then drives offline. One goes into storage with one set of CD’s into my basement and the second set go to a safe deposit box.

I use a SQL server with a web front end that catalogs everything for me including thumbnails for future retrieval purposes.

As a side note, statistically speaking  1 in 20 hard drives will fail. So just keep that in mind.  Also note that burned CD, properly stored can also fail, this is a fact. I have in my possession pristine CD’s that are about 6 months old that are no longer accessible.

Backing up to tape is also a good step to take, but the tape drives and media you will need are not cheap.

Data corruption can happen at any time on any kind of media. There is no sure fire method in preserving your data, except for having a backup of your backup.

 

 

 

This is what I do with my clients pictures, not really with my own kids but oh well.... Anyway, I save them in a file on my computer, then I copy that file to my external harddrive that is 80 gb. Then I try to always burn a copy of the original raw images on a cd as well. When I am done working on a aclient. I will then burn another disc and have the adjusted one on there as well if I need to go back and retrieve them. This system has worked for me so far.
 I have not deleted any clients from the external hard drive which I should. But once I am done with the client, the folder on my computer is deleted ( of course saved to disk first).
AKS

I too have 2 CDs or DVDs of each shoot. But, I would offer this word of advise. Make 1 CD. Then make a copy of that CD. Test the CD (copy 2) of it. If it works, you know that both of them will.

As soon as I complete a shoot and download it on to the computer, I immediately make a backup of the digital negatives on CD as RAW images. These are my untouched digital images. Next, I work up the RAW files making any adjustments and converting them to TIFF files. These are backed up on another CD and placed with the digital negatives CD. I file both of these CDs together and wipe the ones off of the hard drive. That way, I have the original negatives (RAW files) and the touched up images on disc and don't have to worry about taking up hard drive space or the hard drive crashing and losing the images.

I keep a copy on my hard drive, burn a CD backup, once a month back up my entire database of pictures on a DVD, and upload them to an external storage drive.

melody wrote:

I once a month back up my entire database of pictures on a DVD,

You can fit all your photos on DVD???

I can fit 3 to 4 photo shoots on a a single DVD. I just burned one tonight. I back all my photos up to an 80G external (that never gets moved or has stuff set on it - excpet the mouse when I am trying to keep it away from the baby). I only burn one copy of the DVD, I test it before deleting the files. I need to make 2 copies, but they take so damn long to burn!

jana