Backup

[kbeckwith17]

Hello all,

I'm new to photography and don't have a ton of time to do it, but what I do take I want to make sure I will always have. What do you use to back up your precious pictures? Maybe just burn them to CD, create a mirrored drive, back up to tape, ZIP disks, etc? I appreciate the input.

Kevin Beckwith

[JZaun]

YES........................ :D All of the above although the Zip probably is just far too small to do much good. All of the other ideas are good.. Do more than one type of back up and ck your backup's often.

JZ

[sdommin]

I bought a second physical hard drive specifically for the purpose of storing pictures. I don't put anything else on it. I also backup all my photos onto DVD+R. I figure that one or the other will survive almost anything.

[daaaveman]

It will survive if you take it off site. We keep copies on my wife's laptop with duplicates on both of the hard drives in my tower. We also burn to dvd and take those to my dad's house and keep them in his safe. We do this with, god forbid, a house fire in mind. Always keep off-site backups or atleast get a good fire safe for your house.

[CyberDyneSystems]

If your lazy.. get a mirrored drive or an external USB2/Firwire back up drive with "one button" back up...

This is for when your being to lazy to actually create a back-up..

It is not a substitute for burning CD/DVDs and archiving.

[where1]

I put a second hard drive in my computer. Every day at 4am it automatically copies new or modified files from My Documents to it. I also copy files to a que area on the second hard drive when I copy them to the C drive. When the que has enough files in it, I make a CD backup, and delete the files in the que. When I have 6 CDs filled up, I make 2 DVDs, one is for offsite storage. I'm not done yet, I also copy my CF's to my X-Drive, and leave them on there until I get a good DVD backup made.

This may be overkill, but I have lost pictures in the past, and I miss them. :(

I also keep a spreadsheet of what is on what CD/DVD. This helps to find something, or if a CD/DVD crashes, to make a replacement from the hard drive.

[rene_tech07]

IBackup, this online storage (http://www.ibackup.com) service is the best bet for you.

Instead of storing your pictures in a CD or a tape, try this service. You will have access to your pictures when ever or where ever as required. It has features to view your pictures as an image gallery where your pictures will be displayed as thumbnails. Clicking on the thumbnail will take you to an enlarged view of the same. You also have a ‘slide show’ option.

[Eagle]

I keep them on my second drive in my PC and burn them to CD. Been thinking about installing a third drive just for pics as the second has other stuff on it also. Next time I format C:/ I am going to make a partition just for Windows that way it could be reformated by itself.

[jbkalla]

Dual-Layer DVDs work pretty well, but they're not nearly as handy as an extra hard drive. Online storage is probably the safest (what if you have a fire in your house?), but also the slowest...