Backing up downloaded photos - personal shots

[olivia]

After you do a shoot, do you download and immediately copy all the originals to a DVD (or whatever you use for storage) or do you go through the shots for deleting, resizing, editing first?

These images come off the camera so large (20D), I can see that keeping them all at original size will be a potential storage problem for me with my current back-up system (making DVDs, storing in our safe). I rarely print above 8 x 10, but could visualize the very occasional 16 x 20.

How do you handle storage of your personal shots?

[CappuccinoDavid]

Yes I would like to hear about this one....

[Vetteography]

Since CDs are cheap, I just save the originals and the edited copies to a folder until I have enough to burn a CD. For important stuff, I burn those right away to a mini-CD (210mb each)

[CappuccinoDavid]

I know the mini-CDs are hard to find now. Use to I used them for everything, for they were the same size as a floppy. So all my floppy boxes are full of minis now. So I guess the faster you back them up the saver they will be. btw Vetteography your link 'See My Photography Journal' on your signature is not working.. :!::!::!:

[tim]

I delete the crap photos first, then write protect what's left. From there I do whatever processing I want, and move the output to a different folder. I do backups from one internal hard drive to another every week or so, I back up to an external USB drive every few weeks, and I copy those backups onto my work machine too. I'm unlikely to lose data ;)

I don't rely on any optical media, but I do an occasional DVD backup (well, it takes about 5 of them), and keep them at my Dads house.

[DionM]

I have RAID mirrored 120GB drives in my desktop PC, onto which my photos go for most editing/reviewing. This is immediately a redundant system against HDD failure, as the drives are mirrored (if one fails, the other has all the info anyway). This gives me storage for approx 12000 photos.

When the drives fill I will upgrade to a RAID array of 400+ GB drives or whatever size is available. Basically I will just keep upgrading in HDD size to ensure I always have all photos mirrored on a RAID array.

I never 'delete' an image fully, but move them to a "trash" folder. This folder is kept on a separate drive in my PC, away from the 'real' photos. This means that the 12000 will be photos I really want to keep.

All photos are then backed up to a backup drive on my server.

These are then perioidically backed up to DVD. I am struggling / lazy with this however as DVDs are so slow as a backup medium, and I don't have a proper backup software that does incremental backups (I will soon though). However I figure 3x drives spread across 2x PCs is pretty good protection.

[Vetteography]

btw Vetteography your link 'See My Photography Journal' on your signature is not working.. :!::!::!:

Weird.. works ok for me... but you really aren't missing much :p:lol:

If you are into bad photography and just have to stop for that trainwreck, here is the link: http://www.bastaards.org/Photography.htm

[Dante King]

I back up the needed and wanted files to CD or DVD depending to size, print a contact sheet(s) and file under the event and and date.

[thomasrhee]

I back up all my photo's (as well as music files and other important documents) onto a seperate 250gb hard drive that I use only for backing up whenever changes are made. For my image files, they are organized into folders by Year-->Month-->Date. At the end of the month, that month gets backed up onto DVD's.

I'm a stickler for backups. I lost a hell of a lot of files a long time ago due to a drive that went bad with no backups and learned my lesson the hard way.

[mdm]

I use a external usb 2.0 120 gig hard drive. It's saved me before.

[weemannie]

I delete duffers first (that's most of them :D ) then back up to external firewire HDD 160Gb. Periodically, I then back up to DVD-R and use Extensis Portfolio to keep track of everything