workflow Q: How much to compress a JPEG?

tim wrote in post #3105620
Offsite backups in two locations on two different media.

Ditto, once bitten, twice use insect repellent.

One of the small Buffalo NAS devices makes a very portable off site unit at reasonable cost

tim wrote in post #3105420
Fires can destroy two hard drives as quickly as one...

Not just fires, if somebody breaks in and steals your computer and your backup is also in it (or sat on it, if you use externals) then they walk away with both copies.

The safest way is to create a duplicate drive and leave it at a friends / relatives house. Then when you download another shoot onto your main drive, make a DVD copy which you pass on to your friend / relative to load onto the HDD at their end. The DVD provides yet another backup in case of double, terminal, HDD failures (highly unlikely to happen of course but there is no harm in making sure).

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean things can't go badly wrong

bowlesbe wrote in post #3102815
really eh, those raw files dont eat up your hd?

bowlesbe wrote in post #3104288
Of course not, but we're dealing with different stuff here.

With digital photography, I can afford to take a shot with different aperture settings and different ISOs, to see which result is the best in teh end. I can also try many differnet itneresting compositions, of which only a fraction will actually be interesting. The outcome is that I take way more photos with digital than I coujld with film. I did not have the capacity to develop that many with chemicals nor did I have the will or the time. The ability to take and sort later and find out which compositions work best I find to be extrmeely educationaly because I can see which types of compositions are the most interesting. You just can't always make the best judgements through a viewer, especially a samll 30d view finder.

The net result is more pictures than I need. More pictures, , perhaps, than it makes sense to keep on a hard drive.

As transcend mentions below HDD are cheap. 500GB Sata drives for a little over $100.

transcend wrote in post #3104307
No we aren't. A negative is a negative. I have over 75 000 images archived on external HDDs. HDD space is cheap.

Delete the crap, i used to chuck entire rolls of film and negative if they were pointless.

Well said. My DNG files are around 10MB each. So on a formatted 500GB drive (actually around 460GB) I can have about 46,000 images. However, the junk still has to go.