Backing up and Storing

[Rachelsne]

I recently put everything from my laptop and PC onto my external hard drive, but I worry this will fail and I really want to get DVD's as an extra precaution.

I was wondering how do you categorize your photos when you store them, do you put them in categories by landscape, animal, people, or how?

Also is it DVDr I need to put my pictures onto or should I be using something else, is there a recommended brand that seems to work well?

Do you put Raw files, and JPEGS on to the same disc or do you categorize them separately?

When you put the files to disk to you copy and paste them to the new folder on the DVD or is there a proper way to do it.

Im not just looking to do this for back up but for organising my pictures before I get to many!

Thanks

[Ads]

[penfold1]

Delkin archival Gold DVD-R's are suppose to last 100 years.

Normal DVD-r's don't actually have that long of a shelf life, so are considered less safe.

I have never used them however, so I can not say ho well they work.

Personally I would rather invest in either flash memory or a few hard drives.

Nice thing about those two is that even if they do crash there is usually someone who can still get the information off them for a price.

Harddrives are super cheap now anyway.

[xstephenx]

Really, I would (and plan to when I get around to it) set up a RAID array with 3-4 HDD. You can get a 750 gb from fry's/newegg/[insert computer shop here] for a couple hundred bucks. I will probably start with 2 drives and then add as necessary when I start getting scared of losing everything.

[Overkill-F1]

I create folders like: 'People', 'Family', 'Places', 'Pets & Animals', 'Cars & Trucks', etc. in "My Pictures' folder. After DPP copies the photos with a name like: 'IMG_0001' to the computer, I change the names of good shots to a descriptive name like: "Duck at Okover_0001" and move the photo to the appropiate folder.
Every once and a while, I copy all my photo folders to DVD's. I think I'll look for the 100 year archival ones next time!
...Terry

[swmocity]

i just divide them up by dates

[tirediron]

My system is fairly simple. I keep the images on my computer until I've done all the PP that I'm going to do on them, and then they get transferred to my external HDD, and a DVD burned as well.

I usually shoot a couple of gig worth of any given subject, so they're simply labeled by date and subject. Each file has three sub-directories, one for RAW, one for TIF and one for JPG