External or Internal HD?

[just x joey]

wow u guys are crazy, lol i wuld jsut get big prints of my best images and buld a portfolio, and not worry about a HD crash. if i wanna get them on my computer once it crashes, just scan them.

 

[sothoth]

get several harddrives, external ones.

you can buy the external case. and then buy a drive and mount it in the case yourself. cheaper that way, and once a drive is defective, you can simply replace the drive, keep the case.

oh, and get several to mirror. store one backup in a place somewhat away from your house (helps in case of flooding, fire, theft).

Alex is right. Get a good external case and a big HD, get a backup software package, and keep your data in several locations. I have a 450gb on my PC, two 450gb's mounted into external cases, and my photos get backed up (automatically) weekly to the two externals and to DVD. I do the DVD's manually once a month. You have to be crazy to not be anal about backups if you cherish your photos.

Get a safe deposit box for the outside storage, or something like that.

 

[chakalakasp]

wow u guys are crazy, lol i wuld jsut get big prints of my best images and buld a portfolio, and not worry about a HD crash. if i wanna get them on my computer once it crashes, just scan them.

Except, of course, that scanning will never perfectly duplicate a print, and a print will never perfectly duplicate the digital file. Not to mention that scanning takes forever to do properly, and you are unlikely to have high-end $6,000 scanning equipment sitting around in your house.

It's not terribly economical, either. Conservatively, I have probably several hundred photos that are good enough to *need* to save and another thousand that I'd really miss, despite their not being marketable... at $10 per 10x15 (the size where I'd probably capture the most detail into the print), I think I'm better off getting another hard drive, lol.

 

[markc]

wow u guys are crazy, lol i wuld jsut get big prints of my best images and buld a portfolio, and not worry about a HD crash. if i wanna get them on my computer once it crashes, just scan them.

I don't think you realize how much work is in those files for some of us. And scanning a print isn't going to come anywhere close to the quality of the digital file it originally came from.

 

[just x joey]

hm. well if u think about it, picaso, and all them artists never had backups. lol but if u wanna sell a buncha prints of one of your images over a long period of time i guess a backup hard rive wuld be worth it. i'd go external. you hear the smnoke alarm go off, grab ur external hard drive and your laptop and your lenses and run lol

 

[chakalakasp]

hm. well if u think about it, picaso, and all them artists never had backups. lol but if u wanna sell a buncha prints of one of your images over a long period of time i guess a backup hard rive wuld be worth it. i'd go external. you hear the smnoke alarm go off, grab ur external hard drive and your laptop and your lenses and run lol

That's because the value of their prints were that they were originals. If you are planning on only making one print of something and then selling it as an original (and destroying the RAW file and all other copies to ensure that no prints are ever made), then yes, you don't need to back up your photos. I suspect this applies to a very small subset of photographers, though.