About archive and storage

[Patrice]

I've been playing with my new toys and have come to realize just how quickly a 4 gig card fills up saving in jpeg large and raw. I'm still not comfortable enough with digital processing to completely wean myself from the jpeg addiction. All this brings me to ask some advice and suggestions on digital archiving. Just how does one store, save and index all this digital data. I have 30 years of negs and I know how to get to each one but I'm flumoxed on how to deal with just a few years worth of 15mb images.

 

[Big Mike]

There are any number of way to store and archive your digital images. I think you have to find and develop a system that works for you.

I upload my images to my hard drive and put them into folders based on capture or upload date. Every so often, I back them up onto DVD. I plan to get an additional hard drive or two...for backup/storage.

Professionals, or just the more diligent, will go farther to protect their images. Burning extra disks and storing them off site (in case of fire/flood etc.) Even disks can and will break down over time (maybe as little as a few years) so some people use gold archival CDs & DVDs.

As for archiving, I don't have much of a system right now. I can usually find something based on the date...or I just browse the image thumbnails with Irfanview. Google's Picas software is pretty good for archiving...it lets you browse your images very quickly...and I think you can tag & rate the images to be searched a a later time. There are several other programs for doing this.

 

[droyz2000]

I store mine in a few different areas. First I save them onto my computers hard drive. Second, when I am finished processing the pictures I save them onto an external hard drive and burn them on to either CD's or DVD's. I feel that this backs them up enough for what I need. I suppose if you want to be real ambitious you could build a home server and save everything to that, however that can be kind of pricey.

 

[Patrice]

Thanks guys,
I went and got a small usb hard drive for now. I still have to think about the structure of the folder/folder trees and some of my software default paths. I'v allready loast a few frames from a session in the park. They are in this machine somewhere... but where?

 

[space]

use the search feature built into windows. search for **.JPG or whatever format and it will display every file with that extension.. long process but atleast you will find what you want