Where to store my photos? What is your workflow?

[bratkinson]

My workflow is done in multiple passes or stages of a shoot. I copy from the SDHC to my SSD drive and 1TB drive in folder 1. I make a 'fast pass' deleting all that are too duplicative, badly exposed/focused or just a lousy picture from folder 1 on the SSD. I then process everything in folder 1 through Lightroom, creating folder 2. I also copy folder 2 to the 1TB. Then comes pass #3 with Photoshop Elements. I use both LR and PSE as there's things easier done in one than the other. The end result goes into folder 3. I then make yet another pass with PSE, cropping pictures to the sizes I want for printing, sometimes the same picture gets more than 1 crop, 4x6 and 5x7, for example. The cropping results go into folder 4. Each of the folders gets backed up to the 1TB each day, as well as to a 16gb thumb drive I carry with me until I have my offsite copy made and physically offsite, perhaps a week later.

As the cost of hard drives gets cheaper by the day (the 1TBs are less than $100. Contrast that to a 40 MEG, not GIG drive 25 years ago was close to $350, as I recall!), I'm not concerned about filling one up. By then, the 8 or 16 TBs will be less than $100, so space won't be a future problem, either. Of course, the absolute key is in coming up with an appropriate folder name for each shoot. Some use a descriptive name, some only a date, or some use a mix. I use both, and for recurring events, a single descriptive folder name contains multiple dates as folder names for each recurrance. Then my '4 folders' of each shoot are in the date-named folder. And I'm just a hobbiest. Pros would need a much more complex folder naming structure.

In regards to RAID as backup/security/safety, when I built my latest computer in June, I determined from various technical websites that RAID can be more headache/problematic when it comes to recovering from a failure than most can or want to handle.

For that reason, I went to cloning my drives and keeping one set in my computer room, and an USB external set offsite at church. That way I'm protected from every likely scenario, even tornado, as the church copy is in the basement. In preparation for Sandy, I had a packed suitcase with my computer room drive copies in it.

One thing RAID cannot protect from is what I've encountered twice in the past 2 months. Updates to Windows or to the device drivers can and have rendered my computer unable to successfully boot up. Even with close to 30 years PC building/repairing/upgrading experience, sometimes the effort to get it operating again is more time than I have or want to spend. Since I have a weekly clone of C: at home, I simply swap out the C: drives and I'm back to were I started from, albeit with some missing email, at most. Having all my drives on slide in/out bays makes it 30 seconds or less to swap 'em.