How do you save your photos?

[smc1377]

I have an old computer, an emachine, set up as a file server. It has 3 hard drives and 1 Dual Layer DVDRW. All images get offloaded to one of the Hard Drives and as soon as I have enough new images to fit on a single layer DVD disc, I back up onto DVD.

My main computer has next to no images on it. Just program files.

[SkySpade]

Thanks for the info all. Question about burning photos: Is there a difference between burning photos to a DVD rather than to a CD?

[smc1377]

Originally Posted by SkySpade

Thanks for the info all. Question about burning photos: Is there a difference between burning photos to a DVD rather than to a CD?

As far as image quality, no. As far as time it takes, yes. DVD's hold about 6x more information than CD's.

[sybren]

Originally Posted by SkySpade

Is there a difference between burning photos to a DVD rather than to a CD?

Yep, there is. The laser is different (red for DVD, infrared for CD) because the density of the holes in the data layer is different. a CD only consists of a single data layer, a DVD can consist of one (±4.3 GB) or two (±8.6 GB) data layers. A single-layer burner can only burn single layer disks (duh) and a dual-layer burner can burn both types.

[Mr Guy]

Also, there is some amount of debate whether the stated expected lifetime of the media is accurate. I'm not sure which side has the most accurate data, but it's pretty clear you want to store any archival DVD or CDs in a cool dark place.

[sybren]

Good point. And be sure to create a fresh copy every five year or so ;-)

[vivala1210]

I use a flash drive

[Manitou]

All photos are stored on my computer and backuped at an external Netgear NV+ with four redundant 500GB drives. And no, I don't have that many pictures, there's a lot of other stuff on there to .

[janepettigrew]

I usually do the following:

Download RAW files to Mac.
Through Adobe Bridge I delete the ones I truly will never want.
The Mac has a backup on the Time Machine drive (My life saver!)
I also back up to a second hard drive.
After post processing, I back them all up to DVD's, and keep them off site at work.

When I'm travelling, I back up my SD cards daily to the laptop, and burn straight to DVD. I make two copies of my DVD's so that one gets mailed home, because of my paranoia at losing files again (the second one is packed in different luggage - again, paranoia). I had a corrupted 4GB card last year that lost 220 RAW files from a day trip to the Statue of Liberty. Luckily, I had a day where I could retrace some steps, but I know I lost some grand pics.

[Grobby]

For everyday family stuff I just import into Lightroom, backup the LR catalog on exit. My nightly backup then takes those pictures and the XMP sidecar files and stores them on another hard drive.

For client stuff, I import the same, but while importing tell lightroom to backup to external HDD. So before starting any work my shots are in three locations, the working drive, external HDD, and the card from the camera.

After editing the keepers are backed up to the external drive and the 5-star shots are stored on lifedrive.