[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 1. Do you have a location in which you put backup copies of your > JPG/DNG/RAWs (etc.), negatives, and/or prints? Is it a location other than > your home, in > case of fire or disaster?
No. I have a couple file cabinets full of slides, and about 10 feet of shelving devoted to DVD's and CD's. If I'm not exhibiting I have over 1,000 physical prints in sleeves in storage in the house and up to a hundred framed exhibit prints on hand. I probably could put the best of the best in a safe deposit box - but my current safe deposit box could not begin to hold everything. If it all burns up so it goes... I'd be upset if I lost all my photos, but in all honesty I'd probably rush into a fire to save my cat, but would let the DVD's and photos burn. > 3. How often do you do make backup copies to safely store away? Do you have > some sort of backup schedule or is it sort of hit and miss? I keep three sets of DVD's - one set is everything I shoot. More or less everything. I know enough about photography to know that I don't know a good photo when I see it, so I save everything so someday I can look back and discover that maybe I took a good photo once in the past. The other set is the stuff I currently think are good photos, though I realize I'm just kidding myself. The third set is everything I pull out and use for whatever purpose - a show, a sale, whatever. Since I almost always tweak things a bit I save my print files. It also is a valuable archive of past activities. If I want to see what I printed and exhibited at a little coffee shop gallery two years ago - there it is. I also save everything I thought about printing separate from what I actually did use. This is both a record of activity, a way for me to evaluate my past evaluations of photos, and a way to create multiple copies of the stuff that is used or might be used. Assuming that hte stuff that is used is possibly good, then creating multiple copies of it helps assure its survival and makes it easier to locate, in one version or another. About general backups - I have two EIDE drives in removable caddies - Vantec brand - and backup every day or so, depending on whether or not I do anything on the PC. I've had lots of computer crashes and never lost any photo files - it's been the emails, the invoices, the day to day stuff on the PC that has been the pain to recover. So I do a complete system image every Sunday, then incremental backups for the rest of the week. Then I swap out the removable drive, repeat the same thing with the alternate drive for the following week. But that's only on the main machine. the secondary PC is not backed up at all. Aything on it worth saving is moved to the main machine to be backed up. For current photos - not burned to DVD - I keep copies on the portable stoage device, a USB 2 hard drive, my PC drive and in the regular system backups. > Anything else about backing up copies that you want to add... I probably restore a file off my backups once or twice a month. Usually its to recover from an edit I make and decide I don't like, but then realize I overwrote the original file. A good backup system can cost a few hundred dollars if you have a lot of drive space - less if you do not. But with USB 2 drives and other options out there, and the cost of fast storage is dropping all the time, it pays to have a good system. The Vantec EIDE caddies are only about $60, but when I went to faster SATA drives I put the EIDE drives into the caddies, and had a ready set of backup devices for a nominal cost. - MCC -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mark Cassino Photography Kalamazoo, Michigan www.markcassino.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
