Saving Pictures

Eric Alberda Photography

How do you save your digital pictures? I keep both the high quality jpeg and raw file for all of my pictures. However the methods of saving them that I use are highly ineffective. How do you all save your files? I have wanted to try portable/external hard drives but have heard that they randomly fail and lose their data. This may/may not be true, but it is what I have heard. So what method do you guys use to save your pictures?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Thanks for all of the help!

www.ericalberdaphotography.com<o:p></o:p>

MarkR

I save all my Raws (bit the bullet and convert them to DNG first) locally, and to a backup harddrive, and TO AN OFFSITE LOCATION. I use www.crashplan.com, but there are other services too.

I cannot over-emphasize that last point enough. If you are just backing it up to an attached drive (or cd, or whatever) it is subject to fire, theft, and just plain failure. I recently had a primary and backup drive fail within 48 hours of each other. I would have lost gigabytes of precious pictures, if it weren't for the offsite backups.

pathfinder

Some folks use online storage - Smugmug offers services to save jpgs and Raws.

Some folks use redundant hard drives - a minimum of two, or better, three separate external drives, and sometimes they use an online service as well.

It really depends on how important your pictures are to you.

Remember, when people evacuate from a flood, one of the things they usually take is their family albumn.

jjbong

There are two different issues here: what do you save and how do you save it.

As for the what, I save the original RAW image and my final fixed image. Among other reasons, I find it useful to go back and see whether different techniques I've learned since for post do better on images of a few years ago.

How is not specific to photos. How do you backup important data on your computer - not just photos, but other important stuff? This is a complex area. It depends on the value of the data, the risks you want to cover, and what you're willing to pay to cover them. But if you come up with a solution that works for your data in general, it will cover your photos.

In my case, I and my wife each have a desktop in different rooms with a spare hard drive. Every night, we do an automatic backup of my data files to her backup, and vice-versa. In the case of a hard failure of either of our computers, we still have the data. In addition. we use Mozy to back up the same data over the internet (off-site, if you will). So in the case of a fire or a simultaneous hard failure of both computers, we have lost no data (unless there's a simultaneous Mozy bankruptcy).