Archiving

Art Scott

How do You all archive your raw, tiff and jpg files and do you store the final file with the raw.

I went to CD / DVD after losing 3 hardrives in a year....all were under warranty and were recovered but if simple recovery hadn't worked I could not have afforded the cost of Professional recovery.

I was using CD / DVD and software was Roxio Easy media creator 7.5 .... all of a sudden I am getting corrupted file messages.

cletus

ART SCOTT wrote:

How do You all archive your raw, tiff and jpg files and do you store the final file with the raw.

I went to CD / DVD after losing 3 hardrives in a year....all were under warranty and were recovered but if simple recovery hadn't worked I could not have afforded the cost of Professional recovery.

I was using CD / DVD and software was Roxio Easy media creator 7.5 .... all of a sudden I am getting corrupted file messages.

Don't know what to tell you about the Roxio issue, other than maybe try their tech support.

I think the CD/DVD route is probably the way to go for archiving. I don't have a good archive system in place right now. I need to start making DVDs of all my RAW files and final PS files and storing them in a safe place.

JamesJWeg

I pray about it a lot.

James.

Art Scott

JamesJWeg wrote:

I pray about it a lot.

James.

me too.

photon

I'm just paranoid...
After I got my 20D in Feb/05, I've become pretty concerned about my computer backups, too... (Before that, all I had was a few files with finances and a few letters -- it would fit on a floppy).

Now though, I have a few different strategies that working at the same time that will hopefully keep me covered... Basically, I keep as many copies of the pictures in as many places as practical to ensure that if any one of those places fails me, I have somewhere else to go to get them back.

1) I have a large CF card (2 GB) for my camera, which at Large JPEG (which I normally shoot at... I know, I know, eventually I'll start shooting RAW. : ) means I have a few months of 'backup' on the camera itself. I only delete from the camera once I'm sure that my other backup locations are complete and uncorrupted.

2) My computer hard drive. Normally, this is my home machine, but I have also used my work laptop when I go on trips, which serves as a second copy (or 3rd, if you're counting).

3) I make monthly backups to CD using Picasa's backup function. This is nice because it tells me what hasn't been backed up to CD, and each backup has software to automatically restore backed-up CD's. If you're like me and do basic editing within Picasa, it stores those settings as well.

4) When I have enough to fill a 4.7 GB DVD, I burn them using Roxio's Easy CD Creator.

5) In the future, I will be getting an additional hard drive and hooking it to mirror the other (RAID 1 configuration) so each time the computer writes to 'the hard drive' it will actually write to both drives at the same time. This way, if one drive fails, you can replace / recover / reformat the failed drive, and get going in a fraction of the time (and without the heart attack!) It also has the side benefit that the computer is smart enough to read back files from both drives at the same time, which results in an overall system performance gain.

Anyway, the more copies you have, the easier you sleep (and the less praying you have to do for the health of your computer! ) Just make sure that every time you make a copy that you try to load the images so you can count on the backup being there for you when you need it.

Hope this helps.