Storage questions....

[kurtdriver]

I agree with Greg: redundancy is good. The thought of losing all those beautiful photos you've taken would break our hearts. We should all make sure we back-up regularly. An external hard drive is good, but off site back up is priceless. I speak from the experience of having a hard drive failure that was unrecoverable and losing two years of work.
Mike

Not a fate anyone should repeat. DVDs are cheap, these days. Burn, baby burn!

[Greg_Nuspel]

Not a fate anyone should repeat. DVDs are cheap, these days. Burn, baby burn!

Just be careful with DVDs some don't last very long The Life-Span of DVDs
Do Burned CDs Have a Short Life Span? - PCWorld

[Wicked Dark]

Lately I've been using USB drives as back up to the back up. Not everything, mind you, just the cream of the crop - 1 -10 shots per session. An 8gb thumb drive is $20 and will probably go down even more before the $16gb becomes a better deal.

[F8&Bthere]

When you drag and drop files from one drive to another it usually only copies them (unless you use some keyboard shortcut). But when you do the same thing from one folder to another on the same drive it moves the files (does not make copies). At least that's the default on all versions of windows I've used. So I guess you ended up with a bunch of dupes.

Yes backing up is peace of mind, but saving duplicates on your internal drive as a back up of your external drive would be kinda backwards and counterproducive to your other goal which is to not clog up your system drive. For that you might need to burn dvd's or add a 2nd external drive down the road. So those dupes in your My Pictures folder are probably not worth keeping, at least long term.

Regarding how to import images into LR I'll say this- I was surprised to learn from another pro photographer podcast that there is a theory that importing directly from the card is not the best way. The idea is that the way LR ingests and transfers data from another drive or memory card is not 100% trusted, can lead to corrupt data, and there's even at least one Adobe guy that recommends first moving files from your card to your local drive, to a temporary folder, and then do the LR import from there. I don't care though, I'm still going to import from the card until I personally see some reason not to.

When you load a card into a connected or built-in card reader LR should recognize it and when you click import it should list that drive/slot as an option to import from.

[AntZ]

I have been moving my images to an external drive because I am trying not to carry my notebook to and from work everyday, but still want my images available. I exported my images as a catalogue to make sure I had a copy of the files and edits. Then changed the location of the images from notebook hdd to the external one.

[casil403]

What about offsite/online storage like Smugmug? Any good? Advantages? Disadvantages?

[AntZ]

What about offsite/online storage like Smugmug? Any good? Advantages? Disadvantages?

I believe smugmug can handle RAW files, where as the others image based ones cannot.
I use windows sky drive for offline backup. 25GB free. You use your browser or you need a program to allow the drive to show up in windows, but it doesn't show up as a drive letter just a folder. I think the files are limited to 25mb in size, so no large zip files.

There are heaps of other options which you can pay for. Carbonite, mozy, Dropbox... The problem with all of them is your upload speed, hopefully this will become less of a problem as bandwidths increase. To me one of these would be the utopia of backing up.

[AcadieLibre]

Offsite is ok but if they go out of business overnight you lose your images and it has been known to happen. You should have at least two external hard drives that replicate each other should one fail. I am obsessive about redundancy and have 3 external HD's with exact copies of each other. As I mentioned in a previous post one is kept in a safety deposit box and is brought home once a week (if I am shooting that week) to back up my back ups and once I am done it is brought back to my safety deposit box and is never home longer than to back up my back ups.

My life's work is on those drives and if I was to lose them I would lose a lot of money. If my house burns down, floods or whatever at least I still have my photos and I can still earn a living. All my cameras, computers are all insured and can be replaced but once you lose your photos you cannot replace them. Right now I have 3 external 1.5 TB Lacie HD's. And when I upgrade the externals to larger drives I always keep the old ones I never give them away or wipe them clean and I just store them. Years ago it saved my ass keeping the old ones since then I never get rid of them and why I moved to a third and one why it is kept offsite. External drives are inexpensive enough now that redundancy should be something every photographer does, you can never have too many back ups.

[AntZ]

This is always a hotly discussed topic. In reality all you can do is find a solution that works for you. You can have the best manual system in the word, but if you don't have the discipline to do it regularly it is useless.

Regardless of the solution, it really has to be automatic. If you have to do ANYTHING manually you are exposed to at least some risk. That said, now your manual task it to check it periodically and understand how to get your images back. In this regard, nothing beats actually recovering your images from your backup as a test. I have seen people follow excruciating backup routines, only to find out when they need them most, they have missed something or only been backing up shortcuts or don't have a copy of the software they used to do the backup....

Even with prompted solutions (ie.lightroom) how many times have you skipped the backup because you want to import your photos quickly before you head out the door or just want to get processing. Whilst this does not lose your images, it can lose you edits, which is often most of the work.

Certainly an offsite back up should not be your only solution for the reasons AL mentioned.

[F8&Bthere]

What about offsite/online storage like Smugmug? Any good? Advantages? Disadvantages?

Actually one of the reasons I went for a pro account on Flickr. Flickr is probably the worst choice of them all for many reasons, and won't take RAW files, but storage is unlimited, max file size is pretty good, so I use it to back up most of my keepers at full resolution jpeg. At least if the unlikely happens and all goes to hell, I can still retrieve those. So it's not really a backup solution, maybe a last resort better-than-nothing solution, and another little perk for joining the Flickr community. It's inexpensive and I doubt they'll be going broke and disappearing with my images anytime soon.

Right now all I really have for backup is a dual internal RAID-0 HD config where one drive mirrors the other constantly and automatically, I ordered my Dell with that option, but I'm not sure I made the right decision since that took me down to 640GB drives (to stay at my price point) and boy oh boy does that fill up quickly. And as you kind of said, Lisa, I never want to have my internal HD that hosts my operating system more than half full, because it just seems to bog your whole system down.

So more recently I added a 2TB eSata external drive and started keeping all my archives on that as I mentioned previously. But I have nothing to back that up, and what I do have for the internal is still in-house which doesn't protect me from fire/flood/theft. So I plan at some point to do something like the external drive/safety deposit box thing AL does.

Of course, if you earn a living from your photography backup is even more critical.