33 replies to this topic

[LifeLens]

How do you back up your precious images? I lost nearly all of mine because my 500GB Stargate portable hard drive crashed the week of my son's wedding. I wanted to cry and throw up, and learned a valuable lesson of having multiple backups just in case.

[jrzayas]

Right now I use multiple hard drives. I use to own a Drobo system with 4 two TB hard drives and it failed on me. I lost ALL my images!!!

[PreservedLightPhoto]

2 backups in 2 seperate places. Flickr's massive amount of storage space is also a nice place to stash high resolution jpgs in private albums.

[Vyolater]

I know it's not the best way, but I keep all the original shots on the SD or CF cards and backup to an external HD. I feel much more confident with the images on the CF cards than the SD cards.

[DanWeso]

I have a laptop and a desktop which I copy my images to, plus two external hard drives which one is rotated off site.

[JIMMYMACK]

I place them on multiple drives then save them to DVD for filing.

[eldonphotography]

I have several external hard drives and now am trialing Carbonite to place them in the cloud. Its a lot of data but less expensive than buying all of these external hard drives.

[PhotoMom]

Lots of good answers.

[garthir]

I use flickr and an external hard drive,,,might use this too!

[jason]

i have my pc set up so one hdd for operating and working files.  and then i have 4 more HDD 's, 2 internal and two portables for storage .

[Davem45]

Hardrive Flickr and cloud

[Mark Win]

Having the advantage of an online cloud is always a great place

[Adamwesleyo]

I don't know how I feel about cloud yet. Photos can turn in to quite a bit of space and it really could take a while transferring and what not. I'm sure I'll get there but for now hard drives seem ok. At least until they crash.

[Davem45]

Having the advantage of an online cloud is always a great place

Having 27gb of storage in the cloud makes it an easy  option

[Thumper]

I have mine backed up 3 times.   I copy the pics off of my CF onto the desktop.   I do most of my post processing work from there.   When I am done, I will copy all of the pre and post files to an external Lacie drive.   At some point, usually once a week, I will back all of that up again on yet another external Lacie drive.   That may be a bit excessive, but I am less likely to lose images (and a lot of work) as I have in the past due to a HD crash.

[romalliv22]

Saving it in DVD seems old school but that is what makes sense to me (since I'm a newbie with photography).

[Afterimage]

I'm with Jimmy and Thumper - triple redundancy. One on the active hard drive, one set burned to disc and another on an external drive.

[scoobymax]

Ye I agree that using Cloud or Flickr you use up a lot of space very quickly especially shoot RAW ( upwards of 10mb per image sometimes), however I now use NCH compression program which will compress an image down to just a couple of Mb and if I want to print or use the image I'll just reverse the compression back to original size, this saves a lot of space. I also use 3 hard drives and DVDs as well. I had a hard drive crash and burn also and lost thousands of images. .

[LifeLens]

Great input everyone! Thanks! More thoughts welcome on this subject.

[K-9]

Burn the important ones to gold archival DVDs.