Help saving photos

Bykerlass

I learnt the hard way. Stored all my raw files on an external hard drive and backed some up to DVD but not all. (Got complacent) External hard drive packed up and I lost all of the files. I could have cried and still could kick myself for not burning them to DVD. I now have two external hard drives and back up to both and to DVD just in case. May still look at uploading to a online storage site.

jayme1

to back up my photos I have 2 external hard drives with identical copies of the photos on each that I update as often as possible, I also keep all the photos on my computer hard drive, and I have a copy on a few DVDs but I dont update the DVDs anymore as I have enough backups.

I also am thinking of using skydrive for online backup gives you a 25GB file size with a 50MB maximum per file upload.

Shimrod

googler wrote: »

There are doubts about the permanence of CD and DVD, and hard drives can fail as well, so my best advice is to backup on CD or DVD AND Hard Disk

I back my digital photos up to DVD as well as hard drive. The last couple of weeks I've been doing a bit of re-organising and DVDs burnt as recently as 4 years ago are failing. This is especially a problem with dual layer DVDs. I also have a number of scanned photos which I have stored just on DVD - thankfully I haven't lost any of those as being Joe Paranoid I burnt three copies of each disk!

You can get archival quality DVD-R which are guaranteed to last at least 25 years but last time I checked they were around £5 each.

barginunter

Why don't you download Picasa http://picasa.google.com/ which enables you to catalogue your photos into descriptive folders and is also an excellent editing tool. I've used it for years.

darich

If you're just starting into photography then I'd advise forgetting about RAW in the meantime.
RAW images are fine if you want to spend lots of time playing with your favourite editing software eg Photoshop. If you're literally, "just starting" then I'd be more inclined to stick to jpeg and get to know what aperture priority v shutter priority is and where you'd use them etc etc.

Storage - cd/dvd coupled with hard drive would be fine. Online may also be good but it could mean uploading several gigabytes of data everytime you empty a memory card.