lecarter Loc: Jackson, MS

How do you backup or save your pictures? I have just spent a very stressful weekend as I watched my hubby try to recover my laptop's hard drive after becoming infected with a nasty trojan. The end to the tale is happy in that all of my pictures are safe, but I lost a lot of other data in the process.... data that time or money can replace whereas my pictures would have been irreplaceable. So I am elated!

But how do you backup your hard drive.... i.e., your precious photographs?

In the interim, when I didn't know what was preserved, I figured I still had what was saved to facebook or snapixel.com. But I need a good way to save my pictures on a regular basis. I have learned my lesson. This will not happen again!

And to those that can feel my pain... I had only just discovered Lightroom4 but had not exported any of what I had manipulated in the process!!! Now I am too scared to re-download the software. (But I intend to purchase it ASAP!)

MWAC Loc: Somewhere East Of Crazy

I save to an external hard drive (never my C drive), once a month a burn that months images to a CD and that get's placed in my file drawer. I also plug in an additional external hard drive and down load everything to that, unplug that drive and that get's placed in the fire safe box. We have an external for important documents and one for pictures in our fire safe box.

Tea8 Loc: Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.

Right now I just run one external hard drive that backs up the whole computer. I am in the process of getting another hard drive just to back up my pictures. When I do that I will keep it in a fire safe box as well. Since we don't really have any direly important documents on the computer other than pics at the moment I am not going to expand out to a separate drive for them yet like MWAC has.

My family learned the lesson the hard way last year when the hard drive in our seven year old computer finally bit the dust. (And I had been saying for months we needed to get a back up system.) Luckily our computer expert was able to get it started one last time and get it copied over to an external drive for us.

photo guy Loc: Chippewa Falls, WI

I back up my photos onto cds. Have a portable hard drive that is failing so I decided to go back to cds as it is more reliable.

drjuice

Every evening that I shoot any pictures, I unload the cards from my cameras onto the main hard drive of my notebook computer if I'm on the road or the equivalent of my desktop if I'm at home. At the same time, I unload the same cards onto an external USB drive (it's a Western Digital 2TB mirrored drive) which I connect to my notebook or my desktop (whichever got the first backup of each card). Finally, I build a archival DVD (Delkin's are my preferred brand) that contains all the RAW and processed images. That goes to a climate-controlled environment as soon as I can get it there.

FYI - I shoot RAW + JPG mainly because I often want to take a look at the image to be sure I've got it framed properly. I NEVER use the JPG because I'm never happy with the colors resulting from in-camera processing. I should add that I've never been unhappy with a TIFF produced from a RAW file using Dave Coffin's dcraw software. If I then want either a PNG or JPG file, I take those off the TIFF. And, dcraw is definitely a better $$$ deal than $500 or more for some of the popular commercial packages because Dave has essentially contributed this very good piece of software to the photographic community and has placed "no restrictions on this code". Dave's original version was written for *inx so Macs and other operating systems are covered. Additionally, a version written to run from cmd.exe in Windows is available by googling dcraw.

Enjoy!

v

warrior Loc: Paso Robles CA

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Backing-up has always been a hassel for me, and I mean always. I got a couple of backup programs, but I wasn't thrilled with them. Then I found a free backup program that I love.

Someone on this forum recommended SyncToy, from Microsoft. I love it. I backup several folders to three external drives, and the Echo feature makes it fast and simple. It doesn't back up all 1,000 images (or whatever) every time. It just records changes since the last backup, so it can be very fast.

As for the other kind of backing up, I got a tiny camera for one car and a little beeper for the other. As I get closer to something, the beeping changes. I prefer that to the camera.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

I use a Buffalo 1 terrabite external HD. It is comprised of 4 250 GB drives, configured with RAID 5. It is my primary storage site/facility/device, whatever... With RAID 5 if one, or 2 drives fail, I replace them and the RAID restores what was on the failed drive(s). I do not back this drive up. I do however, back up my desk top and my portable to it using Memeo which came with the Budffalo

SlimDude Loc: Cambridge, Ontario

To all those who backup their files, I highly recommend attempting a restore periodically. This is an essential part of any disaster recovery plan in the world of Information Systems where I earn money to buy more camera equipment.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Excellent suggestion! It's like having a spare tire but not knowing how to put it on.

I do that with my laptop, and it works fine. Most files stay on my desktop, but I need some on the laptop, and SyncToy works fine.

Frapha Loc: Tulsa, Oklahoma

I use Carbonite -- it's saved me a couple times when hard drives crashed. IMO, well worth the price

birdpix Loc: South East Pennsylvania

I use Lightroom and it has a feature that allows you to make a second copy to another drive at the same time you are uploading your photos from the memory card. I use an external drive for that. So, right off the bat, I have two copies of the photos. Every Sunday night, I back up my desktop to another external Hard drive. I have two of these drives and I alternate between them each week. I purge the files from the "Make a second copy to" drive that have been backed up to both of my Sunday backup drives. In effect, I always have three copies of my photo files. For lightroom, I always back up both the catalogue and the photo files so that if I have a problem, I can just plug in the back p drive and be good to go.

A lot of drives? yes but they're getting cheeper by the day. There are others who also use online services like Carbonite which can run in the background for you.

Grumps'09 Loc: Midlothian, VA

I save photos to a dedicated, external hard drive and back them up to separate external drive (you can do this automatically in LR 3 & 4 with each import). I have an HP "Simple Save" drive running in tandem with my C drive that auto backs up all of my data. Not too expensive and the external drives can be easily kept in a safe place.

JayJay Loc: Eastern Washington State

I have used Carbonite for several years. My hard drive crashed last October but got a perfect restoration with restore .
I now have their Home + edition which does a mirror image of the c drive for "the next time".
Fires burn up external hard drives and even gold CDs too !

Nikon_DonB Loc: Chicago

External WD hard drive has always done the trick for me.