Hi,

I am realizing that ever since I started digital scrapping about 3 months ago, I have already used up around 30GB of hard drive space, so I plan to purchase more storage in the near future. I am curious about others' storage usage and backup strategies.

I currently have a 160GB internal hard drive and 2 160 GB external hard drives for backup. One backup hard drive is kept at home and rotated with the other external hard dive that I keep in a safe deposit box.

Here is my current upgrade plan: What do you think?

I plan to get another internal hard drive. It will be either 160 GB or 250, the max for my machine. I am thinking of just sticking with 160 GB, instead of the 250 b/c I know me, in about 2-3 years I will want to upgrade this computer. Have any of you gone through 160 GB of additional hard drive space in 2-3 years, especially for those of you that have an 8 Megapixel camera. What ever size additional internal hard drive I get, I will also get two external hard drives of the same size for backing up like I do now.

My planned/current backup strategy is: I create a bootable external backup of my computer everytime I boot up. I then rotate this bootable external hard drive with the other bootable external hard drive that is in the safety deposit box, so that if there is a fire or anything at the very most I will only have lost a week's worth of data. Because even losing a weeks worth of data scares me, I plan to daily backup to the web only the new work created for the week and then dump that weeks worth of data as soon as I swap my external hard drives. The thinking behind this strategy is that let's say there is a fire in my building on Wed, but I switched hard drives on Sat., I can retrieve the hard drive from the bank that has all of the data up to Sat. and then download the new data through to Wed from the web.

I know this might sound a bit excessive, I prefer to be safe rather than sorry.

Sorry this is so long! In summary I guess that I am asking 2 questions and making one request:

1.) How much storage do you utilize?
2.) What is your backup strategy?
3.) If anyone has a better/more complete/easier backup strategy, please let me know!!!!

We as a group spend so much personal time and creative energy on digiscrapping that it would be ashamed if we just lost all of our work.

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Lysiane

~~ Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder ~~

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Thank you for sharing your backup strategy - I like your idea of making your external drives bootable.

I use a laptop and 2 - 250gigs external harddrive. One is kept off site. The laptop only has my current project. The laptop is backup weekly to the in-house external harddrive. Once a month I bring home the off-site harddrive to backup the in-house one.

I don't take very many pictures so this works for me. If I scanned a lot of old family photos that week, I will back up my in-house one sooner than one a month.

I use approximately 60 gigs a year.

I too have a 160 GB hard drive, but computers are know to be unreliable. I also have a 160 GB external.

And I have a super organized 4 drawer filing cabinet I bought at Staples. It's nice cherry wood and I bought 4 boxes of hanging files at Sam's club.
I have two drawers dedicated to clients, one to scrapping, and one to my small family. Extended family goes into the clients drawers since family has to do at least trade for their photos - since a few tend get too demanding with us.

You can organize your files any way that you want. I tend to put one client's images on one CD. And for family stuff, one event on a CD. Or one month's worth of events since some tend to be small. It's totally up to you how you do this. It may take up more CD's but organization and the immense time I save when looking for old files is more important to me than filing each CD.

Besides the hard drives, you should make a back up of all your info anyway. For Photo clients we make an imediate back up of the originals and drop it in their file. (I have plastic hanging file boxes for when the drawers get too packed for old client stuff that is hidden away in the closet.) Then later we make a back up of the retouched photos and the flattened ones that we ftp to the lab. That way re-orders are a snap.

Make sure to verify that your CD's work after you place the images on them. PC's have a tendency to do weird things like create read-only files that have very little of the info stored - so you end up with a bunch of partial photos that are like 9KB. It's very frustrating. Some PC programs have a way to verify after you've burned the CD. IT takes a lot of time it's worth it!

MAC's have a great program called Toast that automatically verify the CD taking about as much time to do that as burning them. It's quite handy and quick. Just make sure that you let it do the verification step.

LAura

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Laura Vanderbeek

http://www.vanderbeekimages.com
http://www.skrapbookdesign.com