Storage questions....

[JAS_Photo]

I decided to use Flickr as a storage option as well a while back. You can change your permissions so those other than yourself only see a small version of the photo and I do not think it is right clickable either. Not the final storage but a handy place to keep photos on since I use it anyway.

[JAS_Photo]

Oh yeah, I had two external hard drives go funny on me. One my main computer will not recognize, the other just went weird but I was eventually able to use it. My light room goes directly to my external as well. I bring to my computer the photos I want to work on and edit further. I make a jpeg and tiff of the finals. I am now owrking on a backup external that has only my favorite photos in an organized format and I will eventually copy that as well. I tried making dvd's but that lasted ten minutes. More stuff to organize. Not my forte at all.

[AntZ]

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,

RAID is not the be-all/end-all solution either. I'm not suggesting this is your case F*, but certainly do not consider your 2 RAID copies as a backup. I have seen RAID controller cards go bad. And try find your particular RAID card in 5years when you need to read that drive. I went down this road at work and ended up regretting it. I would rather a 2nd HDD with something like Norton Live State Recovery as at least it allows you to have different versions of files and also gives you protection against deleting stuff accidentally. With RAID, if you delete a file it dutifully deletes it on both drives.

Like I said for other solutions, it is good to have a practice run at restoring your RAID array. Every RAID card is different and so it the recovery process and understanding your card is important. It is not always clear which drive is the good one, which is the new one....I have seen people recover data from the new drive to the old and lose everything. So best to know how it works when you have an up to date back up on a separate drive and can afford to stuff it up. You really don't want to be doing a recovery for the first time with a drive that has your only copy of your latest work.

[F8&Bthere]

RAID is not the be-all/end-all solution either....

Yes, I guess most things have their flaws. In my case I was ordering a new Dell dedicated to multimedia and when I saw that dual HD/Raid-0 option, and the price being quite reasonable, I decided to go for it. It just gives me a bit more peace of mind

Like I said for other solutions, it is good to have a practice run at restoring your RAID array...You really don't want to be doing a recovery for the first time with a drive that has your only copy of your latest work.

Great suggestion, and as much as my good judgement says I should do that, my c'mon-this-is-Syd-we're-talking-about reality check says I'm just not wired that way lol. Sounds like too much work and time when taking my chances is so much fun. But I still think that since any drive can fail, having the RAID mirror at a small premium is still better than nothing. I could what-if myself into the poorhouse.

I have 5 letters for y'all (which is my longer term plan for a backup system)... DROBO

[AntZ]

Great suggestion, and as much as my good judgement says I should do that, my c'mon-this-is-Syd-we're-talking-about reality check says I'm just not wired that way lol. Sounds like too much work and time when taking my chances is so much fun.

Hey I am only stating theories here . I guess I could pretend I follow all of what I have suggested. That said, at any time I really only have my most recent images at risk, and any recent edits.

I have 5 letters for y'all (which is my longer term plan for a backup system)... DROBO

On my to buy list too. Although ironically DROBO is one of the cases where I heard of controller card failure writing garbage across the whole array and loosing everything. DROBO is also quite expensive.