I'm a die hard external driver...I refuse to store anything on my compter she would run slowly...and that is not good.

I think this is a really messy, user-unfriendly problem right now. CDs, DVDs, external HDs give you more control but take up space. Cloud storage (strongspace.com, fluxiom.com, .Mac) is not really cheap enough for the masses yet, and gives you only a fraction of the space you can get on an external HD. In any case you have to be diligent about creating backups -- who likes creating backups?

This is probably not the best data preservation strategy.

I like using multiple disks per computer and multiple partitions. I keep all my system stuff on one disk, spread along partitions, and I keep my personal stuff, music, and source code on another disk spread along multiple partitions.

It is often possible to recover data off a partition even when the drive fails. As my data grows I'll probably get a SATA RAID card and have a redundant partition. That costs more than an external drive though.

Amazon S3.

No flat fee, no startup costs. $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used. $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

Has a nice easy SOAP api. I host video files from it and archive some stuff there, not important stuff, but stuff.

I used to think my stuff was important enough to have a backup available no matter what even when I happened to be offline for some reason, and then I realized... I'm never offline.

OK this is a really scary admission but my photos are like this:

-RAW files on my LaClie 160gb Firewire drive.
-PSD versions on the LaClie 250gb USB drive.
-Jpegs on both drives, the laptop and the mini, plus stored at Amazon S3 and low-res versions on Flickr.
-DVDs of the RAW & PSD folders stored at work. I'm debating shipping dvds to my parent's house for disaster recovery.

Yes, I take my data-backup seriously. I once lost 30Gb of data because the Yankees lost the 2001 World Series. (If you want the story, just ask sometime.)

All I can say is Thank God for SuperDuper.

I didn't know Amazon had that!! I do backup's regularly too.

Hey Char, have you met my friends? t3h ub3rg33ks, all of them :).

I'm down with this S3 thing tho - could be nice to have another spot of stuff. You know someday moms aren't gonna be ragging on their kids about "picking up their dang rooms already". It's gonna be more like, "clean up, defrag, and backup your hard drive already! If I've told you one I've told you a thousand times. You're grounded until you get your disk in shape young lady..."

There. Did I sound menacing?

I'm a mac person, using Aperture which at the click of a button automatically updates every change to my external sister Lacie.

They call it a vault. I call it magical.

Sophie,
No I have not met the t3h ub3rg33ks...well not until now and they are 1derful! All this talk of back up and defrag makes me wanna hug my hard drive!

Okay okay okay... so is it pronounced "lay-see" or "lah-SEE"?

I thought it was Frenchish, so "lah-see" came off my tongue until Senor Minnesohtan at the computer store went and fucked all that up with a resonating "layyyyyyyyyy-see" last night.

Lah-see. Or so say the geeks in silicon valley.

Me, I just drop a new $300 drive into the computer whenever the existing one fills up. This time around, it bought me 400G when my 80G filled up.

Plus I've got scads of room on my server still.

I also have three or four external FireWire drives that get rotated through as backups.

And there's always jpegged backups of my "good" photos on flickr. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

I guess I'm still way back in the 1990's of Geek.
I use DVD's... But then again, my camera only shoots JPEG so my file sizes are quite small compared to RAW.

That, and I didn't want to add any further weight to my luggage (and figured I'd be back home in a few months) with an external drive.

I'm hoping to rejuvenate my geekness in the near future and join you space cadets.

Is it the "Design by F.A. Porsche" drive? I bought that one not five days ago. Then I installed a gig of memory and danced triumphantly in front of my computer.

Way to follow the link, Ben.

With all this insanity of memory...who keeps all the pictures they shoot? Or do you just keep photoblog worthy ones?

Welcome to the club! With a video camera that shoots MPEG to a hard drive, I found that I started buying a lot more of these external USB drives. However, I have become addicted to storage. You know you have a problem when you have 3+ TB of storage at your fingertips. 1TB of music, 1TB of Video, and 1TB of Photos. Luckily, I had a drive crash, so I have space again. :) or :(

Speaking of NAS, I have a Linksys NLSU to make any two USB drives into a NAS. Anyone want it cheap?

this summer when i started to get more serious about my photo shooting, i invested in a SATA RAID card and 2 240 gb SATA drives which i'm currently running mirrored. Of course that makes my workflow a bit mangled since those are in one of my servers and its significantly easier to upload pics and work them in my laptop. i try to remember to migrate them from the laptop's iView MediaPro catalog to the server.

A friend of mine has suggested i also do offline network storage of my photos since even a SATA RAID setup can fail. Looks like i might have to start looking into S3...

Wow. I'm overwhelmed with response - I should've posted this *before* I went out and bougt the LaCie drive. Nothing like a little indecisive to get the party started.

But to answer Char's question and push things along a little further, I don't delete anything I shoot.

Ever.

Does this make me weird or normal? I was kinda under the impression that most people didn't delete. Then again up until 2 days ago I thought everyone could flare their nostrils but then proceeded to find out I'm a special case.

As if anyone needed further proof I'm a special case.

kick ass tshirts btw.

As far as data storage goes i just put an IBM iSeries in my kitchen, it doubles as a neat breakfast table.

I almost never delete any of my photos, either.
Unless they are blurred beyond any repair and you can't tell what I was trying to shoot in the first place...

And everyone can flare their nostrils. It's a physiological response to a number of stimuli (assist in heavy breathing along with accessory muscles in the kneck, emotional distress, etc.)

They just might not be able to flare on cue... but their body knows how. :-)

Thanks for the answer....I thought I was weird too I don't delete either....nothing. Some of my bum shots I can convert to cool backgrounds for my templates through Paint Shop...but that's probally weird too.

I'm of the "if the original doesn't grab me in some way, delete it" camp.

If I take 4 pictures of the same thing, I'll keep the one I like best and delete the other three. It's not like I can't save copies of that one and play around that way. Also if something doesn't stand out right away when I'm only looking at the ~100 pictures I just took, it's certainly not going to stand when compared to the ~5000 images I have in my archives.

I delete most of everything I take.

It's all junk.