Collect Show Files - question

[alcain Profile Private messageWebsite]

Debbie, Watch the newspaper ads... Especially Best Buy...

Over that past 6 months, I have purchased an external USB 320Gig hard drive for $69.00 and an external 180Gig hard drive for $47.00. These are brand new Seagate drives, plug and play. Lets you back up to your heart's content... Just take your time and keep an eye on the ads - these deals don't come up all that often - but they do occasionally...

~al

[briancbb Profile Private message]

As Mikey has said, the organisation of 'collect files' in producing sub-directories of images, audio etc is good. When I do a show now I make a directory for the show and sub-directories copying what 'collect files' does. This way extra directories can be added (such as Mikey's 'extras' or even a copy of the 'ISO' if it is small enough ), I find this the simplest and easiest ways to keep things together. Also I backup by having one DVD for a show by copying the top directory to the DVD. After all DVD's are cheap, less than 20p (40c) each.

Brian

[debngar Profile Private message]

I bought a 1TB drive, a firewire card and cable about a month back - it's not installed yet though.

I know I probably paid too much for it but thought I was going to install it that day to use it for backup in RAID fashion (so 2- 500 Gb drives). I want to start shooting RAW+Jpg and need that kind of storage at the rate I'm going. Then I realized that I had to do some serious PC housekeeping first. Ugh.

Of course I don't really have a clue how to organize all this and am stumbling through stuff. My internal PC only has a 143 Gb drive. I didn't want to have to keep buying more drives that often and so this is why I bought the 1Tb drive.

Any suggestions for better work flow? I know it's complicated and there seems to be different thoughts on whether to use that drive in RAID for backup or just use it to store extra stuff on it. Either way, I need some kind of backup and don't want to do it all on CD.

I've started listening to podcasts on photography asset management workflow to try and help me make a decision as to how I want to organize it all. Lightroom is also on the list for purchase sometime soon. I have to commit to getting both my fee into this and make some progress soon or I will continue to procrastinate and that could get bad.

Thoughts?

[DickK Profile Private messageWebsite]

As I'm sure you know, the big advantage to a proper RAID setup is that it's doing the backup all the time and for everything. Simple in execution with the slight penalty for complexity in setup.

I'd certainly consider using it as a dual RAID array. I'm not sure at all that it would be best, but that's probably not how I personally would use it, mainly because you're not setting up the RAID to protect the boot drive. I think I'd leave the drives separate, use the internal drive as boot & applications and move every bit of my data files (doc files, spreadsheets, image files, ProShow resources, audio, etc., etc.) over to one of the new drives. Then I'd use the other of the new drives as my backup for everything. A disk imaging program will let you image the boot drive and safely store it over on the backup for great protection, and almost any backup application will do the job to backup anything on the data drive that you don't want to lose.

Dick