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How Do You Store And Back Up Your Photos?


Lollipup
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I just started a thread asking for help because my big external hard drive has crashed. If all else fails I am going to format it and start over. But in the mean time I am looking for the best way to store and back up photos, especially since I got my new camera and I will have a lot more. At the moment I don't even know how to categorise them all, there are already so many.

So -

What do you use to store your photos?

How do you categorise / organise them?

What method do you use to backup and how often?

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I already posted this elsewhere in another thread but DVD back up of anything important and also an external hard drive back up. Occasionally I will run a back up to a second external hard drive to.

Edited by ness
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All folders containing images are dated .

Photos I edit/ want to keep/use are then in another folder- named , and all stored in , eg July 2012 pics.

Each month everything goes onto external hard drive ..and every -so-often-when- I- remember ..onto another external hard drive :o

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Step one: import to Lightroom - pretty much a one click deal

- this saves the originals on your disk of choice + you can choose Make a Second Copy To and it will save a second copy of originals to another location

- at import you can choose to add things like keywords (where it was, what it was blah blah blah), your copyright information and bunches more so you don't have to futz later

With step one the worst that can happen is that I have to redit anything I haven't resaved in multiple locations once I've worked on it. A pain, but not a huge deal as I don't lose any images.

Step two: fiddle with whatever I'm going to do

- keywords

- editing

Step three: export finished files to new folders on TWO or more drives then delete the original originals. This gives me multiple copies of the untouched files AND multiple copies of the "finished" files. Lightroom makes this a one button task, too.

I used to save to DVDs but I haven't done that in a while. Hard drives are so little and so cheap now that I simply save to multiple drives instead.

Use a hierarchy that makes sense to you. For me, I usually use the month & year then have subfolders. For some things I will use the name of the event instead of putting it in the monthly folder: USA2012_JUNJUL or BONAIRE2012. But do what works for you.

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In Lightroom on the right hand side of the import screen is an ->

Click that and choose where you want to dump stuff, otherwise I think the default is My Pictures in Windows; no idea on a Mac.

It's no biggie to move stuff after import either. If you manually move a folder (or rename it), Lightroom simply shows a ? next to the folder name in the menu on the Library's left hand side. Click the ?, choose where the new folder is and ta da everything is sorted :)

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Those would be two different files - one image with watermark and one naked - so you just save each of them to the proper location. Every difference you want saved has to be its own file.

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