I've been storing my precious shots on gold dvd and cd and the ordinary on inexpensive brand name cds and dvd on sale. What's now on my mind is management and searching when the pics are no longer on my computer. I've gotten some feedback that "extensis porfolio" is the way to go but it presently does not support NEF and is complicated

First of all, I am dubious about gold DVD's having the same physical protection for longevity compared to gold/gold CDR. There is no independent test data on the gold DVD-R blank discs currently available.

Extensis Portfolio is a great professional image database, but like all good systems it demands a lot of hours of input to make it useful and effective for searching. If you would rather not spend a lot of time inputting data with a keyboard, it's not the easiest way to go.

If you have Adobe CS2 the Bridge browser application has the capability and you can include all Raw Camera file format files and use metadata for searching including generating thumbnails for images on external drives as well as CDR and DVDR storage.

Thank you very much for giving me this info. I have CS2 but I did not know it would keep track on my digital files I archived on cds and dvds. I'll try to figure that out tonight. As for the gold, I have read good information on that technology, gold does not degrade, that coupled with the reality that we have discovered that regular cds and dvds have failed over time.
Thanks
islandinteriors

Backups in multiple places. I use DVDs and hard drives. My data drive set up in a raid so that the information gets written to two drives simultaneously. I also back up regularly on DVD so my data is always on both hard drives and DVDs. Then when my data drives fill up, I pull one and put it into an external USB housing, put in a duplicate drive and reformat the raid. I don't shoot that much anymore but have always been able to find what I'm looking for because I use a properly named folder hierarchy and a good search program.

I've scanned approximately 10,000 slides for artists in the past two years and have everything backed up in to places.

My own work that I currently sell (about 80 gigs) is backed up on two external drives in the house, multiple copies of DVDs and a 100 gig external laptop hard drive in the bank safety deposit box.

That all may be excessive, but it only takes it onlly takes one hard drive failure to scare you to death.

ok bogie that sounds good but after an hour i can't figure out how to generate thumnails in order to search cds for my pictures. I have CS2 and am working with bridge. Please show me how you do it

The first thing to do of course is to access the CD, DVD, or drive with Bridge's file browser and highlight the drive so Bridge will generate thumbnails of all the files. Bridge saves a file of the thumbnails, on a Mac it is in a folder under Users and in my case personal data section. With Windows you'll have to reference that documentation on Bridge to locate where the thumbnail file is stored.

And I am afraid you will also have to access Adobe's documentation to find how to access the thumbnails and run a search without the storage device active. I'm sorry I have not done this myself for well over a year and don't remember off-hand the particulars step-by-step. I use an entirely different method other than a database as a locator for over 600 CD's of image files that's quicker and can't be lost if a hard drive or even one of my computer systems goes down permanently.

I use a second hard drive. You can pick up a 250gb internal WD drive for less than $80 after $10 rebate at Newegg. Then Make a folder on your C: drive called "Backups" and simply copy that folder to your new drive every other day or so. There is NO cheaper/convenient or faster way to backup images (or other data for that matter). Here is the link to the drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701

Thanks Bogie,
I'll work on it

Quote:
Backups in multiple places.

Speaking from bitter experience, this is the ONLY way to give yourself reasonable security. There is not a single form of storage which can't fall victim to mischance.

I once thought that keeping data on an old harddrive which had been removed from service was invulnerable. Then my house was struck by lightning. Not much was damaged, but I lost the data on three drives which had been sitting on the shelf in their static-resistant bags. Fortunately the electrical zap doesn't affect CDs (or DVDs).

Make a lot of backups and your chances improve that at least one of them will survive.

Here's my solution, built up over a couple of years time: I use three external hard drives. Number 1 is my cache/scratch disk for Photoshop, #2 is my main file storage drive, and #3 is backup for #2. Number 3 is powered off except when I'm actually backing up files (weekly), and the first two are only on when I'm actually working in Photoshop. The only files I keep on my internal hard drive are the ones I'm actually working on (the "Darkroom" folder), and it gets copied to #2 weekly, also, along with other critical files like software downloads. About once every six months, everything on drive #3 gets copied to DVD for archiving. Oh, yes, forgot to mention that all my RAW digital files go onto CD first thing,

The reason for this somewhat paranoid approach: About two years ago, the other HP computer in the house (my wife's) got some kind of bug that trashed the hard drive, and I ended up having to replace it. I don't even want to think about that happening on this machine without a lot of backup protection. Windows XP and McAfee are good protection from most threats, but when the gods of cyberspace decide they're gonna getcha.....they're gonna GETCHA!