Hard drive advice?

[glatt]

Are the brands pretty much all the same for performance and reliability? Are any brands known duds?

Edit: Oh, and I've been backing everything up to DVD, but they are not convenient for finding the shot you want unless you know the date it was taken.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by glatt

snip--
Edit: Oh, and I've been backing everything up to DVD, but they are not convenient for finding the shot you want unless you know the date it was taken.

Good for you for backing up. Perhaps it is helpful to you to consider the backups as the place to go to get your data back when it disappears from the regular location. From that perspective, some small inconvenience at sorting through the discs is irrelevant compared to the joy of still having live copies of your pictures.

Below is a screenshot of a sample of how I organize my pictures. I create, on the external hard drive, a series of folders.

Pictures, which contains folders corresponding to years.

Years, which each contain folders corresponding to months.

Months, which each contain folders corresponding to the event in question. Sometimes these leaf (terminal) folder names are repeated. For example, I take pictures each month that belong to the category of Misc. Kids is another recurring theme for me.

This method has several advantages. All my pictures are in one place. Not like your system where they're scattered over several discs. My pictures are "online", available at a click. I


nevermind.

glatt:

We covered this before.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by BigV

All my pictures are in one place. Not like your system where they're scattered over several discs.

Mine are all on the C: drive in one place, and backed up to DVDs as well. But the 80 GB hard drive is almost full, and it has everything on it, not just pictures. So I want to move these pictures to another hard drive and use the C: drive for the normal junk found on a PC. I'll also continue to back up the pictures to DVDs.

So no word on manufacturers? I guess they are all the same, and I should just shop by price/size/speed?

[Bullitt]

There's the big guys like Seagate and Western Digital. The one I purchased was LaCie and it's worked great for me so far.

[kerosene]

Probably not the best solution by itself, but I back up my photos by putting them on my hosting space. I pay about 7 something a month for it. Then I installed a free gallery software and just import them all into the gallery website. Now, not only are the photos backed up, but they are all sorted out and I can point friends and relatives to them, if I want. I use Coppermine, because it is pretty easy. I can also control the level of privacy on specific albums, so, you know, if I had, say, naked pictures of myself, my parents aren't subjected to porn or whatever. So, there is that, too. With this idea, be sure to pay your monthly fee, or they dump everything. :P

I also periodically back stuff up on DVD, as well, but that seems to have failed me, as a backup I created 3 years ago is now unreadable for a reason I have yet to determine. Lost a lot of important documentation. I have also considered purchasing an external drive, for the convenience...but I think with the flakiness of hardware, these days, I would entrust at least 2 separate backup methods.