[Leica] Question Re Backing Up to External Hard Drives

[dlr at dlridings.se (Daniel Ridings)]

I have something similar (only I bought three of these and I bought them 
with the USB and with the Firewire interface).


I don't use my computer that is connected to the scanner for much else 
than photography. In fact, I don't use it for anything else other than 
photography.

1) On my internal harddisk I have a folder called Vuescan. Under it I 
have a folder for each month of a year: January2002, January2003, 
January2004 etc, etc. Just simply chronology.

2) I scan or dump digital files into one of those folders.

3) I use Lightroom to Import files from one of the folders to the 
Lightroom homebase on the external Western Digital drive:

MyDoc>Vuescan>May2007 -> WDExternal>PhotoArchive>Photos>May2007

After every scan run I start up Lightroom and export. It ignores the 
duplicates so I just have to remember to change the source folder at the 
beginning of each month (both for dumping scans and files into and for 
Lighroom's import)

4) I copy everything from WDExt/PhotoArchive to another WDExt2

I am very seriously considering (have almost decided) a transition from 
a Windows environment to an iMac. As far as I can understand this will 
be fairly painless since Lightroom runs on Macintosh and I can just set 
up Lightroom to point at the external drives.

Besides all of this, I just keep buying the second or third largest 
drive on the market.

Daniel



Robert D. Baron wrote:
> My local Best Buy store is selling Western Digital 500 GB MyBook 
> External USB 2.0/eSata Hard Drives (Model WDG1SU5000N) for $140.  I 
> think that is cheap enough to buy a couple and use them as back ups for 
> my image files.
> 
> I'm not talking about using Retrospect back up software or doing 
> anything fancy, I'm talking about just copying my image files from my 
> computer's hard drive over to an external hard drive as a form of back up.
> 
> Is there a reason this is not a good idea?
> 
> Should I instead (or in addition?) be burning the image files to Gold 
> DVDs and storing them there?
> 
> Even with sales tax these Western Digital drives work out to about 30? 
> per GB which seems pretty cheap to me.
> 
> I know that USB 2.0 is not the fastest transfer mechanism on the block 
> but for what I have in mind I *think* it would be acceptable.
> 
> Thanks for any thoughts.
> 
> --Bob
> 
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