This is more than a "gizmo"-- or if it is, it's a really big one!

In the early days, I had all my photos stored on two sets of CDs. Then when I got a new laptop with a DVD burner, I changed to DVDs. Never have your valuable photos in just one place -- not even for 5 minutes -- unless you don't mind the risk of losing them!

Then I got sick of the complications of this storage system where you have to pull out the correct disc with the older photos that you're looking for -- that is, if you can find the correct DVD on the shelf that has what you're after.


So what I've done is to buy two 500GB external drives. All photos are on the first (with space for a few years to come) and a free backup program copies any additions/changes to the second drive without me doing anything. You can do this, of course, with just one external drive as the backup for what's on your pc/laptop if you have enough space on the computer's HD. I actually started off with just one 500GB HD. Then I still had the backup problem to DVDs, as I have over 100GBs of photos, including RAW originals and TIFFs processed from many of these, and my laptop only has a 120GB HD. That's why I bought the second HD (a twin).

What a luxury it is to be able to just sit there and summon up any photo at all from the past five years with a couple of clicks!

I got my local computer store to make me up these drives. I chose Coolermaster cases and Samsung drives, but there are a lot of options on the market.

My free backup software is from www.comodo.com , although I'm having minor technical problems with it, as I have described in the backup forum on this site. (I'm registered there as andrewgg, if you want to look for this.)

My thumnail/slideshow/file renaming software that I find indispensable in using in conjunction with this setup is also freeware, and is the best available at any price, in my opinion. It's FastStone Image Viewer from www.faststone.org

So what do you do for backup? You do make backups, don't you???