Struggling with the Organizer

[kddardmom]

I've had PSE 4 for about 6 weeks, so please bear with me!

I'm doing digital scrapping with the program, so I not only have to deal with over 2 years' worth of photos, but thousands of digital elements.
I spent most of the weekend organizing several hundred photos and nearly all of the elements into collections and tagging them several different ways.


These are my burning questions:
I had planned to just back everything up to my server, and, in turn, to our external hard drive. I was able to do a full backup over the weekend, and when I try to do and incremental backup, it just hangs up. No error message, no action. What could I be doing wrong?
Also - now that everything is organized, can I get the images off the photo browser without deleting them from the catalog and therefore destroying my tags and collections?
Also - I understand that when you back up to CD, PSE guides you to which CD you need to use, but that could become extraordinarily cumbersome when looking for elements. I was hoping to be able to back up to the server, free up my tiny (40gig) hard drive and access the items I need from our server.
Is this possible?

Thanks!!!

[GaryK]

Hi

Welcome to the forums.

I'm not much of an orgaizer user but I'll see if I can help untill one of the Organizer experts come along.

I'm not sure about the hanging problem.. sorry.

Also I don't quite understand what you are trying to do (sort of). I have a feeling you may have a bit better luck clearing off your hard drive by using the move function as opposed to the backup feature. I am under the impression that backup will create a backup, but still leave your originals on your hard drive.
There are a few around that don't trust the CD burning capabilities of Elements and just burn straight from windows.

When you say get them off th browser. If you mean when you open organizer all the photos show up. That is how it works. It is sort of a filter type of thing all the photos show, and you filter the ones you don't want by selecting tags. I'm not sure there is a way to start blank, and pick what you want to show.

I may be mistaken about any or all of this so act upon this with caution.

I know ..not much help, but maybe at least, something else to check out :)

[kayser]

Welcome to the forum!

I haven't actually tried the backup through PSE4 because of all I've read on the forum about problems with it. I've just backed up my stuff to an external hard drive.

Mary, one of the computer gurus here, has given good advice about backing up:

Several questions without satisfactory answers I am afraid.

As far as backing up to 3 disks and hoping everything was ok - mine never were. The one disk would be very quick but there was nothing on it nor could it be used again. It is a known problem in PSE 3 and on the Adobe site their solution is to use other products to backup.

You can not do "incremental" backups. It will ask for a new disk each time. I think this is a huge misnomer or misrepresentation and should be explained better by Adobe.

Don't use RW cd's or DVD's. This could lead to overwriting your good files and then you would lose them permanently.

I agree wholeheartedly with Will - use Windows to back up your files on a regular schedule. If it is a picture or something you care about at all make sure it is in more than one place. On your hard drive, external drive and on a cd or DVD or on 2 dvds etc with one being in another location.

:)
Here are some other examples of what people have said about incremental backups:

http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5888&highlight=incremental+backup

http://www.photoshopelementsuser.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2993&highlight=incremental+backup

[kddardmom]

Thanks for the input!

I think I'll eventually get used to having "everything I have ever opened" on the browser.

I've done the main backup as far as my photos and digital kits go from Windows already -and I do backup each time I get something new- I think what I'm looking to do primarily is to be able to "save my work" that I've done as far as tagging and collections go and to be able to access such things from the server instead of having to use CD's. (Once I delete from my HD.)

Is that anymore clear?

[Wendy]

Hi there ...

.... and welcome to the forum :)

Wendy

[TheMarshall]

I always do full backups. It's a pain but I'll do a full backup to DVD-RW's once every other month or so and take a copy to work. If you have a fire or flood and your backup harddrive or CD/DVD's are sitting in the same room as your computer you probably will be very disappointed. I too use an external harddrive to backup every 2 weeks (or whenever I spend a significant amount of time in the organizer) and save the backup to disk for a monthly event. I imagine you could successfully (easily) do incrementals to an external HD but I haven't tried.

[GaryK]

Kddardmom

I do think the "move" function in the organizer is what you are after. All that does is move your actual photos to wherever and it does keep track of where they went. So no reconnecting (some may get missed but most should be ok). The only thing I'm not sure of is if you can "move" to a non local drive.

The pictures in the organizer are just the thumbnails so not too much of a HD space hog :rolleyes:

Why not just try to move a small 10 photo attempt and see what happens.

[kddardmom]

Thanks for all your help.

I think what I will probably do is continue to do Windows backups as well as add on "full" PSE backups. As incremental backups don't really happen, I suppose I could open a new file on the server each time and delete the old ones??

I will try moving a few of the "less important" photos and see what happens.

Thanks !!

[mel]

Thanks for the input!

I think I'll eventually get used to having "everything I have ever opened" on the browser.
?

Hi there. If you don't want to have everything you ever opened in the browser, you could always delete that from the catalog.

I use PSE 3 and this is what I always do with the organizer. When I've finished with certain photos that I don't need in the organizer anymore I just right click and select "delete from catalog". It also then gives you the option to delete from the hard drive, but that's up to you.

This keeps my organizer organized and not too full of photos that I already burnt to CD and that I don't do anything with anymore.

Hopes this helps :)

Mel