New External Hard Drive

[Not4wood]

Just purchased a Western Digital USB External 320 Gig Hard Drive from Staples. It was listed at $106 and when I went and paid for it the price was reduced to $99.98 and while I was there HP had a Photosmart D7360 also at a reduced price. In the store it was on Special Sale $70 something and after I had paid the receipt was for $55.50 and this printer is for 6 ink cartridges. Not a bad interim photo printer for a small apartment. Keeping that as my Photoprinter and the HP 5740 for text/documents I am all set. I am running both printers and the external drive off of a Multi USB 2.0 Hub without a problem.

I will use this external drive for my photos and hopefully clean up my main drive. Its getting a little bit too overloaded.

Now, this is my first External Hard Drive. I was thinking of having several directories and sorting the shots under each catagory like Travel, Events, Portraits, Sceneries and Wildlife. How do you keep your Photos with a logical system for filing and retrieval? Do you keep your photos on your main hardrive and use the external as backup only? Or do you keep your photos on the external only? I have a friend with unlimited funds (I'm being polite LOL) and he has 2 external drives with copies of his photos on both for safety. I think he keeps his photos on his main drive but he has a very large drive and has a network setup with his son who lives across the country so he has an awful lot of room. He keeps this stuff in his basement. Trust me, would you believe his printer is a heat dye transfer that uses water with no ink. The roll paper is light sensitive like the old wet darkroom. I saw it and he made a small print to show me. Very big free standing, and looks like its very expensive to me. Wish I had that kind of money.

[NickLewis]

Mark,

I keep my photos on an internal drive, and use the external for backup.

If you're running PSE on a PC then I would strongly recommend looking at the Organizer. This allows you to get away completely from relying on a folder structure, and is much more powerful than folders in terms of locating your pictures.

I store my camera files in a set of folders based only on the shoot - the event or trip they were taken at. Work in progress and finished work is in a set of folders based on the project.

All these files are catalogued in Organiser, tagged with whatever is appropriate to their content. As needed, they are grouped into Collections/Albums for whatever project is in progress.

This lets me find photos based on what they are, without needing any idea where they are on my drive. If I realise that I haven't tagged them appropriately it's the work of a moment to just add a new tag or remove an old one.

Worth a look,

Nick

[kimi_boo]

Mark...

My Western Digital just died. It was less than a year old. I had also moved all of my images there to free up space. My suggestion.

For that price get 2. If one fails you still have all of your stuff on the other. It is cheap compared to the price of trying to recover what you lost.

Good luck to you.

[troush]

I have a 2nd internal hard drive that I keep my photos (and scrapbooking kits) on. Then I have 2 externals that I back up to, swapping monthly. I keep the one that isn't in use in the basement firesafe. The one that is "in use" is unplugged from the computer and electricity unless I am making a backup.

-Trish

[lsweeney]

I use 3 external drives right now. One for long term back-up of everything. It's big. Another holds online class files, test records, the sort of stuff that I don't want to get to very often, but I want handy when I do want to access it. The third holds photos and other design work plus brush files and fonts. I back this one up to the large external drive. Occasionally. When I get around to it. I plan to set it up to aautomatically back up but that's on my "to do" list!

I don't store many files on my computer. One of my early photoshop instructors had a mantra about computers being for programs and external hard drives being for storage.

Like Kimi, I have had some failure with Western Digitals products in the last year or so. I think my big external drive is getting ready to take a dive now. It has the same click which was a pre-cursor to death for the last one.

My photo storage is the same thing I came up with a zillion years ago when I was totally computer stupid (as opposed to now when I am partially computer stupid!). I have a folder called "Picture Archive." It is broken down to sub folders with names like "Christmas's", "Nature" and "Vacation." Those are further broken into folders with names like "2007", "Barns", "Captiva Island 07." Sometimes there are further folders in those, not usually. The photo files are sorted into the folders. It works for me because I am the only one who uses it. I can usually locate a photo very quickly. Unedited photos go in Picture Archive>New Folder>and then a date until I get around to editing and sorting.

[Not4wood]

Wow, thanks everybody.

Kimi, sorry to hear about your loss of data. Has anybody tried to get into it with any data lose programs??? Sometimes bad sectors are still readable or is it a mechanical failure?

My important photos are always backed up on CD so there always available. But who knows how long those will last?? I was also always taught that puters were for programs and externals were for important data. Any documents as well as all important files are kept out of the puter hardrive for safety. One of my first main big powerful puters had a hard drive failure after about 6 months. When the Techie came to the house to take a look (still under service contract) I informed him of what I had tried to do to get it back to work. He just looked at me and even in the old days, he just shook his head and I will never forget what this supposed specialist said to me and I Quote "I never would have thought of doing half of those things" I was very surprised indeed. Now I do know I've been around puters for a very long time, but and I mean a big but is that a hard drive is still a mechanical device and only reliable for so far. Having 2 or 3 backups is very good and your being very safe. I would still make a CD of your important images, brushes and fonts and anything else you think might be important to you. If you loose it, its gone forever. Why take a chance? Then you first have to do the searches all over again to even try to get somethings back that you really liked. What if there no longer available? Then what, gone forever??

Now for an explaination. My very first puter was an Apple IIC which had one internal 5 1/4 drive which was used for the operating system and I had purchased an external 5 1/4 drive for data so I didn't have to swap disks to write anything. No hard drive and Ram was a Joke at 16K and I thought that was a lot at that time... I am also talking early to mid eighties. The very first puter I had played with was my fathers Radio Shack CoCo or Color Computer II (late 70's somewhere) which used a casette tape as a drive. Very weird even then.

The thought of using the Elements Organizer bothers me. Since I have been involved with puters which I'm talking more then twenty years at this point (WOW LOL) I have used many many programs and I'm sure I will still use many more Photo Manipulative programs in the future. I would still like to make a good file higharchy to get used to keeping everything in a logical order. What happens if another program comes out in the near future that is better then either PE5 or the CS versions like Gimp is supposed to be? Then I will have to first make a good logical order of my photos anyway??? I would like to start with a logical order from the early stages (develop good habits early) way before I get so overwhelmed with a good amount of photos that I would never keep myself ahead in any kind of file system. Programs or versions of programs come and go but my Photos will hopefully be there to be available to be played with in the programs for the future.

Now, since what I have in mind sounds good like Isweeny's does, my next comment is do you keep the edited photos in the same folder as the originals? I remember from my early days in Photography that any shots that had to be worked were moved to an In Work File and the final version prints were moved back and kept in another folder but within the main clients folders still in the same name and still grouped together but kept seperate within that client to be found when needed. Does this sound like a logical way?

[NickLewis]

Hi Mark,

I'll chip in again with a couple more points:

First, using Organiser doesn't preclude you using folders as well. It just doesn't care. If you'd feel happier with a folder structure as well, that's perfectly OK and quite simple to manage from within Organiser. The only proviso is that you must do any folder or file moving or renaming from Organiser, or at the very least reconnect the Organiser database once you've done it. Managing your files some other way, and ignoring the Organiser dimension, will steadily store up entirely unnecessary problems.

But tying your hands to a folder structure, and not even trying to explore the considerable power of a package you already possess, on the grounds that you might want to use a different package in the future, seems a great shame. Your choice, obviously.

The only other point I'd make is that there's simply no right answer to this question. You'll likely garner almost as many different opinions as people who answer it. The most important thing is to think out for yourself what sort of photographs you take, how you take them, how you want to use them, and what you're comfortable with. Even on "do I keep originals separate from work in progress", I can see perfectly sound arguments either way! And I've tried both and am now delighted to be doing it in Organiser!

Have fun!
Nick

P.S. - The original CoCo was launched in July 1980. I once had a Dragon 32, which was a machine produced locally here in South Wales, and which was based on the same Motorola chipset. I'd been involved in the independent review of the original business case for its production, so had a bit of a soft spot for it.... It's still in the loft, I think! Much to my other half's despair! The Apple IIc came along sometime in 1984, I believe.

[Not4wood]

Thanks Nick. They do have a soft spot dont they?

As far as Organizor, I wonder what kinds of problems can occur?
What I'm actually thinking of doing is creating my file organizations then I can go into Organizor and set it up. This way I'm not really tied into something that is local only to Organizor and I still will have the system I want.

I've found that when you rely on one thing too much, example like the IIc then Apple went out of its way to turn its back on all IIc and IIe owners without support and programs and we were left stranded. All of the equipment was then immediately outdated and all the monies people had spent were wasted. Thats when Apple came out with the new generation of computers, I think it was the Apple IIGS and Mac and then prgressed into the Mac as we know it today. Learning programs is one thing, we've all been doing it for years but to limit oneself to only one program and sticking to it is kind of very strange to me.

For Example, in the last two weeks I have gone from one Canon Photo printer which was a very good printer btw, and have ended up with two HP printers. One Photosmart and One Stylus. With the Stylus being used for text based documents only, to be able to save on inks.

[lsweeney]

Original files are in a subfolder below the edited versions.

Sometimes. I am really bad about not keeping original files. Too much clutter to appeal to me. I'm trying to do better after get caught short a few times when the original was requested.

Recently I've been using Smart Objects in Photoshop as a means of maintaining those original files/edited files all together. It's a nifty little feature.

"Non-destructive Editing" should be tattooed on the back of my hands so I don't do dumb things!

[NickLewis]

Originally Posted by Not4wood

As far as Organizor, I wonder what kinds of problems can occur?
What I'm actually thinking of doing is creating my file organizations then I can go into Organizor and set it up. This way I'm not really tied into something that is local only to Organizor and I still will have the system I want.

I think the main problem people encounter with Organiser is the one I referred to -moving and reorganising files outside Organiser once items have been catalogued. That trips a lot of people up.

Clearly you need to make sure you back up the catalog, because not all its content can be recovered from the photo files themselves - particularly if you shoot RAW.

I don't know which version of PSE you have, but I should warn you that in PSE6, Adobe changed the database engine that underlies Organiser. In doing so, they've introduced a number of bugs. Johnrellis, who is a member here, has done a lot of work identifying them, and has posted a list of those he's found on the Adobe forums. Most of them are minor irritants and don't affect the basic operation. But you do need to be aware of the bug in the File>Move command, which causes files to be lost if they are moved into a destination folder which already contains a file of the same name. Clearly that can be very serious. On the other hand, if your file naming convention is such that all filenames are unique, it may not matter one little bit. Someone else has reported a similar problem with duplicated folder names.

Like any piece of software, you should give it a trial before investing a lot effort in it.

Nick