External backup drive

[El Nebuloso]

Hi All,

I've decided to go for an external usb drive to backup and catalog my pictures. A quick search showed seemingly innumerable choices. I'm thinking something in the 250-500 GB range will do it. Does anyone have a recommendation?

Thanks,

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I just got an Icy Dock that I really like. It's an external drive that can attach via USB 2 or eSATA for higher speed. The cool thing is that the drive is easily removed. You just buy naked hard drives and slap trays on them. Then you can pop them in and out of the device.

A word of caution about using an external drive as a backup. Hard drives fail. They aren't a great backup solution. They are better than nothing, but I wouldn't use them for long term backup. I recommend that you burn your pictures to DVD as a long term backup solution.

A good workflow might look something like this:
1) Take pictures
2) Copy pictures to my computer and backup drive
3) Edit pictures on my computer
4) Copy edits to my backup drive
5) Once a month (or week or quarter depending on much you shoot), burn that month's pictures to a pair of DVDs. Keep one at home and one at your office/kid's house/friends house.

If you shoot RAW, back up your RAW files (or DNG files) and the resulting JPGs.