So,
now that i'm finally shooting raw (and loving it~ yay!) i have these HUGE jobs that need to be backed up before I'm comfortable beginning the edit. I have 11 gigs from last Saturday's wedding and I want to archive the raw files to DVD. I'm thinking there had got to be an easier way than manually dividing the files so as to put the job on 3 discs. Like, can't i set it somehow that it will just start burning, and let me know when to insert a new DVD? I'm on a new intel MAC and just burn through finder. Should I get toast or something comparable? Hopefully someone will understand these ramblings and be able to help ;-)
Abby

Toast will be a great help to you to automate the backup of files that requir more than on DVD. Of course, you would benefit from having a Dual Layer drive if you don't already. Regards Hank

Hi Abby,

I had the same issue but found the answer on another thread on this forum. Disco is what you need, just drag a folder of images to it and it will tell you how many disks you need and you just feed them in! It also creates a catalogue of the disk if you drag the new disk to it. Well worth the money and I also have Toast but Disco is a great alternative.

SSSSWWWWEEEEETTTT!!! That's two great Mac software tips in one day!! Thanks Ian!

The other one was IshowU, pointed out in this thread.

:~)

~Bill

awesome! Thanks guys ;-) Glad someone understood my idiocy! I do have a dual drive, so hopefully i'll be able to take advantage of this....

Glad to be of help Bill, I get sooo much good info from this forum it's nice to be able to put a little back.

sweet. this looks awesome. I just bought it-many thanks!
A

Ya, I've been feeling guilty that my DVD backups are semi-sporatic and totally unorganized. I have everything on two hard drives, but they are 'on site', I plan to make a complete set of DVDs to store offsite (my online storage is about 800 GB right now, so it's gonna be almost 200 DVDs to get it all...). Better get started... ;-)


Ian, I know what you mean, I've gotten a ton of help here and love it when I can give something back...


~Bill

we back up all of our edited and unedited images on DVD and exernial hard drive. We do an initial jpg conversion before editing and burn those, then we edit the raw files convert those to jpg and do any thing additional to them (actions and stuff that I cant do eaisly in raw). then we burn the finals to dvd and copy them to an externial drive. during this time we also have a tempory copy of the images on another drive, just in case and purge those when all is said and done. as for the raw files we dont save them at all....to big to be worth it ad I have no real need to go back to them with the amount lf editing and backing up we have. the dvds go off site nad hte externial drives stay hear until we are sure we do not need them here for reprints and albums. as of now we are up to about 3tb of storage and will be adding a drive for 2007 :-)

I guess I like the idea of having the raw files stored away, just so I know I can go back and retweak an image down the line if I want to....
Are most raw shooters just converting right away and than burning? I'm still working out the whole workflow. I figured that once the raw files are burned, I'll go through and edit/tweak, and than batch to JPEG and burn again....
any suggestions?

That's awesome! Thanks.

Rick

We only burn a DVD of the final edits to place in the client's file. Until that point we backup on a RAID drive and another off-site hard drive. It just wasn't worth all of the time that it cost us to burn and label the DVDs.

After the photos are edited we keep the Unedited RAW files for one month just in case we didn't choose a photo that a family member really wanted. After a month of it being released we delete those Unedited photos and just store the JPEG and edited RAW files for ONE year on our hard drives. We'll contact the clients after one year and give them one last time to purchase the digital negatives (they can purchase them at any time) before we'll "dump the files."

Right now, we're not actually dumping the files, but at least I have the option in the future.

I no longer archive RAW files, I keep them until the event is moved from my main hard drives to the archive drives and then I ditch the RAW files and just archive the unedited and edited set of JPGS. The timing of that move could be anywhere from 2 - 6 months depending on how long the album / DVD and major print orders take to come in and get finalized.

Update on Disco. I 'dropped' 140 GBs on it and it said, no problem, feed me 40 DVDs and you'll have a backup. I'm on disc 6 right now, when it kicks one out I slap a label on it and put the next one in. It already had one 'bad' disc and made a snappy comment to me about it having made a coaster... ;-)

~Bill

It's interesting to hear each persons workflow. As I am still new to the wedding photography but not to working with images on a Mac (my full time job is manager of a design studio) I tend to work the same way I do in the studio...backup everything!!!! The problem I then have is I also keep all the multi layered edited photoshop files, the raw files, the jpgs I use to put online, the files I supply the client etc. The last wedding I did ended up with 45GB of images, I am just worried I might dump something I want to go back and use.

Hopefully I will get my workflow a bit tighter this year :-)

PS

Glad the Disco tip is working for you

45 gigs for 1 wedding?! YIKES! I thought i was an overshooter
Reading these posts is making me realize that it probably is not going to be sustainable for me to continue archiving all of my raw files....
Now i've got to set up a RAID or something....
*sigh* always another project

JT, excuse my ignorance, but what is a RAID drive? Can that only be used for MACS?

That's not going to be a typical quantity though, I also had all the chosen photos as layered photoshop files. I worked on a very large quantity of the images, the B&G were family friends and the bride was extremely critical of herself and made me promise to "airbrush" the worse looking ones.


Check out this link to see what I mean link