I'm N E W to the business. Started in June, quickly have filled my Mac G5 and have never backed up....ooops! Backup will free space on my Mac...right?
I would like a long term solution so I won't have to worry about this computer stuff for a long time!

Let me know what BRANDS, types, etc.

Can a laptop be used as backup? and then also for presentations?

Thanks bunches

Buy som external storage... Bigger the better, once you have backed up info and old photos, store the HD off site.

Personally I have 5 externals and 2 inernals-

Internal 1 - 250GB I leave this as empty as possible (means your machine will run faster)
Internal 2 - 250GB I also leave this one basically empty and use it as a scratch disc for photoshop
External 1 - Photos in Progress 160GB
External 2 - Photos in Progress Back up 160GB
External 3 - Other Media 250GB
External 4 - Finished Images 250GB
External 5 - Finished Images Back up 250GB
Total Drive Space - 1.5TB

Drives 2 and 5 I keep off site and do periodic back ups like one every week or two.

Obviously you don't need that many, I'm just paranoid

A laptop wouldn't work great since the HD's aren't that big, you could buy a heck of a lot of externals for the price of a laptop.

I'm not paranoid. Rather reality. My cousin (a film photographer for 20+ years) had his house burned down and he lost everything he's ever done.

I use a laptop, so adding internal hd's isn't possible. I have 2 external harddrives. A small firelite firewire drive with 80GB that I can carry in my bag. I do frequent backups to this. This is for the case of a laptop issue.

I have a bigger (and heavier) firelite drive that's 200GB. When I'm fully finished with a project (albums and all), I move those jobs to this big boy.

Then I also burn cd/dvds for backups and extra copies. I have a box at my mom's house that I dump the cd/dvd media. I also put them in our fireproof gun safe that we have in the basement. And I put the bigboy drive in the safe.

When shooting weddings, I download all of the RAWs from the cameras. Then burn a dvd. Put dvd of RAWs in basement safe. Do all of the pp, then burn final images on dvd and into safe. I do a backup to small drive 1x a week.

I am about a year and a half into my venture and use one of the Western Digital 250 gig external hard drives. I got it at one of the chain stores during a sale for a hundred dollars. I will be adding another external drive soon. I think this time I am going to get the LaCie 250GB mini Hard Drive & HUB from apple. It is 160 gig, has 4 USB ports and will allow the kids and wife a place to plug in their iPods so I do not have to fight for space for my card readers. I will keep my WD off site after that. I think it is best to have your files in a least two places. Hope this helps.

1 internal 400GB that I only leave the final Jpegs on
2 external 250GB Jpegs on both
1 external 400GB Raws and Jpegs
2 sets of DVD's with Raws, Jpegs and albums

I have a 300GB external at my folks house with all my Jpegs on it form last year.
We have a photographer in town who lost 2 weddings last year because he did not believe that he had to back up his stuff. I never want to have to explain to a bride how or why I lost her images.

I have a 37.4Gb 10K rpm Western Digital drive that I use only for programs. I have a 250Gb WD in the machine that houses all of the jobs I do. I also have an external 250Gb WD in a case that I connect via USB (for now) as my back up. After each job is completed, I copy the entire thing, RAW files, JPEGs, PSD files, DVD slideshows, etc. to the external for back up.

My normal backup routine is this.
After shooting download to my internal 250G drive
Copy all RAW files to the external backup drive
Work on the images off of the internal drive
After job is complete then copy all files to external back up drive
When backup drive fills up (separating jobs by year), take it out of case, and put a new one in, then store the one that filled up offsite.

Ramiro

Same situation here, basically, though my wallet doesn't quite match my OCD yet so I'm only running on one internal HD, one external HD (soon to add a second Western Digital), and DVD/CD backups.

If it were up to me, and I had the money, I'd be RAIDed out of house and home because I'm so OCD about it.

Laptops make bad backups. The hard drives tend to be small and they fail more often than desktop drives.

I started a thread regarding large storage just a few days ago:

http://www.opensourcephoto.net/forum/index...72&hl=Damon

Oh yeah, avoid RAID. You don't need RAID.

If you have more specific questions feel free to send me a PM.

Photoshelter

250 gig internal for programs and system
100 gig internal for scratch disk (overkill but screamingly fast)
1Tb external for originals
1Tb external for selects

Check out Photoshelter they rock!

You can get a hard drive enclosure from MacGurus or Granite Digital

The thing that's great about this is you can have up to 8 bays with (any brand) hard drives mounted via Firewire or SATA connections.

I've found that the cost is about $.60 per GB of storage space doing one of these JBOD setups. I actually have a mirror of each drive that is offsite.

Louie, this is easy. You want something that is going to look good next to that beautiful G5 tower? You want something that has a 2 year warranty? You want something you can set up RAID with (2 separate disks that record the same information simultaneously...that way if one of the disks crashes the other disk has absolutely everything on it)?

Go here: OWC. I have one...you'll thank me later...and this solution can be long term if you venture off into 500 GB and greater!