On Jul 31, 2005, at 11:11 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
My life isn't on the computer, it's not organized around it. All the
records i need to secure are elsewhere.
Yes, we have different ways of dealing with living. I moved all my
record keeping, writing, bill paying, financial management,
photography, and other office-oriented endeavors to the computer
years ago. I didn't plan to, it's just turned out to be much easier
and less time consuming to do it that way.
Although I worked in the computer industry for 20 some years, you
have to understand that I don't love computers at all. They are just
tools to me. Using them gives me much more time to do the things I want.
We're different - not only can i find what i want in a matter of
moments,
but somehow I can remember specific frames I shot thirty years
ago. My
stuff, while not highly organized, isn't strewn about. All negs
are in one
file cabinet except for the ones I'm working with. There is a
semblance of
order to them.
I applaud your discipline and ability to file things. I've never had
that discipline.
I'm not going to reenter that debate. ...
It's not a debate.
ok ... Let's not then.
Pleasure ... like writing with a fine pen, watching a movie on a large
screen in a nice theater v on a TV set attached to a high tech TIVO
system,
reading a favorite book in hard cover v paper back.
Hmm. I started typing everything when I was in 6th grade because I
hated writing things out longhand. That was more than 20 years before
economical, computer word processors existed. But ...
I prefer cinema to television presentation (but 90% of the films I
love to watch are only ever accessible via DVD ...). And I read two/
three books a week, hate reading anything of any length from a
computer screen. I suspect we have more things in common that we
enjoy than your comment implies. ;-)
One thing, though: I love the fact that I no longer have to carry
fragile, delicate, easily damaged film, and lots of it, through
airports and xray machines, etc. The 40 G storage device and 5G of
storage cards took up far less space in my luggage on my trip to the
UK than the 60-100 rolls of film I would have needed would have
otherwise.
To get back to the original question ...
Yes, buy two external drives and copy your pictures to both of them.
Cheap, effective, fast. I just bought a FireWire/USB 2.0 drive,
Acomdata I think was the make, at Fry's which was a complete
standalone drive for $180 after rebate, 320G capacity. That's enough
capacity to hold about 30,000 uncompressed RAW image files, 10M
apiece. Two of those should last a while if you are making 1000-4000
exposures per year in digital form.
Godfrey