Storage of Digital Photo Files

[kc2aqg]

Hey All-

I seem to be having somewhat of a predicament now that I have gone DSLR. When I shoot in Raw + JPEG, I can fill an 8 GB card in half a day's worth of shooting. Going out a few times, you do the math, that's a lot of hard drive space. My question for all of you is how and with what do you store your digital photo files? Do you keep all of the files that you shoot or only the ones you use? What mode do you shoot in, Raw, JPEG, or both? Would you keep the raw files of pictures that you probably wouldn't use?

Historically I've kept everything I've shot, but if I plan on continuing that trend, I'll have to make a major investment in hard drives. Also, for those of you that know me, you know that I'm an IT geek and have a ridiculous hard drive redundancy setup in order to avoid losing data due to hard drive crashes, software glitches, etc. This definitely complicates my plans on how I want to store the new photo files. So I definitely am looking for as much input as possible in order to figure out how I should proceed with this. If it helps, my JPEGs are about 3Mb per pic and the Raw files are 10-11 Mb per pic. Thanks!

[MarkLawrence]

My RAW are +/- 5Mb and my JPREG are around 2Mb - I have everything on an external that I connect to my laptop when needed - at the moment, it's a 120gb external - just about to get a 500Gb - at Office Max for $119.

[kc2aqg]

Hey Mark - do you keep all of the photos that you shoot or just the "usable" ones?

It might help to mention that I have a mirrored 500GB RAID array of hard drives that is about to become a 1TB striped mirrored RAID array which stores all of my personal files (pictures, movies, music, etc). Right now I have about 280 Gigs used, but at the rate I am travelling and shooting movies and pictures, I will be out of the 1TB by the end of the year...

[MarkLawrence]

I keep everything - I have since I started shooting...but - I haven't always shot RAW - that started well into my shooting..

[SmAlbany]

I haven't seen any reason to shoot jpeg+raw. For aircraft, I just shoot RAW. Non-av stuff I shoot jpeg.

I usually keep my latest stuff on my laptop with backup on an external. When I need to clear the laptop drive, I archive to CD/DVD (while still keeping them on the external.