Quote from: etienjones on January 02, 2011, 13:31

The way I do it (for what it is worth) is that I keep three versions of each file:
RAW - PSD layered - Jpeg (for agencies)

I used to do it the same way but I just found that saving uncompressed (layered) tif works several times faster than saving a PSD file - important when you need to edit multiple files in a row.

Right, after doing your RAW corrections open in 16bit RBG Color space as a PSD in Photoshop (up until now everything is of the highest quality with no compression).  Work the image with adjustment layers, save layered work as a PSD or Tiff (quality is the same).  Flatten, shapen, change to sRGB (Edit - Convert to Profile), save copy as jpeg (quality12) for agencies.

Quote from: molka on January 03, 2011, 08:31

Quote from: RacePhoto on January 03, 2011, 01:12

....had a 1T external USB drive for $59 last month!

You'll just love it when that $60 drive makes that tipical 'trapped tiny fly' sound and won't be accesible anymore.

Made by Verbatim, not some fly-by-night upstart.

But you are correct. Remember the Zip drive, click of death? When it made that sound, your data was on the disc but the drive had just turned into toast.

After years of saving my photos and sometimes wondering why, because no one cares much once they are archived or made ready for sale... (another issue) I've found that in order of reliability, hard drives last best and hold the data better than anything else. Old drives, fill em up, put them on a shelf and they don't go bad. External USB is the same. Unplug it and save it. Next is CDs but they don't hold as much as they once did with smaller pictures. DVDs which are my emergency last resort back-ups and I don't trust them, don't count on the data being 100% there, and basically burn them just in case there's a catastrophic failure and I'd be happy with something, instead of nothing.

My preferred system would be two 1T drives, raid 1 where everything is mirrored. If a drive takes a dive, nothing is lost, just add another one and you're back up and 100%.

I've seen people complain that they formatted a hard drive or that they lost all their backup data, because they deleted everything. They won't saw that they were the cause, just that the whole backup was lost "somehow" and avoid the truth that they were the cause.

Ask yourself, how many times have you had your hard drive completely lose all data or crash? In other words, a simple backup and you'll probably never ever need it. That's why a cheap $59 1T external drive works so well. You have everything you shoot forever, on a drive. Each year you buy a new one and put the old one on the shelf. It's still good. New drives keep going down in price... I have everything on a 300GB drive, bought a 400 the next year, have everything on that, bought a 500 the next year, have everything on that, and when I get the next 1T drive, I'll put everything from the 500 onto it plus what's new and have redundant backups, because the main computer has the roiginals.

The point that started this was someone saying how their hard drive was filling when they saved all their PSD or TIF files.

And what I say is, for $59 you can back up all those old, mostly useless files, and keep your active work on the computer hard drive. Yes, I back up cards, right out of the camera, then copy them to the working computer, and only then format the cards in the camera. I've never yet, needed the backups because of a computer error, hard drive crash or losing the zero track or lost data of any sort. But I have needed them when I hit delete or threw away something by accident. Most lost data is Human Error! 

Maybe I'm just lucky but it seems that when my computers take a dive, they are already backed up or old. Oh wait, everything I own is old and started as a used computer except my Netbook and my external backup drives.