Colin, I use the Drobo external hard drive interface - redundant hard drive technology in a very simple format.

With additional hard drive backups in other houses.

Cheers

Brian

__________________
Founder, Olympus Photo Safari Group
http://www.ukphotosafari.org

Backup,
I used to burn everything to CD/DVD.
Now I just have two external hard drives.
I don't keep anything other that the current months work on the computer.

As far as DNG goes, I was at the intro to Creative Suite in 2005 when Adobe was introducing the new DNG. I was sold right away.
No need for raw files and sidecars.
Not 1 issue ever.
Shooter

__________________
"If you don't stand for something,
You'll fall for anything."

http://www.streetshooter.us

~ Shooter's Flickr photostream

In terms of .dng I also convert my files for long term storage. Though for the initial edit I use the cameras raw file.

I've stopped backing up onto CD/DVD. I've had too many fail. I now run 3 backups of my raw files and 3 backups of my edited files. I use hard drives for this. When ones full up I store that somewhere and buy a new one. By the time I get to fill up a drive, there's usually a new one thats half the price and twice the size. I use 2 separate, high-speed, very robust firewire 800 drives for the photos and video I'm currently editing.

I've currently got 10 drives, all storing photographs, video and music. I recently bought 3 x 2TB drives and these are sitting in a MacPro which I've turned into a server. I've had problems with external drives and prefer the internal ones. The 2TB's are Hitachi drives which "park the heads" and apparently last longer.

It may sound a bit over the top, but this is my living & I've got material from corporate and educational shoots stored as well as peoples wedding photographs and videos. The clients have all got copies but you can never rely on them!!!

Well, the deed is done. I only have dng files now and the conversion went without a hitch. Regarding backups, I use 2 external 1tb firewire 800 hard drives plus a smaller 250gb portable hard drive and copy to all of them. My only problem is remembering what I have copied to which drive as I don't use any backup software, just copy and paste. I need to find a Mac solution which will just sync changed files. Any ideas?

Brian, I have the backups covered I think except for the off site aspect. I'm not sure if I can be organised enough to do that.

Don, you were right, all those sidecar files have now disappeared. It all seems much tidier. What software do you use for the raw to dng conversion?

Jim.

Jim,
I use the stand alone converter. That renamed the files.
Then in LR I give a quick looksee and delete any garbage'.
Then rename the files to get rid of un even numbers.

You can convert on import to LR but I like this way.

__________________
"If you don't stand for something,
You'll fall for anything."

http://www.streetshooter.us

~ Shooter's Flickr photostream

I have been using exclusively DNG for 2 years now without a hitch. My fuji S5pro RAW files are about 25MB out of camera and shrink to around 12/13MB when DNG. The S5pro is not a fast camera and fuji chose to leave the files bigger and do less processing in camera to get the file size down, a not unreasonable compromise. The file compression is entirely lossless.