Saving Photoshop files

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Saving Photoshop files

Have you given a thought to how you save Photoshop files?
Photoshop files can be very large and after a while they can take up a lot of space on your hard drive. Do you save all your files? Never get rid of anything. This can also take up a lot of space on your hard drive.

If you scan or take a lot of digital pictures with your digital camera, this will also take up a lot of space on your hard drive.

So how do you handle storage and backing up of your files.

For myself, I save everything. the pictures that I scan and the pictures form my camera are the negatives. Before starting to edit or use the pictures I copy them to an external drive that I keep a well organized file system. This serves as a backup of the files. I also burn them to a DVD as a secondary backup, just in case something goes wrong with the Hard drive.

Storage is cheap today and if you have drives that are a few years old, they are probably small drives. So I purchase a new drive that is at least 1 terabyte. I usually leave the files on the old drives, but copy the files to the new one, which usually holds 2 or more of the drives. Now I have a third backup. Yes I do like redundancy, but I have not lost files.

Another thing to think about is sharing your files or storing your files with someone else. There is also internet storage backup sites. Some are free and some you do have to pay for.

As I work with my pictures and complete them, they are moved to storage for safe keeping and for easy access. The files are than deleted from the computer to make room for new files. Unfortunatly you cannot keep everything on your computer and you don't want to fill your computer's hard drive. Windows needs lots of room and if you fill you drive 90 to 95 percent you will find that your computer will start running slowly.

If you are like me I like to save everything. All of my Photoshop files and all of the wonderful resource elements that we keep downloading from here.

How do you handle your ever growing, expanding files?

I burn through a looot of storage space, FAST, since I save original images, and every layered Photoshop file (..I get scary amounts of layers sometimes..), as well as a finished jpg. Such a relief that drives keep getting bigger!! smiley

Once I opened my shop, I realized I'd need to keep my shop and customer files extra-organized - I've definitely found that having a "completed" folder to file away finished things inside my other category folders is a big help for finding current projects quickly!

On a related note: I've had a few harddrives bite the dust over the years (and cheap old cds I burned that are corrupting!) - solid state drives cost a little more, but are ideal for backup, as there are no moving parts inside. I also recently set up an account with Carbonite as an online back-up - and I have to say, the (relatively low) price is totally worth the peace of mind! It's also completely automated, runs by itself, doesn't bog down my system, backs up what I tell it to, and I don't need to remember to do a thing - which is of KEY importance to me! smiley It does only back-up what's currently on your system (if you delete something, it will do so as well), but as a stop-gap between things still on your in-use drive, and things on a backup drive, it's wonderful! My super-nerd husband is constantly harping about the importance of having an off-site backup if you can - and with all the scary weather lately, I agree!!

I was so thankful that when my laptop crashed, I had everything backed up to an external drive. I have been lucky with drives and still have a few old drives that contain a secondary backup. I do not keep my drives connected to my laptop. I only connect when I am going to backup my files. And you are right Photoshop files have a way of growing as you work on them and as you add layers, styles, and or filters as well as elements.

My husband is always after me to backup everything, especially all my digital files. I can see now how helpful it will be to pickup an external drive.

since I design, I keep EVERYTHING...i save to TIFF files instead of PSD as it's smaller sized. I have two EHDs (a portable and a desktop) and one hard drive that i work off of. Also have online back up of all our kits.

I have to agree with Vivie that I save everything as TIFF's... the files are smaller but it keeps the layers and transparencies and the quality of the picture is the same as a PSD file... I'm actually in the midst of converting all my old PSD files to TIFF to save some space and I'm also gonna convert all the templates I've either bought or gotten for free to TIFF if they didn't come that way to try to save room on my hard drive... the other really nice thing about TIFF files is that they have a thumbnail preview... so instead of the thumbnail for the file just being the logo for the psd file it's a little picture of the actual file which can make finding what you're looking for much easier (especially on templates so you don't have to open each file to see what it looks like...) that's one of the things I always disliked about the PSD files I always wished that they showed you what they are.)

As for storage... I use a 3TB EHD that I bring back and forth to and from my house or my parents house... depending where I'm working from on any given day... I don't have anything currently backed up, though I want to save up and get another drive to back up everything since I've dropped a couple of EHDs and broken them (lost everything on them too.) but because I do my scrapbooking on two different computers I keep everything on the EHD and none of my files on either of the actual computers.

I'm the same as Melissa, I save original files (RAW), the edited photoshop version, as well as a .jpg version. In addition to that I tend to have a large amount of web-size versions of photos for clients that are uploaded to Facebook etc. So, I end up burning through tons of space very quickly. As it stands I have several EHDs that range in size from 1TB to 3TB. I'm leery about getting rid of much of anything whether it be client work or personal photos. smiley

Sarah, you got me interested in looking up the benefits of storing files as TIFF vs. PSD. It looks like a mixed bag. Out of curiosity, are you a photographer or a designer? I'm kind of curious as to what other photographers are doing.