Technology - Smology

007/365 - April 17, 2009, originally uploaded by HarmonyHilderbrand.

I'm not the best at technology, but I do consider myself pretty savvy.
For the past couple years I've been backing up my photographs (and everything else) onto hard drives. I have two 500 GB Western Digital drives that I've been using for storage. One drive served as my travel drive that held everything and that I used when editing and whatnot. The other drive served as a backup drive or a ghost copy of everything on the other drive.

--Why?-------------------------

Backing up is critical. I've had so many friends have their computers and hard drives crash and burn. And they lose everything. All their files, all their work, all their pictures. If I only had my pictures saved in one location and that location failed.. I'd loose all my photographic work, school work, personal records, etc from 2005 or so through the present. Thats a great deal of stuff! The way to prevent this from happening is by backing up your data.

Backing up should be done by keeping your data in 3 different locations. For me, I've been trying to do two separate hard drives and then on DVD's. [I've decided the dvd part is hard to keep up with and so I'm getting ready to replace that portion with another hard drive or online/off-location server. ]
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Back to my story...
I've had these two drives. I knew I was running out of space (especially with all my 365 shots, and all the portrait sessions I've been shooting lately) and so I started looking at getting either another 5oo gb or 1 tb drive. Jeff got me a Western Digital 1TB drive for Christmas. And literally the next week I ran out of space on my 500gb drive.

Now I've been copying everything from my 500 GB onto my 1TB, but it is such a slow process! (My dinosaur copies/transfers so slowly, so I'm stuck leaving it to run overnight on one year, or a couple months of pictures at a time). As soon as its done being copied I think the 1tb will be my working drive, and everything old will be backed up on 500gb#1 and then newer data will be backed up on 500gb#2.

But I'm running into a dilemma. Each year I've created more and more work which means more and more data to store and backup. This year as I graduate I'll start doing commercial photography more, which will mean even more data to store/backup. How am I going to store this data? Should I keep buying 1 or 2 tb drives and doing my 2-3 hard-drive backup? Is there a better way? Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for me?

I just envision next year as a disaster of dozens of varying hard drives stacked around my office with labels indicating what years data and work it contains. But there's got to be a better way... right? Anyone???