What files do you archive?

[winwintoo]

Having completed my first full month of daily working with PhotoShop, I decided to back up my files and clear space on my hard drive. Needless to say, the files in question take up about 5 GB of space.

I'm in the habit of saving frequently and to preserve the state at each save, I use "Save As" and name the files sequentually. I've found this method to be useful while working with a file, but what about after I've finished with the restoration. Should I delete all those intermediate files and only keep the raw starting file and the final completed one.

I intend to burn the archived files to CD, but at this rate, I can see being quickly buried in an avalanche of CD's.

How do you all handle this storage problem??

Thanks for your advice,
Margaret

[DJ Dubovsky]

I just save everything myself, but you are correct that they get to be alot after awhile. I would say it depends on what you would do with them in the future but mostly saving the before and final is enough as long as that final holds your saved selections and layers.
DJ

[Doug Nelson]

I don't save sequential files. That way a simple ctrl-s saves the work. I just save an original and my work copy, and make sure I use reversible steps. Then I save to a zip drive.

[Jill]

For each new project I make three folders...
Original
Work in progress
Finished
After I am done with a project I save one web version and one print version of each picture for each folder. (except w.i.p. that is one photoshop file)
I always burn to a disc.

[Sanda]

I should be deleting the obsolete files on my hard drive but since space is not a great problem I must admit I tend to keep a lot of files on each project. I always back up each project on CD when the job is complete. I save the original un touched file and the completed one so it's not really necessary to keep all the work in progress files but I just hate deleting them.

[thomasgeorge]

I usually save to CD: (1) a copy of the raw file,(2) a copy of layered intermediate work with most of the heavy restore/retouch done and (3) a finished ready for output file and delete the rest... If you have firewire capability, Maxtor is marketing some external hard drives with monster size storage capacity at very reasonable prices, but backing up on CD is probably the best and cheapest way to go, at least for now....Tom

[DJ Dubovsky]

Alot of times, to save space and not having 2 or more different files to deal with for the same image, I will make a copy of the backgound layer (the original) and work on that layer and above. That way my original is stored in the last untouched layer of my working file. If ever I needed the original, it would be the background layer of my Work In Progress.
I learned that from Katrin Eisman's book. She usually always works on a duplicate layer above the original file. It may not work in all instances but it sure works for most of the situations and saves space.
DJ