It’s no secret that I’m a fan of photography.  I’ve been into it since I was young, doing skateboard photography and eventually ending up with an undergraduate degree in fine art photography.  I was a film hold-out and didn’t move to a digital format (at least for anything other than point and shoot) until 2006.
I am also a pretty serious mac user.  I can work on about any platform, but everything I own, save for a linux server in my basement and a D-Link NAS, is apple.
This can be a blessing and a curse.  I’m a hoarder.  I never delete anything.  I have huge amounts of disk in my NAS that house primarily backups of things I never want to lose, most of which are home movies and photos.

Being the hoarder than I am, I am not just satisfied with on-site backups, so, I want to document how I back up my photos.

Let me follow this up by saying that I am *not* a professional photographer or videographer.  Yes, I’ve sold work in the past.    Yes, I’ve been paid on multiple occasions to rework video and to film and edit together special occasions.  No, I don;t spend gobs and gobs of money on professional class gear for this. I do have some nice lenses for my DSLR.  I do take a lot of pride in the stuff I do. But, I was always taught that expensive, high end equipment doesn’t make you a good artist, and I still, whole-heartedly, believe that today.

If you don’t believe me, read Ken Rockwell’s stuff  (thanks Jim).

I made photo art with stuff I got at pawn shops.  Hell, I sold art that I made with a polaroid.  You can win awards with cell phone images and take bad images with thousands of dollars worth of equipment.  It’s about content, composition, juxtaposition, framing, lighting, opportunity and, at it’s core, having a good eye……

…but I digress…this is about saving data.

I use iPhoto.  I really like iPhoto.  I like the smart albums.  I like the interface and the plugins.  What I don’t like, is that