Although this isn't a specific Poser issue, it can effect everyone's artwork. You veteran artists may snicker at me, but earlier in the week I lost original images to a CD rom that proved to be defective. I had transfered the images off my hard drive to save space and only had them on one CD. From now on I'm backing up copies on 2 CD's to be safe. I never thought this could happen to me, so don't let it happen to you too. CD's are cheap, and it is worth a little extra time to be safe. Does anyone have a better backup medium than CD's or in addition to them? I was considering an orb drive as a second backup device. The discs are 2.5 to 5.7 GB and not as expensive as Jazz discs or other similar products.

I use a 20gb BUSlink external harddrive. Since I'm not someone that needs to burn cds for music or copying software to share with others, a cd burner wasn't much of a consideration when I was looking for a storage device. I'd also heard too many stories of cds being defective and so on. I'm very happy with the BUSlink and it's very sturdy. I do a nightly backup of my website and a backup of my graphics folders and sleep without worry.

mean time between failures for CDs have to be HIGH. MTBF for HDDs is in the 100s of thousands of hours. I have all my digital stuff on a HDD that I backup to a mirror drive. I burn CDs only to send to clients who have low bandwidth connections.

I'm really cautious/paranoid - keep two different brands of 50-pack CD-ROMs and use one of each to make copies of everything. Don't just burn the 2nd from the software's setup, in case it's messed up. I close and relaunch the program and set up the second CD from scratch, then burn. Of course, I only have to do it about once a week, so it's not much trouble. Yah, I've got a shelf full of the things, but they've really saved me more than once. I have an external hard drive for temporary and video back up, but have seen two drives go belly up, so don't put all your trust in them either. Oh yeah, keep some of those backup CDs off site, as one of my New York City friends was grateful she had done prior to last week.

Hi I simply OPEN every important original image (or other file) on the burned disk to make sure its good. I lost some Bryce animations that I was using for a music video that way. Ran the verification- all seemed fine. Except the files were corrupt ON the CD. Then in a bit of irony, my hard drive failed when I was burning a second copy. ALSO treat CDR's as if they are DELICATE- they ARE more fragile than commercial cd's! I have had LOTS of trouble with ORB disks (from different lots, purchased over a period of 1 year, and 2 different ORB drives. On the other hand my 2 gig Jazz drive has been trouble free- and I have filed up 6 disks with NO losses. Admittedly, 2 bad drives and 5 bad cartridges is NOT a large sampling from a statistical standpoint. But I am not investing any more to buy a 3rd ORB drive... Eric Walters

It's also wise to check the CD on another computer. I've seen CDs work on one computer, but not on another. I always check the CD before I delete the files from my hard drive. On things like downloads, especially expensive ones, like Vicki and Mike, I back them up on more than one CD, just to be safe. I've also been known to lose CDs, so I'd rather have important things on more than one. Melanie

I have also been looking at orb drives, but I may endup going to a Sony DAT Tape. I know how you feel about losing the files I lost 4 CD's late last year that had a tone of my textures, poses and models on them as well as the original pz3 files.

I burn a copy and check the files on a different drive, reboot and burn another cd. I actually had them go corrupt after I used them once or twice, so I am paranoid, LOL! The Poserworld material and very important stuff I have around more than twice.

The originals are on my boot partition, backup file on a second hard drive (not the second partition on the primary drive), which is backed up every night to an alternate file so that I always have two days worth of backups, and a copy of the original file on CDR. Cheers

I back up onto CDRWs which are a little sturdier than CDRs - then I copy what's on the CDRW onto a CDR. I recently spilled Pepsi on a CDR and guess what? the silver came off!!!! thank the gods I also had the stuff on my CDRW too. BTW - after seeing what the Pepsi did to my CDR - I quit drinking it! hehehe Jade

Computer 101 - lesson #1 Back up everything - lesson #2 Back up your backups

Best backup is a usb drive, Archos makes great ones.

Thanks for everyone's imput. It's great to know I'm not alone out there. Things have gone from bad to worse here I'm afraid. Now because of a computer problem I have to reformat my hard drive. Computers, you can't live with em and you can't . . .

Well, actually, y'know, you can shoot them...

If I shot my computers I'd have no way to use Poser ;-) and that would really stink.