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If you're like me, you have perhaps thousands of files installed into Poser. It would be a real shame to lose all this stuff to any kind of computer disaster. I've always backedup any files I downloaded from the internet. CD Burners are cheap and convenient for that. I've found a perfect program that allows me to backup important Poser folders such as "Runtime" which contains libraries, Geometries, etc. I've tried a few other programs, but they were either hard to use or just wouldn't work with my Hewlett Packard 7500+ CD Burner. (It's almost 2 years old, which is ancient in computer talk!) NewTech Infosystems (NTI) BackupNow does the job easily and quickly. I just backedup over 1.3 Gigabyte of files in short order. The files were compressed, and fit onto 1 Rewriteable CD. NTI BackupNow comes in different versions. I have the Windows 2000 version... It is about $100. It's a small price to pay when you know you can backup anything on your computer! In case you're interested, here is their URL: http://www.ntius.com/

But what if, like myself, one has a poser folder currently weighing in at 12.8GB and that is just the active part? yes i agree one should back up your zips and exe to a personal library, mine is currently 17 cds. but currently there is nothing that can do the job on folders as mine, and modeler have it worse. about all one can do is keep track of what is where and have a 2nd HDD that is nothing but POSER. That way if the OS gets killed on the primary HDD the poser one is "Safe".

I'm building a server for just the purpose of storing and retrieving Poser files and 3d models - all told I need about 60GB. There are high-capacity tape drives out there, but most are out of reach for the majority of us - in the thousands of dollars range. I'm looking at DVD-RAM drives; 5.2 GB per disc, drive is about $400-600.

ack!!! stay away from TBU!!!! they are terrible and make you do the job twice. the server is a cool route if one has the $$ to do that. That's why i kept to the multiple HDD in the system. my current layout is C:(10GB) OS related files, and drivers D:(13GB)the off line models and OBJ and textures and loose 3ds/OBJ files E:(30GB) POSER4 also i have a 20GB USB HDD that also gets used as straight storage or i could use MS backup and point it to that device. The dvd-ram is a good idea but I would wait a bit more for the tech to catch up with it. as now they are less stable as one may think.

DVD-RAM - less stable? In what way? I haven't got a chance to play with one yet. Servers are no problem, my company throws PC's away like crazy. I grab all I can get most of the time. Got a nice Dell PowerEdge 6100 that way.. ;) Hopefully another 6100 is just around the corner of the dumpster!

well so far dvd ram drives are better at making coasters than making readable media. the major vendors are making better firmware for the drives. but the rate is about 1 in 3 or 4 are coasters.

Ouch! Those discs are too high-priced to make coasters! Thanks for warning me....

No problem, but keep in mind they are fixing it, but the industry is still kinda in 1st/2nd gen dvd ram. they likley will be as solid and cdrw in a few months.

hey silver...how about tossing one of those my way!? Lol!:)

Hey silver same here... I need to set up a better home server too... I'll even pay for shipping ;)... But anyway heres my $0.02. Just recently I lost over 3 gigs of stuff, excluding poser (about 10.9 gigs with poser) in a massive house wide computer crash (virus probly). Luckily I was able to recover about 300MB worth of compressed data about 1yr old from an old CD-RW. I barely recovered my DAZ purchases. I would really recommend the 2 hdd solution of if $$ permitting buy another computer, older ones work fine and use it for a central backup. My old 266 works fine for this. I serve as an example of a person who as literally lost 100,000's of files due to upgrades, crashes, hacks, etc. If you're as lucky as me (I hope not) nothing beats good old fashion cds...

The best solution I've found is a BusLink USB hard drive - comes in multiple sizes (mine is 80 Gig, cost about 340.00). I keep an uncompressed copy of all my graphics, 3D files, & Audio, & poser files (both original purchases, and my Poser4 folder structure). Plus I keep a series of archive folders on one drive, that I copy all my downloaded zips & sits into, once I've extracted the contents. When one gets up to 500Meg or so, I burn it onto 2 duplicate CD's, Verify the CD's by playing a test MOV file (that I put on each for the purpose) on my laptop (which has a very finicky CD), so I know it can be read, then I store each CD separately (one in my study, one in my garage-workshop. Takes about 1-1/2 hours every other month, on average. Overkill? - You Bet!, but I've squandered too many hours on this stuff to want to re-generate from scratch! :-) I've lost up to 7 months of coding (years ago when I wrote code for a living) in incredibly silly computer problems (the dumbest was the time I took my Comp in to a shop for an odd random reboot problem, & they REFORMATTED MY HARD DRIVE for me during the troubleshooting process, just to eliminate that as a source of the problem! Don't think the guy ever did realize why I was so upset - he did fix the problem for me - by replacing the memory chips) Rules to compute by; 1] Backup 2] backup 3] backup 4] repeat 1 thru 3 G