Kurt,

Sorry to hear you lost work!

You might consider using external USB/Firewire drives to store your photos. We are at an unprecedented sweet-spot, where pricing for 1TB of remote storage is ~$125.

Some good workflow policies can help you. Copy each new project onto remote storage as an archive. Leave everything you're not working on in for post-work on the remote drives, using your main machine only as a temporary host for this content. That way, if your hard drives fail, you've only perhaps lost recent edits, but can still draw from the archive for the originals. Also, if your machine fails, you can use remote drives to recover onto either your repaired machine, if that's possible, or a new machine, if it's not.

Additionally, you can use redundancy, so that you're not exposed to having all your work in one storage place. You can also consider using a program like Aperture, Light Room, or other photo storage programs to provide search, archive, and other storage management features.

As an example, I'll describe my setup. I mainly use (5) 1TB drives in the Unified Belly Dance Photo Collection.

Drive T1 stores the actual UBDPC, which is an Aperture collection. Drive T2 stores an Aperture vault, a copy of the content on T1. Drive T3 stores a copy of the vault on drive T2, a redundant backup. Drives M0 and M1 are each 1TB scratch drives for working projects, and they are used more or less in tandem: a project on archived on one is copied onto another, so that an archive of originals is available as a backup. Then I'll do edits, sometimes right on the remote drive, other times after copying to a machine; then the edits can go back to both drives, the first drive, and an archive drive.

My policy is biased toward absolutely never destroying data, including even never erasing my crap photos -- I use these to learn where my mistakes are when doing reviews later. As a result, the storage requirements do escalate, esp. with multi-copy for redundancy. But again, storage is cheap, so it doesn't bother me much, once I've done sufficient capacity planning. For example, I'll upgrade to 4TB drives around 2010-2011.

You may prefer a less strict policy, where you do eliminate photos you don't like, or you do not keep originals, only their edited versions. In such a case, your needs will be 3-4x smaller than the system I described above.

But, having at least one remote drive is incredibly good insurance against accidental data loss.

Wish you well, and cannot wait to see some shots with your new 300mm!

Blessings and Light,
M