The Nature of The ProblemDigital camera files continue to increase in size due to the every-increasing size of imaging chips. A day's shooting with a camera like a Canon D60, Nikon D100 or Fuji S2 can produce several hundred RAW files, each of 6 — 9MB is size. That's about a Gigabyte in a single afternoon, without even trying. Process a dozen or so into TIFF or .PSD files at 24MB or more each and that's another few hundred Meg. People scanning film are used to 35MB to 150MB files from a single frame. If you're a professional photographer shooting thousands of photographs a month the issues really are serious.

But, almost regardless of how much you shoot before you know it you're drowning not in megabytes (that's old news), but Gigabytes. How to handle this, how to store them and how to archive them? These are pressing issues.

The short and medium term storage problem is, in my opinion, best handled by online storage. I use Firewire hard disks ranging in size from 80GB to ...