I've just had the eye watering experience of having my PC crash. I was saving changes to one image while my backup file was open, both files were corrupted. It's not entirely a waste but it is a fair setback. I need to review my backup strategy. I've only been writing to disk on finishing.

I'm asking forumites, particularly those that have invested time in images, what they consider to be reasonable safeguards. Thank you for your time.

Sorry about that, I hope is not a big loss.

I usally do a lot of consecutive saves. I don't have my images in the same disk as the OS, but in another one. Also I have a pendrive attached to a USB port and I save there from time to time. When I finish a image, or when I finish my painting day, I save all in a external hard drive. I think thats all

Cheers

well, i guess i'm rubbish then, i save constantly, about every 30 mins is the longest i wait before i click 'save' (and thats on the outside), so that's very clever of me, however i only ever save to my external hard drive when the image is complete, & then i save a flat version & a layered version.

I've tried saving to hard drive more often, but in the interests of safety, i put my hard drive in it's box to try to avoid any problems with it, i never leave it plugged in to my laptop, but i started losing track of where i was on an image.

I "CTRL S" every couple of minutes or so as I'm painting. I always save a new version before any largish global changes (e.g. flattening layers, cropping, etc) or if I'm trying something that I know I may not like, then I can go back to a version before the change (and it's sometimes useful to be able to rip something from an earlier version into the current one). I'll normally end up with around 10 or more versions saved for a single painting. When I've finished working on a painting I'll transfer the files over to a second HD before burning them onto a disc.

You may still be able to recover the files that got corrupted. I had a problem with a HD cable a while back and thought I'd lost some files, but I was able to recover the important ones with a psd repair tool I found.

banjaxedmdt:

You may still be able to recover the files that got corrupted. I had a problem with a HD cable a while back and thought I'd lost some files, but I was able to recover the important ones with a psd repair tool I found.

I was able to partially recover them, thankfully. Just as well it's fan art. When it happens to a pro it must be catastrophic.

I've saved more backups and I'll get a memory stick later today for a little external insurance.   

Thanks Cano, kazky and banjaxedmdt.