Work Flow

[Hinfrance]

FWIW this is what I do. My file structure is much simpler - I rely on the lightning fast searches (well it is from google) within Picasa to find pictures by file name/tags.

What I do is import to an 'images' folder system on an ehd using flashpipe. The folder system is structured by source, ie stills, video, scans ect, and then by month, so January 2010's pictures from the camera for example are in 'images/still camera/january2010'. I then quickly go through them in picasa's thumbnail view ditching the obvious rubbish, then larger views to get rid of the less obvious failures. Then I tag them and rename them. I either do basic enhances in Picasa, or if something more adventurous is required a dedicated editor like Elements.

Backup is by syncback daily to a partition on my internal drive and a long stop monthly upload of 90% quality jpgs to flickr (would be 100% but my broadband is a bit on the slow side).

Andrew's and Forseti's systems sound pretty foolproof; I'd need another drive to emulate that.

[eysha]

Wow, i have just read this thread and it is something for this newbie to think about - a lot.
I have elements 7, free when i did a uni course that wasn't good. However i tend to burn my photos to disk and keep a copy on my seperate internal hd. I have a laptop.
Never thought about catalouging them as they are in their own folders named where they were taken, eg Scotland. I did try Picassa but probably wasn't using it right so depeted it. I use faststone to see my RAW files and delete what is rubbish, ok a lot of them are rubbish,lol. then i transfer them onto the other hd in a new folder with the place name on it. This gives me two copies, hd and Disk.
Is this ok or should i do something different and if so what?