I'm building a new production machine for my wife who is a professional photographer and digital artist and am wondering what to do for storage.

She typically keeps her data stored in 3 places (she is very paranoid about losing any of her work). Right now we have 3 different external hard drives to go along with her internal hd (total is just over 1 tb). On her internal drive we keep all of her applications and any current projects she is working on (a project can be anywhere from 30-75g worth of data). All finished projects are stored on two seperate hard drives for archiving as well as burned to DVD and locked in a fireproof safe.

It all seems kinda unorganized and I'm looking to implement a better, more streamlined back-up and storage solution with the new PC i'm building but am not sure what the best way to go would be.

The MB i'm using in the new PC has 2 external 3g/s sata ports that may come in handy.

If you were in this situation what would you do?

Seeing how important your wife's work appears to be, she's not being paranoid. When I was working on my doctorate, one of my professors advised that we make three copies of our thesis papers and keep one of them in a fireproof safe. His reasoning included how it happened to him that he had his thesis prepared and ready to submit and a fire occurred which destroyed his one and only copy. It took him months to get everything together and re-written for submission. Sure, its a bit of work and in most cases very unnecessary, but if a disaster happens, fire, flood, tornado, the PC gets hit by lightening, etc, having extra and protected copies can make the difference between being able to re-install the backups and get on with life, or looking at a lifetimes worth of work lost forever.

So yes, let her do it her way.

I have no issue with keeping things in three places, I just know there has to be a better way to do it than just adding a new external hard drive every couple of months.

I think Sailers advice should be applied here,"So yes, let her do it her way. "

If you want to take responsibility for any thing that might go wrong, then sure jump right in.

I'm by no means an expert on marriage, I am on my third one, but I do know a thing or two about spouses.

Was it Ben Franklin who said "If it works dont fix it"?

The only problem with a fire safe is that they are only rated for a specific temp for 15-30 mins. Even then, are you certain that the heat won't warp or otherwise damage the plastic the DVD is made of? Things might not burn up, but there could be heat damage. Maybe a safe deposit box or other off-site safe would be a better bet? Just trying to avoid having all your data in the same location. What if a tornado hits and your house is gone? I bet the fire safe flies away as well. (Sorry, just a worst-case-scenario there.)

Maybe I should rephrase my question.

What type of NAS or RAID setup would you recommend for someone needing flexibility to grow upwards of 3-5tb storage over the next couple of years. In the setup I'd like to have redundant backup and will also be making DVD archives of all data for extra security. I want to move away from using regular external hard drives and streamline the way the data is stored and accessed (instead of having 6 external drives plugged in I'd like 1 or 2 max)

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=85 a couple of these should be able to address your storage/redundancy needs for a while.

http://www.newegg.com/store/SubCat [...] 24&Tpk=NAS lots of choices