I never trust my photos to a hard drive. Because my computers are on the road so much, I get about 1 to 2 years of life from my hard drives. I have my photos backed up to CD. I have never lost a photo, but have lost plenty of hard drives. Presently, I am using 9 hard drives between 3 computers.

I don't crop until I print and I do my cropping in Qimage as that is my printing program. I then save my printed file along with the original.