Keep tarballs Either you share images or download from someone, signed tarballs are convient way to transfer files. It also faster to move between local disks and ensures integrity. Therefore do not remove downloaded tarballs but save them to archive instead. Archived files must be set read-only and carefully backed up. It is best to copy tarballs on a DVD medium. Use directory colors Some desktops (e.g kde) allow to set colors to directories. That's very usefull if you mix images of different purpose like graphics and photos. Get relieble fast disk Do not use flash drives and SD cards as a primary storage. There is no waranty of redutancy and many manufacturers lie the specs. It may stop working. It can be painfully slow to copy. Use relieble file system Most disks come preformatted FAT32, EXFAT or NTFS, do not use these file systems. These only have basic protection agains write errors and exposed to bit rot. EXT4 or XFS are also exposed and should not be used. ZFS or Btrfs file systems are self-repairing and recommended. important! advanced file systems especially XFS may not recover files after crash. Do not produce large images If your camera produces high resolution images (>16MP), Consider to set smaller image size. Do not be aware of older cameras, consider better lens instead. Reasoning: large images exeed the capacity of absolutely most screens and practially never printed in full resolution. Smaller images well fit on optical media and more easily shared. backup symlinks While it may seem to be harmless to remove few symlinks, I swear you don't want to get lost all symlinks collection. It carries information of all correct file groups!