I think you misunderstand my drift, or it has already drifted elsewhere.

I take pictures to capture my experience of, mostly nature, which leads to 2 sequences

1 getting the image to coincide as nearly as practical with my experience, the camera does not 'see' as the eye does, our brains are more complex (tho it often captures 1/500 sec lasting things and very small things the eye misses). So one works on it in PSE or whatever to 'freeze' the best of what the camera and the eye saw.

This can take say 1/2 hour. So do you keep that in .psd/.tif for when you want to print rather than view or you have learnt a new trick. I just wondered if others have similar ideas on this?

2 filing and storage only becomes an issue if you haven't enough. My image folder = last 3 years kept digital and as much as I have had time to scan of my historic and all extant family pics is 15GB and could be weeded to 10. I will risk the chance of both La Cie drive and internal dying simultaneously, especially as the system (mac OS 10.2.8) locked me out the second it found 1 suspect sector out of squillions on the internal HD so it could all be transferred before any serious damage could occur.