Roger,
Thanks for the detailed synopsis.
Peter

Palou,
You can send them by yousendit.com.  They have a free service. (I also use the paid service).
Please send to peter at peterkrogh.com
Peter

Joe,
I would say that you don't have to validate all of it - but you should at least do a decent sample.

As to what you are protecting against, it's not just virus.  It's also bit rot - random flipping of bits on a drive. Additionally, there is also corruption in the volume information (overlapped files, for instance)

There's another one, as well. With a  hard drive archive, it's likely that you will want to update the drives periodically. Doing that without writing bad data over good is possible, but not easy. If you don't validate before each update, you are likely, at some point, to make this mistake.

You would also want to be very careful whenever you have all hard drive copies on line at once.  At that point you are susceptible to some electrical or volume problem killing all hard drive copies.

IF you don't want to use write-once, I strongly suggest using one copy of the hard drive versions as though it was write-once.  Hash it and don't update, except after a thorough validation.

The write-once copy - whether optical, disk or tape - plays an essential role as a disaster recovery copy of the files.  Optical disk just makes it more achievable for most photographers, IMO.

Peter

Palou,
Would it be possible to get a copy of both files?
Peter

Palou (name?)
I assume you were using the latest version of the DNG converter.
I'll ask Adobe what's up with that.
Peter

Slowness in this kind of browsing is related to the way previews are handled. Is your standard-sized preview big enough to cover the window in use?  Have you told Lightroom to generate Standard-sized previews?  The first thing I would suggest is to build these.  You might even try to build them at multiple resolutions (testing the effect after each build) to see what is working best.

There's a lot of "predictive rendering" in Lightroom. That is, the engineers tell Lightroom to prepare screen pixels for what they expect you to do next. There are a lot of variations, including processor speed, available disk space, disk fragmentation, size of previews, size of screen setting.  And of course, some logic is built in to get the next set of screen pixels ready for you depending on what it thinks you are going to do next. Sometimes one thing in the set of expectations can slow down the whole process.

Also, are you running in 64 bit or 32 bit?

Peter

Bill,
A friend recently got bitten by this - the discs he bought don't work in his burner.  I as unaware of the compatibility chart.

In general, I think that a move to Blu-ray should be accompanied by an implementation of some kind of data validation procedure.  No matter what the theoretical longevity, that's just too much data to trust without verification.
Peter

Joe,
Do you routinely optimize the catalog when you close Lightroom?
Do you have lots of keywords?
How many images in the catalog?
When you say "browsing" what do you mean?  Scrolling in Grid?  Full Res browsing in Loupe view in Library?  Moving through images in Develop?

Have you built 1:1 previews of the images?

Peter

Sossity,
I let the numbers run (no reset).
Peter

CHarlie,
No worries on the delay.  I've been working on projects that keep me buried, so I'm sometimes not getting around to answer stuff for way too long.

Yes, the PV2010 sharpening and NR do require a new approach, but it's worth it.  Revisiting older images produces results that can be much better, and have always been at least a little better for everything I've tried.

Also keep in mind that sharpening for prints is a lot more forgiving than sharpening for screen.  Stuff that looks downright ugly at 1:1 on screen can print up beautifully.

Peter

Jon,
I did not notice this post here until just now. I assume you've probably figured it out, but you could use either Aperture or Lightrom 3 for this.
Peter

You can also use the smart collection options to find when something was added.  Use this to find what was most recently added to each.

Alternately, if you try to import the whole catalog, it will let you know if there are any new images, or if everything in the catalog you are importing is already in the other catalog.

Peter

Ken, (Please sign your posts)

The basic steps are these:

Find when the two catalogs diverged.
Determine What files have been changed since the divergence
Export catalog of changed images from satellite catalog and import it into the master catalog.
You can use "replace settings" for the satellite catalog import if you're sure that the images you will import have not been changed in the Master Catalog.

To find out what images have been changed in each catalog, make a Smart Collection where the criteria is "Edited Date" and the date range is the length of time since the Satellite catalog was made. 
Once you have the images in the Smart Collection, select them all and "export as Catalog"
In the Master Catalog, select "Import from catalog".  If will ask you what to do about images that are already in the catalog.  Tell it you want the incoming settings to overwrite the existing settings.

If you think that some images have been changed in both catalogs, and you want to save each version, then you could import the new settings as virtual copies. Only do this f there is the possibility that you would be overwriting settings that represent some real work in develop, or in captioning.  Adding the Virtual copies brings its own overhead.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.
Peter

Jorge,
That's a great idea - if only I had time to make it happen...
Peter

Bethany,
That's an interesting point.  I think that the Spanish version is published by an overseas company that may not have purchased US rights for distribution (this is just a guess). 

The Spanish language book appears to be well done.  I have a copy, but I would not be able to tell you anything about the quality of the translation.
Peter