Just curious... I have an external hard drive and all my photos are stored there. I am also backing everything up on DVD-RW discs. This seems to work well in that I have my files backed up in 2 places. But even the large DVD-RW discs don't hold a lot of photos when I'm taking so many... so what do you do for storage??
I have an external hard drive, plus they're all on my computer hard drive. Then I sometimes upload onto shutterfly too, because they store them at full resolution, then if the worst things were to happen and I lost my computer and external hdd, I'd be able to pay for disks of my more recent photos.
I run a RAID-1 (mirror) array on my systems hard drives. This means I have two hard drives (750GB) behaving as one. All data on one is mirrored to the other in real-time.
This isn't a "backup" so much as redundancy. If one drive fails (which it has), I still have a complete copy on the other.
Ideally, I'd also like external off-site backup, but it's just not feasible at the moment.
Regarding the external hard drives, you can get those with a RAID-1 (mirror) array built in, such as the Western Digital My Book World Edition II. This particular one can actually plug in to your network. That opens up possibilities to have it stash away somewhere (like the roof?) and still be accessible over the network.
I only use harddrives now, I had a copy on DVD's as well, but after a few years the first dvd's really started to deteriorate and I had a really hard time trying to restore the biggest part of my photoarchives. DVD's that you burn yourself apparantly have not such a long life.
So, I use harddrives, and I usually copy on a monthly basis any new data to a spare drive. Best would be to have one of those mirrored drives, even better. But that's out of my budget now.
I use external harddrives. I have a MyBook 1TB one right now, thinking about getting a second (probably 2TB) to do a back up of the MyBook on. Not all my photos are backed up yet, so one day I just really have to sit down and get everything backed up between 2 laptops and 1 desktop.
Gotta say one thing... at least the box I store my film negatives in can't "crash" and lose all the data, LOL.
I use two external HDDs (I rotate them, keeping one in another location), archival gold DVD's, and a DROBO S http://www.drobo.com/ for my main storage so there's always built-in redundancy. Since getting the DROBO, I've stopped using DVD backups so much except for "final" works.
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This isn't a "backup" so much as redundancy. If one drive fails (which it has), I still have a complete copy on the other.
Ideally, I'd also like external off-site backup, but it's just not feasible at the moment.
Regarding the external hard drives, you can get those with a RAID-1 (mirror) array built in, such as the Western Digital My Book World Edition II. This particular one can actually plug in to your network. That opens up possibilities to have it stash away somewhere (like the roof?) and still be accessible over the network.
So, I use harddrives, and I usually copy on a monthly basis any new data to a spare drive. Best would be to have one of those mirrored drives, even better. But that's out of my budget now.
Gotta say one thing... at least the box I store my film negatives in can't "crash" and lose all the data, LOL.