One of the sites offering storaging services says that 'eventually all hard disc drives fail'.
Sounds serious. What will happen to all our photo files gathered on our computers? What do you do to back them up?
Here's what I do:
1. Because I shoot in RAW, I create a folder called 'negatives nr xx' - simply because I treat RAW files as kinda digital negatives.
2. When the folder reaches 4.7 GB, I burn a DVD.
3. I have a portable disc drive called Digimate, 80 GB, so I back the files there as well.
Here are some more things to keep in mind - DVD's are not 100% safe, they decay with time, so creating another DVD after some time is good advice.
Hard discs become larger and larger and the prices go down. I am considering buying a large 500GB external disc drive (plenty of space for me), it costs just about 130$ - should be enough for quite a long time.
Of course, having your images on DT drives is another safety measure, but you don't have the access to those large files - you need to buy them as any other customer. I admit, in case of emergency this option is the last resort.
