Backing up your piccies

[Chris Bloom]

This topic seems to be one of continuous anguish for photographers in the digital age. How do you store your thousands of images? For the past nine years I've just been dumping the pics on DVD's and making a back-up copy. I know have about 150 DVD's and to be honest it's a pain in the ARSE trying to locate images.

I'm thinking of maybe getting two 2TB external drives instead and putting all my pics on these. At a rough calculation (150x4.7GB) I have about 700GB of images. The spare 1300 GB should be enough for at least another 3-4 years by which time there will most likely be 8TB drives or something at the same price as the 2TB drives are today and I can just move all my pics on to them.

Does this make sense? What's everybody else doing?

[pixelboy]

and those DVD's wont work in a couple of years (if they do now)..

Local external drives as you suggest and off site backup..(external drives don't survive fires)

I use carbonite.. $50/y unlimted storage.. ive got over 200GB backed up..

[ysu]

Online storage seems like a good idea if you have a bloody good upload. But if you're on a standard adsl2, it'll take a "little" time to backup 700GB
I've bought a 2TB samsung story external (usb3) drive recently, it's happily backing up everything automatically, couple of times a day, using CrashPlan.

No hassles, total cost was $120.

The only potential drawback; it's not offsite, so a break-in or a house fire can mean the end of that as well as the original data. But it's good against technical failures.

[pixelboy]

yeah sure it takes time.. but once its up its incremental.. only took me a month to do 200GB on ADSL2 running 24/7