Safe Luxury

What is the safest way to backup your digital photos ?

Should I use DVD-R, external harddrives ... what will secure my photos 20 years from now when I want to look at photos of my kids growing up ?

Public Comments

1. To be absolutely the safest you should of course use both. This is of course a hassle. I think the best of the two would be external harddrives. However I would also consider buying some remote storage and dumping your photos on a server to provide an extra backup.
2. Here are some thoughts: 1. Hard drives have a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) bascially this means that they will fail within a certain time or at least produce bad sectors making some of your data unrecoverable(ish). One way to try to protect data on your PC is to have a RAIDED system that means 2 or more identical drives and hardware or software replicates the software across each drive so if one drive goes down you still have your data. This does not help if the PC goes on fire or gets water damaged, you should always have a seperate backup procedure. 2. DVD's are a good way of backing up your data and I would say are a more reliable way of backing up rather than Hard disks but they are limited to 4.7GB (single sided). What I do is burn a backup every week or whenever I do a big change of data but this is dependant on the old saying "What happens if your Hard Disk died in 5 minutes would you miss any data on it" if yes do a daily Backup. 99% of IT companies only backup there data every day so backing up every few hours is a bit extreme but again if it is critical do a backup. Buy quality DVD's! 3. USB memory sticks are pretty tough bits of kit and you can give them quite a bit of grief before they fail, USB sticks use memory chips rather than magnetic media like hard disks and tend to be a little bit more robust. They can get corrupted just like any other device. 4. Zip disks are a bit old hat and have the same problem as floppy disks avoid avoid avoid! Trust me I have used them and relied too much on them and lost data cos of it. 5. Tape backups (DDS3/4/DAT72) have a good capacity and alot of IT companies use this type of backup but again they are suseptable to corruption similar to floppy disks if kept for any length of time as they are magnetic media, expensive to maintain. 6. SD/MMC cards are similar technology to USB memory sticks as they store the data on a chip(s) but do not normally have the capacity to store alot of data (1GB?) and are very easily lost/broken as they are so small. 7. Online backups are an option but most are insecure and do you want people to have access to your data/photos etc. hmmmm I suppose there is no 100% safe way of backing up your data (and keeping it safe) but I have found DVD's to be pretty good (using quality DVD's with dark ink), I use DVD-RW as my data changes alot and there is no point in me keeping the old stuff but buy high quality DVD's as cheap and nasty DVD's tend to develop problems later in life. I have seen alot of testing done on USB sticks and they have been found to be very tough to break. If you are serious about the data you can buy a small fire proof safe as well. Just my opinon and experience!
3. you can try to make serveral copys and also save your photo into HD or pay a little money to buy the storage online to save your photos. 20 year is long time, you would have high chance to forget backup or lose your CD somewhere you can not find. Large Internet Company company more likely will back up their batabase pretty often . You also can manage your photo online.Now there is a lot of photo album internet service. You can try it.
4. Store them on as many different media (preferably external) as possible. Also, archive/zip them and upload them to a reliable online e-mail service (like Yahoo, Gmail).