External Hard Drive? DVD? CD?

I download all my photos directly onto an external hard drive, but I imagine an external hard drive has a finite life. My current external hard drive is around three years old. I'm thinking of getting a second and even bigger one to back up the first drive and add new photos. Is this being over-cautious? How do you store your photos ( often quite large digital files) for posterity and without spending a fortune?

All forms of discs. HDD, External Hd's Cd's and DVD's are prone to breakdown at sometime. so it is a matter of taking the pick and crossing your fingers. I store mine on all 4 mentioned so I have backup copies of everything

I've always been using external hard drives to store my images and, thankfully, have never had a problem. But just in case, as the first reply already mentioned, make back-up copies of your images on a second hard drive or DVD. Also, try to store your DVD's and hard drives in a cool environment away from any moisture and strong direct sunlight.

I use multiple hard drives. All of the pictures I want are in several places, storage is cheap.

Yes,you can burn a DVD disk~

Hi there. I'm so new round here that I haven't even posted a photo yet. This topic attracted me because I've just invested in two 500 GB external hard drives.

I chose Samsung drives and Cooler Master enclosures, made up for me by my local computer shop, although there are a lot of choices out there.

I have over 130 GBs of files, including RAW originals, TIFFs from these for printing and JPEGs in large and small sizes, the latter being for upload to forums, slide shows and emailing.

I had these on two sets of DVDs for safekeeping before getting the HDs, but keeping track of photos and adding new ones was such a pain and a time waster that, frankly speaking, it was taking the pleasure out of my photography.

I am now able to find any photo from the last four years or so (since I changed to digital) with a few clicks. Backing up is simplicity itself, with the Comodo Backup, which I downloaded free from www.comodo.com After a few seconds delay, this program silently copies over any additions, changes or deleting from the primary HD to the backup one.

By the way, I use Faststone Image Viewer from www.faststone.org to view thumbnails, full screen photos, slide show and renaming. (For the Iatter, I find Faststone more flexible for this than Adobe Bridge in Photoshop CS3.)

As mentioned above, nothing will last forever. If one of these drives fails, then I'll just have to replace it. When I eventually run out of space, I'll get two more.

I could never imagine going back to burning discs now.

If all else fails - cd's, dvds' external hard drives, blogs, more blogs, web sites - there is always the fact that every one of my photos has been printed and could always be scanned in again. However, in the case of the world ending, I have already prepared a small space capsule, ready to be launched at a moments notice rom the roof of Zedsdead Towers, towards the planet Krypton...............

i have the habit of printing out the 10 best pictures i took in a year on glossy photo paper with my canon bubble jet printer.

this is usually the result of a horrible week end of sorting out pictures, making difficult decisions, crying out loud when in the end i have to reduce everything into this ridiculous small frame of very subjective choice... *sniff*.

so, if all my pics that are saved on hard disk, cd's, dvd's, photoblog, etc., will once see the end of their performing days, i still will have my (probably yellowing) prints. and these, hopefully, will be considered ancient family reliquary for my grand-grandchildren and will be handed forward from generation to generation... ;-)

seriously: delete as many of your pictures as your bleeding heart allows and redundantly save the rest on as many storage systems you can get your hands on; the rest is silence.

For now, the cheapest solution per gig is to burn your DVDs.
My approach: PSDs, JPGs and finished images on main hard disk, RAW files and back-ups of everything on second internal hard disk. Back-ups of back-ups on an external hard disk and on DVDs. Something is bound to survive... I suppose I'm not alone in distrusting on-line back-up solutions. I try to keep printing to a minimum - save the planet, etc.
I agree with the approach of ruthlessly eliminating everything you don't like - but keep a copy of the originals, as your tastes and PP abilities may change.