I don't want to tempt fate....

[adrian jordin]

...but given all the wonderful family Christmas photos, especially of the little ones, I get the word 'backup' crossing my mind...

I back up all my digital images to a separate hard drive, as and when I remember, and I have some of the earliest family shots on DVD. What do other people use? Anyone use any of the web-based backup services?

 

[Dave Moss]

All my shots I dont mind people seeing are stored on Flickr(about 15,000). All the family stuff is on three computers and a memory card (or 2) in digital photoframes which get updated about once a month. I get the fun out of taking the photo so perhaps I'm not so worried as a proper pro photographer about my images being used. Although I have been asked if quite a lot of my images can be used in a book on the history of the Caldon Canal recently

 

[Hamish Gill]

Back up drives at work 2 mirrored drives with everything on ...
we use dropbox for work stuff, although not technically a backup service it works for that!

 

[Pete Askew]

I use 2 RAID 6 NAS systems (Synology - UK and Germany) and duplicate them onto (slower) RAID 5 NAS units (Buffalo) located in a different building.

 

[Dan Cattermole]

I use a 250gb external hard drive....... thats it..... does anyone know of a link or site as such that does back up your foties?? other than the likes of flickr and photobucket etc....??

 

[Tim Pindar]

I back up nightly to an external HDD using Norton Ghost which takes a complete image of C: and also my HDD with photos on, but as it stays next to the PC it is vulnerable to burglary or fire etc.

So for a while now I've backed up online too, using IDrive, but I have recently subscribed to Crashplan which is a much better service and crucially it is unlimited in capacity for a reasonable cost. It also arranges for other PCs in the family to be backed up to your PC, and hence onto the cloud from there.

With all these online services it takes a long time to back everything up the first time, maybe some weeks, but once done Crashplan will keep it up to date continuously as well as copies of deleted files etc in case you need to retrieve them later.

With any service look out as some won't back up external HDDs.

 

[Brian Moore]

I back mine up in archival quality negative sleeves that I keep in 3-ring binders I'll be OK barring a fire, a tornado (unlikely in these here parts), a hurricane (also unlikely aroon here), a tsunami (possible) or a quake (most likely) that swallows my hoose or casts Southern California adrift into the Pacific Ocean.