DSLR Photography Forum

I'm sure nowadays all of us use hard drives to safely secure our thousands of images. But how sure can we keep it all safe in our hard drives. I do like to know more how do you keep your thousands of images safe and avoid loosing it.

I'll start with mine.
After a project shoot ----> 2 staff will download all images in two different external hardrives-----> STAFF 1 will transfer all image files to our Main server and WORK server in our Home office studio ----> STAFF 2 will transfer all image files to our different location/area server or we call it Loc2HD.

Main server - We don't altered any images here
Work server - Copy of Main server and alteration of images are done and stored here
Loc2HD - Copy of Main server. If Main server fails I still have copy of all files here. Or vice versa.

Loosing all your work is much more expensive than buying hard drives.

Whats yours?

Back up to a separate HD on computer, which also contains a separate operating system. Also weekly, back up my Windows Folder, to this HD, got me out of trouble once. My windows Folder is about 12Gb, 16/32GB memory sticks are inexpensive, so easy for anybody to do this. Also use a prog, to back up Registry daily. Ubuntu, on a stick, will access these HD's if necessary. Only one (unpaid) staff member!! Ed.

To be honest I have no back up procedure. I'm storing my photos on several different (external) hard drives. Published/processed/important photos are uploaded and stored on the web server too, but that's mostly because of the easier access, not because of the security.

At the moment when one of the hard drives starts showing signs of illness, I just go and buy a new one hoping that not much data will be lost. Yeah, I know..not actually a good plan