Comment The best way... if you're on a budget. (Score 1) 642
My solution to the backup problem is quite simple, two SATA drives in my work computer in a RAID 1 configuration, and two external 250 GBytes harddrives which I use as backup drives, for redundancy I have two, not one. The ideal would be to take one or both of the external drives off-site, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
It is very unlikely that all of my drives will fail at the same time, unless there's a fire or something of that order - and obviously, off-site drives would remedy that.
When new technology arrives, or I need greater capacity, it's a simple and fast procedure to move data to the new technology, at worst I'll have to add a new interface to the PC.
And most importantly for me, I can afford it; as this solution is quite inexpensive. You don't need any special hardware or software, just regular standard drives which are around 200 each, and that's it, you're about as safe as you can be.
Summa summarum, in the digital age you shouldn't count on archiving anything, instead focus on keeping 'live' backups, store data on media whence it can quickly and easily be copied to new formats or media, as they arrive or become cost efficient.
Oh, and for the DSLR RAW images, you might consider looking into the longetivity of the RAW formats, what guarantee do you have that there's going to be any software to read or process those proprietary files in 10 years time?
See http://www.openraw.org/ for more information. The same applies to any digital format, but the more specialized the format, like e.g. a particular model DSLR from a particular manufacturer, the less likely it is that you're going to have software to read it in the future.
It is very unlikely that all of my drives will fail at the same time, unless there's a fire or something of that order - and obviously, off-site drives would remedy that.
When new technology arrives, or I need greater capacity, it's a simple and fast procedure to move data to the new technology, at worst I'll have to add a new interface to the PC.
And most importantly for me, I can afford it; as this solution is quite inexpensive. You don't need any special hardware or software, just regular standard drives which are around 200 each, and that's it, you're about as safe as you can be.
Summa summarum, in the digital age you shouldn't count on archiving anything, instead focus on keeping 'live' backups, store data on media whence it can quickly and easily be copied to new formats or media, as they arrive or become cost efficient.
Oh, and for the DSLR RAW images, you might consider looking into the longetivity of the RAW formats, what guarantee do you have that there's going to be any software to read or process those proprietary files in 10 years time?
See http://www.openraw.org/ for more information. The same applies to any digital format, but the more specialized the format, like e.g. a particular model DSLR from a particular manufacturer, the less likely it is that you're going to have software to read it in the future.
