Well said, sir. They don't let just anyone be an astronaut; those guys (and girls) are studs. Typically top-of-class engineers, soldiers and super-jocks, we've lost some good Americans to the pursuit of the bleeding edge.

Jim

Well said, sir.

Jim

I disagree: Linux software RAID5 is easily grown, with no data loss, using mdadm. The resulting array also has the advantage of being transferable to a different machine if the original dies. What happens to your data if your DROBO dies three years from now and a replacement is unavailable? mdadm software RAID arrays are recoverable by any old Linux machine.

I think people buy DROBOs because they either aren't capable of or interested in "rolling their own". On the positive, DROBO is an aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-use system with some nice features. Not everyone has the time or inclination to learn the command line incantations necessary to setup and maintain a homebrew RAID box!

I keep all my media (includes pictures, movies and music) stored on a RAID 5 array on my primary desktop computer. It's currently 3x1TB, which is about 1.8TB usable when formatted EXT4. Of this, about 150GB is pictures. Since RAID5 is fault tolerant, I'm protected from a single hard drive failure. In addition to this I back up my photos to DVDs. I keep the DVDs in a Case Logic case in my fire safe. In the future I plan on making a secondary backup, either to an external HD or a second set of DVDs, which I will keep at my parents' house in my Dad's fire safe. In your case, since the amount of data you're storing is relatively small, I'd pick up an external HD for primary backup, and backup to an online service as a final line of defense. If an online service costs on the order of $25 per year, it's really a no-brainer in terms of value. If you're like me, your pictures are the only truly valuable things on your computer, and they are of utmost importance.