I always wondered about bitrot and lately ransomware encryption.

I too have a RAID setup for redundancy and backup to an external HDD, all get replaced every few years. But bitrot can set in and ruin pictures and if the worst happens, such as ransomware encrypting your data, everything can be ruined when you backup your data and overwrite the old files with the encrypted ones.

I've been thinking lately of using something like ZFS with versioning. I'm still researching this, but apparently ZFS can help with bitrot if set up correctly, plus with a versioning system any ransomware encryption would just create another version you could roll back to.

Perhaps I'm being a bit paranoid, but there's nothing wrong with being paranoid about your data... right?

Backing them up is important, but make sure you know what the pictures are, from when and where... I have a script that copies the photos and movies from the SD card and puts them into a folder by date (YYYY-MM-DD). I then add in a description for each directory, so I end up with "2011-02-14 (Valentine's Day at Grandmas)" For backups: I use a RAID 1 (mirror) to store all my important data, including photos. Each night, the drive is rsync'ed to a USB drive. I have recently gotten some additional drive space for Picasa and plan to write a script to upload to new albums with the dates and descriptions stored as the directory name. Every 18 months or so, move to the next HDD size, store the previous USB HDD somewhere safe and re-use the two old RAID 1 drives for something less important. This protects against pretty much anything, save Armageddon (or the end of Google)... And lastly, print out some of the photos! Take a little bit of time to go through your recently downloaded pictures and have a few of them printed out.

At least now we know how the Professor kept the radio running for so long...

Avast Antivirus is pretty good too. It's free, but you need to register yearly.