| I think the best way to store digital images is as photographic (not inkjet or dye sub) prints.
At least then the image is stored on a proven, long lasting technology.
I just went through my back up CDs and transferred them over to hard drives, and had a few discs that wouldn't read any more.
There is, in my opinion, no foolproof dead simple way to archive digital files. Multiple redundancy is the way to do it, and maintaining a file system and updating the hardware that goes along with it is necessary.
As of last weekend, I am no longer depending on CDs, and have transferred as much of my old files onto hard drives.
At the moment, my back-up strategy consists of a mirror (RAID 1) using two drives in my computer, controlled by the motherboard, plus an external mirror using two separate eSATA drives hooked up to a RAID controller card in the computer plus a Drobo storage box.
At some point, I'll take my previous computer, which has room for 4 drives in the box and turn it into a dedicated storage unit. I haven't researched the most reliable RAID method for this, but a my gut tells me that a dual mirror is the way to go with 4 discs, as up to three discs can fail, with data recovery still possible. |