I dunno how money can be that tight and you'd spend a cent on a camera frankly. I'll get bashed for that but if $200 here or there affects your affordability then you have bigger fish to fry than buying new toys.

I might be able to save up for both... but still...

P.S. I don't call my gear "toys". They are just TOOLS, which are NEEDED.

[Marc Sabatella]

That's the marketing bullshit.

Of course it is. But it's no more outrageous than imagining an external hard disk will be good for that long. My point isn't that DVD is better than a drive (or vice versa) - rather, that *no* single backup is good forever. You need some sort of redundancy.

There are good reasons why optical discs are not an option for data archiving in business. They are too fragile, unreliable (and their capacity is too low).

I agree, although the capacity issue may or may not apply to home users.

[fs999]

I backup my photos on Blurays (25GB)...

[figmental1978]

I backup my photos on Blurays (25GB)...

Blu-Ray is also a good option, $160 for the burner, $10 per disc for 25gb...not a bad option. I could backup all my RAW files with two discs! Media will get cheaper over the next year too. Do blu-ray discs have the same life span as DVD's?

[simico]

Do blu-ray discs have the same life span as DVD's?

It's still the same cheap, fragile plastic thing. Just uses different wavelenght light (that's where the name comes from, "blue" laser ray) to get smaller spot size, thus higher data density.

[Tom S.]

With 1TB hard drives so cheap, it's hard not to use one for back up. As for DVD, if you have one go bad, all may not be lost. I discovered two days ago I couldn't read one I had burned 6 months ago (even with the drive I burned it with). I purchased a copy of ISO Buster and recovered every file on the DVD. Well worth the $29!

[Entropy]

I would reccommend multiple fully independent external hard drive based backups, plus a set of DVD backups.

RAID 1 is nice, but having fully independent filesystems and neither hard drive connected at the same time gives you some protection against "user oops" and "software malfunction" data losses.

DVD-Rs are 100% immune to data loss from user oops and software malfunction if burned properly and verified - a virus or crash at the wrong time can't erase a DVD.

[rpriedhorsky]

I have purchased a pack of Fuji Photo DVD-R's to back up my images and nature videos *permanently*.

It's impossible to have any backup strategy at all that's permanent. Even if the DVDs don't rot (which they will), DVD readers may/will become obsolete. You'll need to develop a plan for rotating the backups onto more modern storage, whether it's a set of external hard disks or optical media that you re-copy every ~5 years.

Another thought... backing up is super easy to slack off on, so the more automatic you can make it, the better. Even if you don't have it scripted, make a checklist and arrange reminders (e.g. with rememberthemilk.com).

And VERIFY the backups EVERY TIME! You will have a bug that will eventually creep into your procedure and make them stop working right, and if you don't notice, you're f***ed when you go to pull something from backup and realize that they haven't been working for two years.