When it comes to protecting your images, digital media has both it's advantages, and disadvantages. While prints and negatives are vulnerable to environmental factors, one stray bit of static can render a hard disk full of digital images corrupt. If you aren't backing up you could lose years of work in the blink of an eye.

last month my laptop had a brake down took it in for repair and yep lost last years photo's due to hard drive having a problem

i had started to move them to an external hard drive but never got round to doing last years,lesson learned,

is there away i can get my photo's back from my sd card's,

I cancelled my Mozy account last summer before I finished backing everything up. Lost a bunch of stuff that I'd spent many hours developing. Still had the RAW files for them thankfully, but needed to reprocess all of them.

Goes to show this is a big warning!

I back my serious stuff up to more than one backup drive. I do a backup to one drive and then backup the backup to a different drive.

I sync to a separate removable drive. I was thinking of backing up into a cloud environment. Looking at some of the cloud solutions, they are expensive and with over 300Gb of media, I think it would be cheaper over less than a year to buy another 500Gb portable drive to ensure there is a "Backup to the Backup.

There are many times I have heard the primary backup failing.

I have several HDD but don't trust them.

I send all my OK pix to my Flickr account at full size.

Many go to Facebook but they are not full sized so you cannot recover from there. (even if you use their HQ upload option.)

DVD's are pretty good backup.

After I download from camera to computer, I then copy to a usb stick and also burn to a cd or dvd.

Thank goodness I have never had a situation where I have lost any of my photos.

I save first to one RAID-1 portable drive, then I backup to 2 different NAS which also run RAID-1.

One NAS is in Switzerland, the other is in Thailand, and my portable drive serves as a travel case.

I occasionally make backups of resized pictures on DVDs

My biggest worry is the size of the pictures, since I got a DSLR, a single pic in JPG can take up to 12MB, 20MB in RAW...

I take the belt and suspenders (braces) approach. I do full image backups of my project work (over 30 years worth) along with my photos. One copy is on the original drive, one copy on a 2nd internal drive, 2 copies to two external USB drives and 3 copies on my office computer, both internal backup and external backup drives. This gives me two geographic physical locations in case something catastrophic happens at one. Just too important for me to take any chances. Overkill? Perhaps. Peace of mind? You bet.

I backup raws and derivatives to an external backup drive. I backup up derivatives (jpegs) to an online providor as well.

Its all so easy to do these days if you are using a DAM software such as aperture, lightroom, etc.

All good advice, thanks.

I have a lot to learn......you guys are speaking in a language foreign to me.

Cheers.

Overkill? thought I was over killing back ups, have for at least for 12 years put images and documents on 2 other hard drives as well as to 4 re-rewritable DVD's

last couple of years, very 6 months do a total PC Image backup to yet another HDD, did this last Monday took just over 9 hours...

Over the years would have lost everything if I had not done backups...

​Maybe of interest........ when I came here I put 2 HDD + my DVD RAM writer in my case with clothes packed around... The DVD's were in the container that came by ship.. New PC here early 2004 added the HDD's from UK would not work, Fried as was the DVD writer., thankfully the DVD's with photos's and Data were fine. just took 6 weeks to arrive..

after the RAW image files been downloaded from camera to the first PC harddisk, I apply SecondCopy and duplicate the RAW image files to a second harddisk in native RAW image format. by end of day a backup is made automatically to a third harddisk in backup format.

I had experience of losing a pair of harddisks in a La Cie RAID1 enclosure. now I add one harddisk in-between and store the data in the native formats ( non-RAID, non-backup ).

I made a mistake about 10 years ago and didn't back up all my photos. When the hard drive crashed I lost everything except what I had saved on CDs. My home computer now has a large capacity external hard drive that automatically backs up everything, and anything really special gets saved on a DVD as well. On my travelling laptop I have a 1.5 terabite external hard drive that I add to on a fairly regular basis.

Overkill? thought I was over killing back ups, have for at least for 12 years put images and documents on 2 other hard drives as well as to 4 re-rewritable DVD's

last couple of years, very 6 months do a total PC Image backup to yet another HDD, did this last Monday took just over 9 hours...

Over the years would have lost everything if I had not done backups...

​Maybe of interest........ when I came here I put 2 HDD + my DVD RAM writer in my case with clothes packed around... The DVD's were in the container that came by ship.. New PC here early 2004 added the HDD's from UK would not work, Fried as was the DVD writer., thankfully the DVD's with photos's and Data were fine. just took 6 weeks to arrive..

Have you tried loading the DVD's and writing them back to a disk?

I am asking this because I have found that DVD's after about 5 years become an unreliable archive media unless they are in a controlled atmosphere.

Overkill? thought I was over killing back ups, have for at least for 12 years put images and documents on 2 other hard drives as well as to 4 re-rewritable DVD's

last couple of years, very 6 months do a total PC Image backup to yet another HDD, did this last Monday took just over 9 hours...

Over the years would have lost everything if I had not done backups...

​Maybe of interest........ when I came here I put 2 HDD + my DVD RAM writer in my case with clothes packed around... The DVD's were in the container that came by ship.. New PC here early 2004 added the HDD's from UK would not work, Fried as was the DVD writer., thankfully the DVD's with photos's and Data were fine. just took 6 weeks to arrive..

Have you tried loading the DVD's and writing them back to a disk?

I am asking this because I have found that DVD's after about 5 years become an unreliable archive media unless they are in a controlled atmosphere.

They are rewritable DVD's, I re format and write the Disc again, have 1x hard drive in PC with only photo's so just write the whole lot in many different folders on to my DVD's

I go for the multiple disk approach for all my files, not just photos

There are several good file synchronising programmes around that will

compare two disk/directories and tell you what needs to be copied

rather than doing the job manually.

Google file sync

back up on two external hard drives and write a dvd every 2 mnths

I have lost slides and was really upset, spent 6 months scanning slides an now they are saved

I copy the images to my laptop, which backups itself automatically to home RAID1 NAS.

From NAS I take every now and then an extra copy to another disk.

Documents are on Dropbox.

Images I have now decided to keep on Picasa (2048px max resolution). That way I have at least some copies of the selected picture in case of disaster. I can also use the Picasa uploaded images on my own websites with quite ease.

The idea is to make the workflow as easy as possible.

I back my serious stuff up to more than one backup drive. I do a backup to one drive and then backup the backup to a different drive.

And then to one more ! And all my drives are now redundant (Raid 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels#RAID_1)

I don't know which all versions of Windows will do this, but 7 ultimate will and I've had other versions for years that will. I have two computers that replicate each other in real time. The dangers there are if I delete files on one they are gone from the other. They are both in the same physical building for fire or robbery problems. Not really a backup, just one more step.

Someone mentioned a long image making problem. I use Windows Backup and its scheduler to image my C drive to a second hard disk drive every.single.night while I sleep. It takes about 30 minutes to run but it's only about 100 gig. I have had to use those images twice now for recovery because of data corruption for reasons I couldn't figure out. How sweet to insert the recovery CD WB prompts you to burn and boot from, and 30 minutes later have exactly what you had in the wee hours the same morning.

I use Cobian backup to back up directories I choose, even on separate internal disk drives. It's free and uses the VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) and has never failed. It runs twice every night, one backup to an internal disk and one to a network storage device.

I still need to get off site backups going.

I'm using rsync on linux crontab job to copy pictures from my laptop to the NAS. It's a brilliant little software which checks if there is any changes to the files or directories and copies the new files to the other computer or NAS.

The following command does it all for me when my laptop is on my home network. It's executed every 3 hours automatically. If there is no files to be copied, then the run time for 50GB of data is just few seconds or tens of seconds.

5 */3 * * * test -f /nas/.nas-mount-done && rsync --bwlimit=1000 -arv /local/pictures/ /nas/pictures/

There is some packages of rsync for windows as well http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/tour_Rsync.html

I use Cobian to do my back-ups. It's free, has enough options to keep nerds happy, will do zipped/encrypted/neither back-ups and will keep multiple versions too.

A couple of points:

1) Offsite storage can be a lifesaver. I read a couple years ago that Francis Ford Coppola (living in Argentina) had backed everything up to external hard drives. Someone robbed his house and took the PC and other items...also the external drives. 20+ years of pics, documents, scripts, etc. gone forever. The same could happen if you had a fire that destroyed the drives.

2) Beware online backups. I used Mozy for over a year, then swapped my C: (hard) drive for an SSD (vast speed improvement). The Mozy system noted the hardware change and refused to acknowledge that it was the same PC, declared it a new PC and would not associate it with the 3 Terabytes of photos and videos that I'd already backed up (over several months at their 'trickle' upload speed). I have about 3 months of saved correspondence with everyone from first line tech-support to the VP of marketing in Seattle, trying to get them to connect the backup to the PC, (vs. re-backing up for 5-6 months), all to no avail. In the end, they simply flipped the switch that said 'new PC' and my backups were gone forever. I do think they did this simply to bring the matter to closure. The good news: I switched to CrashPlan and am happy.. they have a clear, working method of 'adopting' a PC and dealing with hardware changes. And their Family Plan Plus allows for no limits on storage for all the devices in your household. Much better pricing!

CDs/DVDs are non magnetic storage... Kept at room temps or less - hidden from light and they will keep images / data for a Loooooong Time.

High Capacity USB flash drives are very good - durable but not beyond being incapacitated by heat or water.

Disc imaging software such as (but not limited to) Norton Ghost - backs up everything on the hard disc drive - including applications into a fully bootable replacement hard drive with applications reading to run - a working mirror copy ready to go.