magicmonkey
TPF Noob!
I have a stupid amount of hard drives on my network, the 3 I use for photo's (and photos only) are an additional drive in my main PC where I use the files and edit them etc. A hard drive in a backup server which takes coppies from my main PC 3 times a day, again there is one hard drive for photos in there, and a portable hard drive which takes back ups once every other day or when I've got back from a shoot, whichever is more convenient at the time. The PC's are both on seperate mains curcuits and have curcuit breakers in there incase I get hit by lightning or something horrible and the portable hard drive is never plugged into the mains in the house. If my photo's hard drives gets full then I buy 2 new hard drives and the full ones become backups, it's cheaper (when you get into 250GB sizes etc.) and much more resiliant than burning a load of DVD's as they just don't stand the test of time...
I know that having a hard drive with pictures on sounds like hassle but I have a USB hard drive enclosure which means that I can just pop a hard drive in there, plug it into the PC and I have access to the whole drive in seconds. The enclosure only cost about £5 and was well worth it!
I'm afraid that as someone who has had a lot of backup material on DVD/CD and got it all wiped through a problem with ambient temperature (nothing very extreme, just sat in my office away from the radiator and out of the sun in England) I have to say that keeping DVD/CD only is a very simple way to loose all your work. It's very convenient but will always break. it's not bad as a backup for your hard drive backup but as I will already have 2 hard drives with backup on I don't bother myself with it
in case you can't tell, I have data paranoia!
I know that having a hard drive with pictures on sounds like hassle but I have a USB hard drive enclosure which means that I can just pop a hard drive in there, plug it into the PC and I have access to the whole drive in seconds. The enclosure only cost about £5 and was well worth it!
I'm afraid that as someone who has had a lot of backup material on DVD/CD and got it all wiped through a problem with ambient temperature (nothing very extreme, just sat in my office away from the radiator and out of the sun in England) I have to say that keeping DVD/CD only is a very simple way to loose all your work. It's very convenient but will always break. it's not bad as a backup for your hard drive backup but as I will already have 2 hard drives with backup on I don't bother myself with it
in case you can't tell, I have data paranoia!