Best Backup Method

[woody121]

Hello all,
I have subscribed to the RSS feed for some time, but just recently had this issue come up with backing up my photography, so I figured I would join and see what all you experts had to say.

The situation:
I got a DSLR in December, and have been shooting like crazy since. I shoot 12mp RAW shots, and currently have them all stored on my laptops hard drive. This is now taking up the majority of the drive, and also have no backups, so clearly this situation cannot continue.
I am travelling constantly, since I am spending this whole year in Europe, studying occasionally and travelling mostly.

The question:
How should I back up these photos? I am a heavy user of lightroom, so I thought about potentially exporting them as a high quality JPG, and occasionally put them onto a free 80gb hard drive for now, but I worry about the loss of quality and inability to edit things if i have a future idea for a project, but i dont think that is very likely.

Or I could look into online backup options - carbonite seems to be good, and for 55 a year offering unlimited backup space seems great. Anyone else using such a solution, or any other suggestions?

[nategesner]

This has been my problem for many years and it becomes more difficult as I've upgraded cameras with larger file sizes. My current solution is to back up all my photos to an external about once a month. Then 3-4 times a year I'll back everything up to DVD. This keeps my files in their original format and in three locations (computer, external, DVD). If one fails, I still have two chances to get it back.

Online storage is VERY convenient, but I do worry about the cost, security, and inconvenience of retrieving a single file. I used a free backup site before and everything was in one big chunk and I had to restore the entire chunk just to get to one file. ARGH! It looks like carbonite lets you hunt for a specific file/folder and retrieve only that item, which is much better. I've been contemplating the purchase of a newer, bigger external for backing up, but I think I'll consider an online service.

[LeeR]

I would only like to add the possibility of an exteranl hard drive. They are cheap and hold tons of images. Here is one from Tigerdirect.com with 1TB of memory for less that $100. Not bad. Add that to at least one other storage system, like Carbonite, and you have something that is failry failsafe.

[woody121]

Thanks for the options guys - I just purchased carbonite for this year, so I am backing up all of my photos there. Once that is done, I will test it for a bit, and hopefully just keep "worst case backups" - DNG's of all good photos, and just high-quality JPGS for the rest.

That is the plan, anyways. Will post on results!