How do you store your photos?

[photobum]

I'm curious what is the best way to store photos. I'm a hobbiest, but getting more serious. I don't want to overload my computer, so I figured that I should store all of my photos on an external hard drive and get a Sutterfly account and store them there too. Is this the right way to store my photos so that they will always be safe? If so, is Shutterfly a good site to use? My photos, especially of the family and kids, are very important and I want to do the right thing. Thanks.

[OsmosisStudios]

I use a RAID array to store my photos. It's a separate, mains-connected enclosure that stores multiple hard drives (2 in my case). Most can be set up for either large-storage or redundancy. Large storage uses the drives as one big drive, also known as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives), so if you have a 2-bay enclosure with 2x1TB drives, you have 2 TB of storage space. When set up for redundancy, the drives act as mirrors of one another, so given the same enclosure with 2x1TB drives, you only get 1TB of storage space, but you have 2 copies. If one drive fails, the other is already a copy: just pull the bad one out, replace it, and the system syncs itself once again.

The only additional step you could take would be online, and that means some kind of service that allows for uploads.

[photobum]

Are there any online services that are better or more secure than others? I have a Shutterfly account, but haven't uploaded any of my pictures onto it yet.

[sk66]

2x internal 1TB raid mirror in my MacbookPro and 1TB external backup....

I still don't do a good job with the "off site" backup part.

[kirbinster]

Well let's see, I have a RAID 10 array in my computer which is for a combination of speed and redundancy (some call it RAID 0+1). It is comprised of four 2TB drives. In addition to that I have a 2TB external eSATA drive that all my RAW photos and Lightroom catalogs gets backed up to. All my good shots that are processed I also save as full size jpeg files and upload the full files to Flickr as off-site backup.

[sk66]

Originally Posted by kirbinster

Well let's see, I have a RAID 10 array in my computer which is for a combination of speed and redundancy (some call it RAID 0+1). It is comprised of four 2TB drives. In addition to that I have a 2TB external eSATA drive that all my RAW photos and Lightroom catalogs gets backed up to. All my good shots that are processed I also save as full size jpeg files and upload the full files to Flickr as off-site backup.

showoff!....

[kirbinster]

Originally Posted by sk66

showoff!....

You just say that cause those MAC boxes don't let you have 6 drives in the system

[jdepould]

I have a bunch of Western Digital and LaCie Rugged FireWire drives, like 6 or 7 TB total. Everything is duplicated with ChronoSync.

I've heard good things about Backblaze for online backup, but haven't used them myself. I'd like to get network-attached storage for off-site backup, but haven't done it yet.