I used to use DVDs, but to be honest they are too unreliable, the dyes used just seem to degrade, no matter how you store them.

So I wend down the external hard disk route too. I purchased 3 external hard disks, they all have the same information on them, two are at my house (The Master drive and the Working drive) and one is at work (in case of fire or burglary).

Every 3 months, I take the Master to work, and bring home the drive at work and sync it with the Working drive. All the photos that are not on all 3 drives stay on my PC hard disk until I have all 3 copies synced.

I also have servers and RAID, but decided against using them as no matter how secure a server is, it can get hacked, and RAID is useless in the event of a fire. Also I have seen every disk in a RAID array killed when a PSU dies.

External hard disks are really cheap these days, and there is no better alternative at this time in my opinion.

I really think you should keep a copy of your files at home and away from your house too, then you really are covered, unless there is some kind of catastrophic event like an earthquake or tidal wave etc, but lets be honest, you can only account for so much (although I have seen earthquake proof memory sticks before )

Bloomin' eck mate I heard MI5 were coming around to get some advice to protect the national secrets...

Seriously it is good thinking, and all the data we have nowadays does present a headache backing up. I guess you have to seperate into what is essential to keep and what isn't so important. Most people could probably get all their stuff on a 500gb disk or less but for some of us we need more. For me a work related reference database of scientific articles, features, my own training material etc. is essential to keep but in truth, the photos I have taken that are any good would probably fit onto an 8Gb card

Does anyone know if the speed DVD's are written at makes any difference? I wouldn't have thought so, but I have found occasionally faster written DVD's and CD's aren't as easily read as those written slower. Also, if you do archive via WORM media, it is worth ensuring you use the 'verification' process to check it has written.

As of yesterday I have all my photos on an external hard drive [which I already had] I have another with all the same info on at my mums [which I did yesterday]..............I have all the photos on cd [which I have been doing for years and no loss of quality yet].
And yesterday I backed up all the photos on dvd.

So at home I have an external hard drive and cds.

At my mums I have an external hard drive and dvds. [in their fire proof safe]

I would hate to lose all the photos of Luke from a baby.............nothing else would really matter, only Lukes photos.

Correct, I am just about to change the 3 500Gb drives for 3 1TB (or bigger) drives. I actually have 3 drives for photos, 3 for Video as I have been videoing my kids for the past 14 years too 2 drives for documents and backups of bits of software that I have purchased over the years (as I have the original DVDs/CDs anyway)

Definitely, I have found over the years that burning discs slower (both DVD and CD) increases both their reliability and longevity. The first CD burner I purchased was over £400 and discs were £7 each (CDs) so it was in my interest to get reliable results asap

The verification process does prove the data was correctly written, but I have had disks that I have burnt, then gone back to a couple of months later only to find that some files would not come off the disk, which is why I do not use any disk based media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray) or Magnetic media (DAT-VXA etc). While small, CDs are definitely the most reliable of the bunch though.

Alan.