How do you store large amounts of photos?

[billwendy]

HI everyone,

My mom just came home from a trip where she took like a thousand pictures. How should I help her store those (would never want to lose them). She tends to get pics put on CD's at CVS or something, but this might be too many for that - lol.

Any ideas?

 

[JoeDif]

I store all my photos on an external drive plus I'll burn 2 copies onto DVD's which will hold about 4X the data as a CD.

 

[shafke]

I have my pictures in the following locations...

1. PC they were intially copied to
2. External HD
3. 2nd external HD used as a general backup device (time machine on the Mac)
4. Online with smugmug

If you use DVDs buy a name brand. I have had bad experiences using store branded dvds. If you do backup to dvds verify that the files casn be read in more than one device.

If you get an external HD that comes with autimatic backup software, occasionally verify that the backups are running when scheduled and you can view the files. You don't want to be in a position where you need to restore from a backup only to find the disc is not readable or that the backups have not been running for months.