Here's What I Do
Larry,
Your experience with CDs is the reason I don't use them to archive pictures. I even bought the "good" ones (Mitsui gold) but I just can't chance it. I'm also with you as far as reinstalling software goes. I just don't want to do it, and in many cases it would be at best difficult to locate unlock keys. I'll tell you what I'm doing now for backups as well as what I will be doing shortly.
First of all, I've got a lot of pictures, particularly size wise. I've been playing around with RAW. One of my cameras lets me shoot RAW plus JPEG, so I can really eat up the MB in a hurry. I'm also bad about not deleting pictures. Bottom line is that, as best I recall, I've got about 45GB of pictures on my hard disk at home. My current backup strategy fails if there is a fire. I've basically got my pictures on three drives, my C:\ drive, a second internal drive, and an external drive. I use Acronis True Image (v8?) to automatically do full and incremental backups onto an external drive. Right now I'm doing 2 full and 5 incrementals weekly. This will shortly change (for reasons below) to one full and six incremental. This (knock on wood) will protect me from catastrophic disk failure. I've already used it when something went wonky with my C:\ drive several months ago, so I know that restore works fine. I also use XCOPY and the Windows Task Manager to daily automatically copy my pictures to a second internal drive. I just recently started using the /a switch with XCOPY (along with the switches already used), so only those files and folders that have been changed (or are new) are copied. After that copy is done, those same files are copied from the second internal drive to my external drive. All of the picture copying occurs mid-morning while the backups happen during the night. Needless to say, I run everything 24x7 at home.
Since I'm still vulnerable to fire, I recently purchased a Fire King Media Vault. It is big enough to hold an external drive (if the external case isn't huge). The max internal temperature on the media safes is 125 degrees. I'm waiting for this to be delivered. When it is, I'll start rotating external drives. I've got a second one already. At that point I'll change the Acronis True Image to do a full backup and six incrementals. After the 6th incremental, I'll put that drive in the media vault and use the second drive for a week.
I've also decided that my following step will be to acquire a 3rd external drive. I'll then work out some rotation such that I've got one drive offsite (daughter, mother, or sister-in-law's house), one drive in the media vault, and the 3rd drive in use. My worst case scenario there would be to lose two weeks worth of pictures in the event of a something bad enough to also wipe out my media vault.
As long as we're talking about external drives, let me throw in my (admittedly limited) experiences there. I currently own three external drives (with the 3rd one at college with my son). In each case I bought the external cases and hard drives separately. The first case I bought had a fan, USB2, and firewire. Firewire in actual usage is supposed to be faster than USB2 (despite the specs to the contrary). I never could get the firewire to work right. Since speed wasn't a big issue on the backups, I decided to just go with USB2. No problems. Subsequent external cases have been strictly USB2. I've found that fans on cases can be noisy and cause annoying vibrations. The latest external case I purchased (just last month) is aluminum and fanless. So far so good with it. The last three drives I've purchased have been Seagate because of the 5 year warranties, but one of my external drives (as well as more that one internal drive) is Western Digital.
Mike
