I haven't quite gotten into the storing images in every manner possible syndrome 🙄... yet. But I feel kind of uneasy about relying on only 2 DVDs. One disc goes bad and then the duplicate gets a scratch and.... you may want to give serious consideration to an alternate storage method, even though my gawd that is an awful lot of data to store somewhere the other way to look at it is my gawd that is like losing a lifetime of work if things go wrong for you.
As to the topic, around 5500 images (actually kept) and 16GB of data using Raid 5 (4 drives) as well as copies on my workstation and a good portion of them being on SmugMug. With my server going to Raid 5 over 5 drives soon, the current drives are 60GB IDE drives and with drives being so cheap it will be 500GB SATA2 drives in the array. The sad thing was the 500GB drives were not much more expensive than the 80 or 160GB drives.
Oh memories of 500MB drives being a dollar a MB and now we suffer at 10c a GB 🙂
First of all your making it seem like discs are these super fragile things and they are not. As long as you handle the discs properly and store them with archival materials, your golden. If you do happen to scratch a disc you can repair it. Hell I have rented DVD's from blockbuster that looked like someone took a bandsaw to them they had so many scratches and 15 seconds in a resurfacing device and they play like they were brand new. Certainly long enough to make another fresh copy. You have to literally gouge a DVD into the data layer to make it unrecoverable and that is actually an extremely hard thing to do. Besides as soon as one of your discs goes bad, if it goes bad, you immediately make another back up copy with the good copy. You dont just continue on with just that one disc. You always have 2 discs, always. I have been using this system for well over 10 years and I have yet to have a single unrecoverable image, not one. In fact I haven't even come close to having a unrecoverable image. I have only had a few discs go bad and in each one of those cases the 2nd disc was fine. I immediately made another back up and was back up to 2 working discs.
Why would I want to think about another method? 10 years+ without a single lost picture. As I stated earlier, its cheaper, more reliable, makes your pictures on your computer vastly more manageable, is a better overall organizational system, and it has unlimited size potential. The only disadvantage is the time it takes to burn and again as I stated earlier I burn while I am already at my computer doing other things so it only takes around 30 seconds a disc. Thats cake in my book. The people that should be worrying about losing their work are the people that store their backups on hard drives, not the people storing them on optical discs. Hard drives fail all the time, high quality discs do not. I would not be able to sleep at night if I actually still stored my backups on hard drives. I have heard way too many horror stories and have had too many problems myself to ever trust a HD with anything.
I used to know a bunch of photographers that backed up on HD, including myself, and every single one of them have switched to a disc back up system. Trust me I sleep like a baby with the system I use.
Its important to note that optical discs now include the Blu Ray format. Blu Ray, which ill be switching to soon enough at least for my new burns, has a vastly superior protection layer. That isnt suggesting that the protection on DVD's isnt adequate because it absolutely is. Its just something to consider if your thinking about which method to go with. Again I wont trust a HD with anything important. They simply fail far too often and for far too many reasons. Just google hard drive failure rates and do some reading and you will find out that HD's are failing as much as 15 times more than the HD manufacturers are claiming. They pad the numbers by a lot of different methods. For instance if your HD fails and you send it back to the manufacturer and they test the HD and find out it wasn't the optical drive that failed but some other part, they dont count that as a failed drive. Again a lot of experts predict that the failure rates are 15 times higher than what the companies are telling you. Now Google optical discs failure rates and read up on the projected life spans of high quality optical discs like Taiyo Yuden's. Then ask yourself which method you trust more. I did and I chose optical discs. The fact that they are cheaper, easier to catalog, make your collection of photo's on your computer vastly more manageable, and have unlimited size potential is just a bonus for me. I choose them for their reliability as they are vastly superior to HD's in this regard. Again everything else is just a bonus.
