Having just discovered that several of my older cd-r disks filled with photos have become unreadable in five short years, I’m making a switch to a different brand of recordable DVD disks. Made by Delkin, these disks have a gold core and are guaranteed to last 300 years. While I’m not gullible enough to buy into that claim, I have done a bit of research and found that these particular disks are living up to their claims…so far.
Backing up to some sort of optical media has become a must-do routine for anyone shooting digital images. The ones and zeroes that make up our photos are fragile things that need to be kept on some sort of reliable storage medium. I personally back up all my shoots first to my external hard drive (that means I’ve got a copy on my internal drive too), then to optical when I have enough images to fill a 4.7 GB DVD.
The finished DVD will then go to an off-site storage facility. I use a large deposit box at the bank. The reasoning is that what’s the point of backing up if you’re gonna store it beside the computer? Fires happen and I’ve read too many sob stories about folks who didn’t store their copies in another location.
In the very near future I’m also planning to subscribe to either Carbonite or Mozy for a fourth link in my backup chain, but more on that later. For now, I’m happy to add gold as a link in the chain.
THE THINGS I DO... 