What is the best way to store digital photography for a professional photographer? When an external hard drive doesn't give you the most assurance, and burning 4-10 CD's for each folder doesn't sound too good, what is the best way? Please include any how-to links to any techniques. Thanks! I am storing on a Terabyte external hard drive, but I'm wondering if Zipping the files and burning them would be a good option also... ?

All Answers To Questions

I store mine on a terabyte hard drive which is then backed up using carbonite (www.carbonite.com).

i use two external hard drives, you could use dvds,

I use mirrored external hard drives - one of them is always kept elsewhere.

Duplicated external hard drives. How can external drives not give you "the most assurance"?

I have had extremely bad luck with both internal and external hard drives in the past few years, but I have not yet lost a single one of my photos. I store mine in four places: my computer's internal hard drive, an external hard drive, and two sets of DVD's (one is stored in my office, the other at my parents' house should anything happen to all of my copies). Burning files to discs is a better option than relying only on hard drives because the data is less likely to become corrupted. Discs will degrade over time, but if stored properly they can keep your photos safe for years. If the amount of storage space on a single disc is a concern, you could pick up a Blu-Ray recorder for around $100. There are Blu-Ray discs available that will let you burn up to 50GB on a single disc.

you could cloud it online, or use compact usb drives - they don't really ever break and you can label them easy according to shoot

As an avid photographer I've come across this issue as well. As you use an external drive to backup to I'm assuming you don't use a computer like a Mac Pro with space for internal drives, which would really be optimal. For normal working storage I stripe three 2TB drives and partition off the fastest section for maximum throughput. This gives me enough space to work with my files. As for backups, depending on the amount of data you have, you might have to opt for striping a couple drives, but if you can I'd mirror your backups. Redundant backups keep you covered for any likely hardware failure. I'd also recommend backing up to drives you swap in one or two week rotations, e.g. first week you update with your newest photos, swap out to second drive the next week after leaving the first drive and update that, etc.. I use a simple single drive enclosure for this. As for online storage, what I currently do is export my keepers which I flag in Lightroom to DNG and back those specific files up. My photoshop files are always backed up online, as are my Lightroom catalogs, so I don't lose any processing work either. In the event of total local (and likely city wide) data loss that could be caused by say a tsunami or earthquake that wipes all your backups (including the drives you have in rotation) you still have all your significant data backed up onto servers around the world. Peace of mind. Unless you make a mistake, of course, which is most likely. With such systems, being diligent of handling data and keeping your cool in the event of drive failure is imperative.