Okay, that thread about the number of photos you shot made really think about buying a DVD burner. That's not a problem. The problem is, what brand of media you guys are using? I wouldn't want to backup the photos and after a month discover the DVD is unreadable. With CDs, I usually use Verbatim and have good experience with the discs. What's your preffered brand for DVDs?

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I don't want to rely upon DVD's. I use 2 seperate computers and store them on both (one of which is a server). The chance of both computer/HD's failing is IMHO far less than the chance of your DVD/CD becoming unreadable.

Attached Link: Film (still) kicks ass...

3DGuy's right. The best way (at this time) to future-proof storage media is to keep it available on a network, and keep moving it forward from server to server as you upgrade servers. (remember: 15 years ago we were using TCP/IP over BNC "thin" ethernet) DVDs in 15 years are going to be like - hm - 15 years ago we were using 1.4megabyte 3 1/4" floppies. Seen any drives for reading those lately? ;) I store on 2 servers geographically separated and I periodically back one of the servers up to a removable 1 tb disk that I keep at my parent's house 500 miles away. mjr.

This has been a huge concern of mine as of late; with all the photo's I've been taken this past year. I would be devasted to lose them. I have an external drive I will back them all up on --- I do have several at Webshots and now here. Do you think that is enough? Oh, sorry, this isn't my thread. lol I'll be watching this one close.

Attached Link: Film still kicks ass

As I point out in the referenced link above(my earlier post) future proofing is not just a matter of media and storage, it's also a matter of making the data worthwhile years from now. That's the big DIRTY SECRET of digital photography. :( Remember when you thought 640x480 32-bit color was COOL?? In 15 years (the same amount of time)what will you think of your 6 megapixel image? You'll think it's crap, of course. Because your kid's camera in their cellphone will be shooting 64 megapixel 128-bit color. Heck, I remember when I used to think ASCII ART porn was "neat" 25 years ago. In 25 years, will the stuff we're doing now just be "quaint" and "retro"? mjr.

But then just yesterday, it was quite impressive to see photo's still in their paper books - black and whites - dated in the early 40's. I loved looking at those, and was surprised to see them in the great condition they were in. They are priceless. So, maybe 'quaint' and 'retro' isn't all bad? But yeah, I hear what you're saying. I can't imagine where technology will be 10 years from now. It'll be interesting to see. :)

Look at the rate of technological change that existed in film photography. Now compare it with digital photography. Basically, the same chumps who brought us PCs that can't stay up and running for more than 4 years because their software gets bloated, and the operating system has gone from 1 million lines of code to 50+million in 10 years - those are the guys who are gonna be selling us cameras. I used to work the high tech industry and was on the investment/venture capital side a couple of times. After you've heard some senior guy from a company like Intel say (seriously) "nobody really needs this feature but we're putting it into the system because it'll stimulate more development of gigabit-data hungry applications, which will trigger our customers to need a system/motherboard upgrade in 4 years" -- you get cynical fast. If we let computing's ingrained "more bigger faster!" mindset take over photography we'll be buying a new digital camera every 3 years. OOps... I just upgraded my S2 to an S3 earlier this year... mjr.

Hmm well technology may move on but the images are still precious I think branded DVD's are a very good and cheap option I back up on my HD not very reliable!! I have found and thankgod often back up on a DVD and only use them to restore

When I get back home, I IMMEDIATELY burn them on CD's....granted, they may not be the best media, I will always have a backup incase my external hard drive fails...so by having them both on CD's and my computer, I think that they should be fairly safe...

With computers, storage of digital datas is nowadays cheap, fast and easy. So I would say that the best storage is... many storage ! Hard-drive storage + network storage + CD or DVD storage (several copies, why not ?) ... It's very unlikely that all these support would be destructed at the same time (except in case of atomic bombing, but...) For DVDs I use TDK, or Sony, or Verbatim. It depends of the price. Anyway they all come from the same factories somewhere in Asia... Hope I helped a "byte" Sam