Best Way To Store Photos?

[Rainy]

so guys whats the best way to store digital pic's?

My laptop has fried itself but we were lucky enough get alot of the photos off befor it died compleatly. The IT guys said to me to just burn them to a disk and keep them on that but i was told by someone else not to.

so i figured id ask the experts :D

[tlc]

I have some on disc but more recently I store all my photos to an external hard drive, they are much cheaper than they used to be and it's not time consuming to put them on. I have heard people say hard drives should be replaced every 4 years, not sure how true this is. The thing that bothers me is with the new technology, discs, hard drives, USB sticks etc, no one really knows the life span as they haven't been around long enough. Also what's next, I've got stuff on video, you can't even buy a video player now and I made sure I kept a video player to play the tapes if I want to. who knows what the next piece of technology will be. I'm curious to see what others do with theirs.

[kja]

+1 for hard drives. I have some really old stuff on disks but I've pretty much stopped doing that. If you do go the disk route, remember to still have another copy as disks can die and do need to be checked once in a while.

Everything I know I wouldn't want to lose is backed up in at least two separate drives and essential stuff is on three.

Every now and then I wander through old externals to eliminate stuff I don't need and to double check the drive is still working.

[persephone]

I have two external hard drives ... one gets used most days ..and one is just for storage, and lives in the safe, when not being added to. :)

[Rainy]

Thanks guys have added new external drive to the shopping list, should proberbly go through the old ones an see if i can dump some stuff off them that will give me a little room.

[kja]

Have fun - that project is super time consuming but often brings back lots of good memories (at least for me!) :D