What is the easiest way to store large amounts of digital photos?
Jackie W asked:
I have at least 6 years worth and it is a pain using cds to store them on. Is it advisable to use an external hard drive for this? I need help>
I have at least 6 years worth and it is a pain using cds to store them on. Is it advisable to use an external hard drive for this? I need help>
The basic answer is there isnt a basic answer.
All medias fail over time. With that in mind you would want to backup to multiple formats/cds. External harddrives will fail eventually, sometimes without warning. CDs can fade and the data be made unuseable. They do make gold archival DVDs that are supposed to be good for 100 years. They are spendy and supposedly the best thing to archive to.
An external drive may be easier though as you can get a large capacity drive that can hold your entire collection and the transfer would be rather painless.
CDs only hold 700mb. DVDs will hold 4.7 gig. and a double layer DVD will hold twice as much. External drives can be huge in comparison.
You have options. You could move up to storage on DVDs which hold 4.7GB of data. If you are willing to make and investment in an external drive, look into either a RAID system. In addition, Western Digital has just released a product called a Mirror Drive; . As with any storage system, there are rates of failure and loss of data. With a RAID or Miror-type drive, there is a redundancy in the storage, so if one drive fails, there is a duplicate drive with the data.