How much do you value your photographs? If you have spent several hundred dollars on a camera – spent thousands of dollars on a trip to Hawaii and then you lose your Hawaii photographs because your hard drive dies then your trip was in vain and memories lost. If you keep your photographs on just one hard drive then you are going to lose your photos. You may be lucky and upgrade to a new computer before that hard drive fails.

Google, who stores their data and a heck of a lot of hard drives, has found that hard drives will either fail in the first month or they will last about 3 years and then every year after that 10% of the remaining drives will fail.

I use to have about 6 external hard drives and used Superduper to back up my data – and then I had 2 of those harddrives over heat and die in one day. I new I needed a better backup solution.

What do I do now? I use a Drobo which has 4 hard drives that share the photographs. If any of the drives fail then the data is safe. In fact, I have had one of the drives fail and I replaced the failed drive with a new one and the Drobo picked up the data protection.

Drobos allow you to use whatever SATA drives you have laying around and you can upgrade them. You can also share the drive on the network and act as a Network Area Storage device.

True back up solutions also require an off-site solution in addition to the Drobo I store the photographs on SmugMug. If a meteor ever hits the house or a fire consumes the Drobo and my computer at least my photographs are kept off site.

So backup your photographs and your data!