Pictures....external hard drive?

[eirual]

I'm seriously considering getting a small external hard drive JUST for pictures. 

I never get around to printing them, we occasionally loose info on our computer and there are just so many files all over the place (hmmm....maybe I need to organize our computer(s)....)

But anyways, DS was making figures with shapes and wanting to take pictures of the completed project, and in some respects documenting these little things is fun and kind of validates the experience (anyone with a Reggio background will get that, I would think). I got to thinking how nice it would be to actually make our photos accessible and easy to use/reference. 

If we get a few small hard drives we could have one for movies and do away with the zillion DVDs, if we had one for photos we could actually use them and document various events, if I got one for work I could easily transport files and keep them accessible as well.

Pipe dream or brilliant?

[JesKace]

I use external hard drives to store photos/videos.  I simply can't keep the past 6 years of photos on my laptop and still have space for my itunes library.  Since I keep my photos in raw files they take up a ridiculous amount of space.  I use the external hard drives to store photos/videos that are more than a year old.  That way the recent photos I may want to look at again are on the computer but everything else is on a removeable  hard drive.  I have 2 hard drives with the same photos on them, one is a back-up in case one of the hard drives fails.  Since I don't have things backed up on cd/dvd's (some can degrade and lose information over time).  I keep one of the hard drives in a plastic bag inside our safe (because the safe is fire proof, but not completely water proof) in the basement.  I'm probably over cautious about media storage than most though.

After my last son was born my laptop died and I lost all of the pictures from his first month of life, including all the photos I took of him while we were in the hospital.. I was beyond crushed!  I did manage to get most of the photos back using special software that I had to pay for, thank god.  So after that I've been more cautious about how I store my photos and videos.  I also have a designated external hard drive that backs up my whole laptop a couple times a month.

[ChicoYaYa]

I do not think JesKace is being over cautious... I might have a year ago, but that is when my external hard drive crashed, and now I have lost not just years, but decades of family photos that I had spent endless hours scanning.

I think backing up either on the high quality DVDs or a secondary external is a smart idea.

[SubliminalDarkness]

Definitely have a back-up. We're actually kind of nuts. We don't have anything stored on our laptops. We have a Mac Mini Server. That holds all our music/movies/entertainment. When I listen to iTunes, through my computer, it actually pulls the music from the server. We also have a Time Capsule that stores all our videos and pictures. We have that set to auto back-up our laptops daily. And we have an additional external HD set up with our Time Capsule that backs up the data on the Time Capsule. 

Periodically we also update the most important pictures on a server in the cloud. And we burn pictures onto CDs and send them to my parents. This way, they see the pictures, and they have a back-up in case anything ever happened.