Now that I've got my 550d I'm eating up hard drive space like mad. RAW pics at 18mp are huge! My current storage setup is as follows:

• On laptop hd
• On external hd (1tb)
• On DVD

At some point I'm going to fill the external hd and not have an overlap of pics stored. Other than buying more and more external hds, any suggestions or ideas? I do need to go through the pics and delete the ones I've no use for but that'll take me ages.

I normally burn them to dvd and that's it, for really important images, I burn to dvd and archive to a nas with raid.

Personally I hate optical storage and wish it would die already. It's not anywhere near as bad as floppies became those last few years before CD burning was ubuquitous, but from my experience the disks have a pretty high failure rate and short lifespan. Something in the area of 15-20% of the disks I've burned over the years have become unusable or failed outright during the burn. On top of this, DVD stacks take up lots of space.

All that said, i don't really have any better suggestions. I think If i had the cash I'd just buy a new drive whenever I needed more space. By the time you fill half a dozen terabytes the 10+tb drives should be available for cheap.

For large (1TB +)collections like that, I've got no better suggestion that to just buy another hard drive, sorry. Less expensive per GB, easier to store, no need to label dozens of discs and also consider there's less time involved (I would recommend TeraCopy).

My most cherished stuff does get backed up to DVD+R as well, I put them in these sexy brown suede Slappa cases that would make any Vegas pimp green with envy. Keeps them out of light, away from dust, and the sleeves are very safe to use. I still have CD-Rs from 1999 that work (I've since backed them up)

Blog the first question I want to ask is does your drive have buffer underun protection and are you somehow verifying the burn after you complete.

Underruns haven't been a problem in years, and I still tend to burn DVDs at the slowest speed, just in case. The biggest problem with my burn failures seems to be shitty media. I buy whatever's cheapest, and a few times have ended up wasting one or more disks for every successful burn out of a given batch. As far as becoming unusable over time, I think I've mentioned before that I've had many discs that begin to deteriorate after a few years (UV damage, maybe, or corrosive ink?), eventually leaving some or all of the files unreadable. Then on the other hand, some of my oldest discs are still readable...so again it probably comes down to crappy media. But seeing how there doesn't seem to be any pattern in which brands are good and which are not, and considering the price of hard drive space is dropping much faster than DVD prices, my opinion of the media on the whole is still a poor one. But at least they're not Zip disks. My god those were horrible...something like $20 for 100mb disk that would pretty much be guaranteed to get the click of death within a year.

It's hard to always recommend a single brand. Taiyo Yudens seem to always get good grades but they're not always cheap and they have sub brands now. I think you can't go wrong with Verbatim, Sony because their manufacturers always seem to get good grades. I just avoid Memorex because I got burned several times by them, problem is they're everywhere and usually the best price.

These days I'm using the HP LightScribe DVD+R. I'm all about burning the label rather than paying more $$$ to print one. Pretty sure the manufacturer is CMC Mag which don't exactly get stellar reports, but... they work fine for me? They aren't usually reasonably priced until Staples has a sale on them where I usually buy a couple small spindles.

I still have my 10 year old Zip Disks mainly because they WERE SO EXPENSIVE. Can you believe they still sell them in some places??? You're exactly right, they were anything but reliable. I saw a couple kids lose important college work on them, one girl bawled her eyes out, poor thing lost her final project due to that clicking death deal. Someday I'll ceremoniously sacrifice them to the silicon gods by means of a hammer, although they'd probably strike me down for such a pissy offering.

So it seems more hard drives is the answer. I've a new question then: do I keep buying external hds? or build a desktop and fill it with huge hds and use it as some sort of media centre? I don't need the desktop to be super quick, as long as it will run video to my TV I'll be happy. It's been years since I've built a desktop, I've got a little shelf behind the tv so hopefully I can put the desktop there and keep it out of sight.

Yeah, I use Verbatim DVD+R 16X (Mitsubishi Chemical media ID: MCC-004-00) for archiving. The Sony DVD+R 16X (Sony-D21-00) are good also. I always burn at 8x. Burning at 16x seems just as good. It will depend on your burner (and maybe software used). I have burning software change booktype to DVD-ROM when DVDs burn.

- Samsung SH-S203B (firmware: SB04)
- ASUS DRW-24B1ST

That's not a bad solution, in my opinion. I have a dedicated web server set up which doesn't really serve anything except a few static pages. But I keep most of my movies and music on it to free up space on my workstation. It doesn't act as a media server in the typical sense, but I wrote a script that allows me to browse the server's media directories and open URLs in mplayer.