External Hard Drive Safe for Original Images

1. My main drive is only 100G so I decided to move all my original images to one of my external Lacie drives and only keep my software on the hardware. (including Lightroom and PSE) I of course backup to a second external drive and DVD. (My main drive is 3 years old now whereas the external drives are new)

I've been told this is not a good idea as an external drive is more likely to crash than a harddrive, so now I'm a little worried about my images - is this true?

Would adding a second harddrive in my computer for images be a better answer or do I hear a new computer coming? I thought it really wouldn't matter and reasoned that the newest drive might just be the less risky - any drive can fail !

2. I've been getting a "stack overflow" error message while I'm on here lately.

Is this a sign of computer trouble, or a web / Windows issue?

Edit: an after-thought - I just installed Norton 360, could this be responsible for a stacking error?

Thanks!

An external hard drive is only liable to break more than an internal one simply because it gets moved around more (although there are ehd's that have casings that are built to be more "rugged").

ehd's are pretty cheap these days, so why not duplicate two of them?

I'm not happy unless all my images are on at least two separate hard drives, and even then, I backup all my RAW files, and LR DB to my web host, so even if my house and office burnt down, I'd still be able to reproduce them.

Thanks for the reassurance Pete and Goatee. My external drives don't move from alongside my computer and contain two full copies of my images. If the external drives themselves present no greater risk to failure than my harddrive, then I'm good to go!

Offsite storage is something I should look at soon though.

Thanks again!

The one thing to think about, is many external hard drives don't have fans to cool them. My advice would be to keep them turned off and disconnect the cables when not using them. 1) You save electricity (and the world ). 2) Should you get a bad spike in the electricity the drives won't get fried - it's worth disconnecting the USB / firewire cable as well, as if the machine has a hissy fit, it's possible it could send a high voltage down the USB cable, which could fry the hard drive.

goatee wrote in post #3414167
...I backup all my RAW files, and LR DB to my web host, so even if my house and office burnt down, I'd still be able to reproduce them.

how is that achieved? does this webhost service cost a 'pretty penny'? how much storage etc?

I have 2 External HDDs also and 1 internal HDD to store all images. They are all COPIES of each other, and thus should contain the same data.

One E-HDD permanently attached to my PC which contains all photos; all photos are also on my PC Internal HDD.
My other E-HDD is a wardrobe, that I make full duplicates to every month or so: so this HDD is slightly behind the others..

But still, if my house burns down, i loose everything (even the wardrobe, and my super garments!)

I was thinking about taking the 2nd External HDD that is currently in a wardrobe to my Parents house, or my office so it is slightly more protected from disasters

I have never had an External HDD crash (touch wood), but I never move mine around. I have never had an Internal HDD crash either, but I know some people that have.
Luckily there are some 3rd party apps. that can do a good job at recovery if you loose anything, but as you can see, I am relying heavily on redundancy with multiple HDDs

I use dreamhost.com (if you want to sign up, contact me, for a 50% discount on your first year ) though you should also check out Amazon S3 storage - it's not that expensive.

Alternatively, having an external hard drive off site is also a great way of doing it - keep one at your house, then the next time you go to your parents, swap them, and sync that drive with your computer.

I use Synback from 2 bright Sparks - it's great software (and they do a free version).

Here's what not to do.....

Keep all your images on your laptop and back them up to an external, decide that your internal harddrive is full and delete the images as they're already on your external, delay your decision to purchase a backup external HD for a few months. In those few months your external HD will crash and you will lose most of the shots you've taken in the last 18 months.

Learnt that the hard way last month.

Fortunately most of the best ones are at least hosted on line (albeit at a reduced quality), and friends have copies of a lot of the travel shots, but still.

If you're already backing up your images on 2 external HDs as well as DVD then there's no issue at all, unless they're all at the same place and it burns down, or someone breaks in and steals stuff. Good to go offsite.

Really sorry to hear of that Billo - that's really harsh, but I can also understand how that could happen. You delete them from one place for a day or two and then months later haven't backed them up again.

I dump all captures from the CF card to an external hard drive, "I never take the large drive off my desktop. Then I copy onto 2 separate DVD's and the JPEG files onto a CD. I catalog them so I know what I gave the client and then I keep files for 1-2 years on my desk file. It's unwise to depend on one method of keeping records. You may lose something or a hard drive may crash. But I like the external drives now. They are reliable. I've never lost anything, at least, not yet.

And prices for external drives are so cheap, it's easy to factor their cost in to client work - right now you can get a 500GB Western Digital Mybook for under £100 ($200) - even a wedding will only generate 8-10GB of RAW files. Say the whole wedding takes up 100GB, split between 5 weddings, that means adding $40 per wedding.

I take around 8-12 GB per wedding. So the 250 MyBook is what I bought first. Now I am considering the 500 GB. I saw the 1 TB drive at Costco the other day and was so tempted. But that's really leaving all your eggs in one basket.

Ideally, you will want 3 copies, 1 on your PC, 1 on an external, and 1 on an external that you store at the bank in a safe deposit box. Once a month, you pick up the external from the bank, copy everything that has changed on those drives and then take the external back to the bank.

this gives you an onsite backup you can use right away if the internal drive dies, and an offsite backup in case of fire/flood/hurricane, other natural disasters.
Hopefully the bank doesn't succumb to that same natural disaster.

My Pictures folder is automatically backed up to an external drive on a daily basis as well as this all my full size JPGs are uploaded to SmugMug.