Whats wrong with backing up to my Hard Drive?
One of the most important differences between film and digital photography is the ease by which years of hard work can be wiped out within seconds. Most digital photographers simply store their entire photo collection on a hard drive and expect that the drive is a safe storage medium. Wrong! Hard drives should only be treated as temporary storage, not long-term archiving. Drives have delicate moving parts and they DO FAIL!. Personally, I have had two drives fail on me: one caused 100GB loss of video work, the other was a drive that was starting to fail — one that contained my entire photo collection! That said, some people have used hard drives for long term storage, but these are typically offline drives (i.e. drives that are generally disconnected & off). For the price and convenience factor, it may be a worthwhile option. Hard drive crashes are a definite possibility, and can occur for no immediately obvious reason. But, of course there are other more obvious failures, such as vibr
