Using External Hard Drives as Offline Archiving System

There are two types of digital photographers; those who’ve had a hard drive crash and those waiting to have one. I’m pretty sure that almost every photographer (even who is still waiting for a hard drive crash) thought about backing up photos at least to free up some space on computer’s hard drive. CDs or DVDs have small capacity and not reliable – any serious scratch could destroy many photos. RAID arrays are good for protecting your data and for fast access but they are expensive and are not an archiving solution – it quite difficult to expand them. As far as I know right now only Netgear has Network Attached Storage (NAS) with RAID that can be easily expanded. External hard drives are cheap and easy to use but this approach also has it’s own drawbacks – no redundancy, difficult to manage etc. However some people are developed a very good approach with using external hard drives as offline archiving storage.

I would like to share a few links to articles about archiving digital photos with external hard drives. The first one is written by Quang-Tuan Luong, great large format photographer. Have a look at the Digital post processing - Computers and storage section. Sorry, there is no direct link - you need to scroll a little bit.

The second and third articles are from "Image Mechanics" - digital capture company from Los Angeles. They developed very efficient and cheap offline archiving system based again on external hard drives.
Part 1: Image Mechanics Off-line Archiving System
Part 2: Image Mechanics Off-line Archiving System: The Next Generation

I hope this will help you to protect your photos.