Backing Up Your Photos The Best way .

thats the way to go i just looked at a 5 bay on sale for 600.00 at adorama . not ethernet . that way I don't have all usb ports taken im just useing one .

Was it the "fs" model? Stands for file sharing. It has ethernet.

The "s" model doesn't.

S 5 bay eSATA , Firewire 800, usb3.0 Storage Array Encloser

Macs have firewire, not sure many PC's do. eSATA is very fast.

i back up to an external hard drive and burn them to dvd

Thank you ML that was a big help . now I understand more as to what im getting in to .

Glad to help John.

Thank you Butterfly , I have tought of that But DvD's all over . as all so it would not take much heat to warp them , then your out . but like you say DVD's and ex HD you stell have 2 copys so . Good Info yall . I got what I wanted and that was to better understand how every one was doing it and if I was thinking right or not . Thank you all very much it was a Big help .

Time Machine. Simplest, reliablest, bestest. But not much help if you're not on OS X.

The most important things about backing up, and I've had to deal with a lot of this:

1. Automate it. If your backup policy requires you to press a button it will always be the wrong time, you'll always be too busy and it will never get done.

2. Verify it. If it starts not working, it'll continue not working and you won't find out about it until you need to restore something. You should maintain a log of backup output and errors. Having the backup utility mail the log to you is a good way of keeping on top of it. Mail errors separately to the main log with !!ERROR!! in the subject line; you can get complacent about daily log emails.

3. Version it, maintain new archives for each day, week and month. If you back up every day to the same archive and you've inadvertently changed The Best Photo You Ever Made, that's the version that'll get archived. Obviously, it's the wrong one. A good version policy is one version for each day of the week, numbered 1-7. At the end of each week, duplicate version 7 to a weekly backup, maintain one weekly for each day of the month numbered 1-4. At the end of each month, duplicate version 4 to a monthly backup. Keep one monthly backup for each month of the year numbered 1-12. That should just about do you.

4. mirror your backup to a second drive and keep that somewhere other than the primary backup. You could get away with doing that once a week.

On windows, I used to use a scheduled Synctoy with a perl script for doing the versioning.

In general, online backing up is no safer than locally backing up but it does give one way of duplicating your backup.

Hope that helps.