Who do you trust to keep your images safe?

[BecdS]

In the last 6 months, I've "lost" two external harddrives - a Western Digital and a Seagate. I have no clue whether they became corrupt due to user error, of if I was just unlucky and struck two dud drives. Fortunately my photos are saved on a different drive (which is also the oldest of the three). I know it's not clever to trust my precious(sssss) to just one place, but I'm a little bit "twice bitten, thrice shy" about where to put my money for new ones.

What brand of drive do you save your files to? Have you had especially good (or bad) experiences with a particular brand or model?

[crf529]

When I was looking 'round for a couple of HDDs, most of the threads and articles I read suggested the Samsung drives are the current 'reliable' bet. So I wound up with 2x 1Tb Verbatim USB3 HDDs (which use Samsung drives) that came up for $40 a pop.

That said I also have a little 300Gb WD 2.5" portable drive that's for a further backup/photo transport, and that has been going strong for nearly 3 years.

I think though regardless of what anyone says or recommends, 'reliable' when talking about HDDs still comes down to luck and less the brand (provided it's one of the big companies).

[ricktas]

I have three backups of every photo. All on external hard-drives, one of which lives at a friend's place (protection from fire and burglary). All HDD are subject to failure, they are not a perfect storage medium. It doesn't matter what brand you buy, they can and do fail. So it really is a matter of ensuring you have enough backup copies to protect you, rather than thinking one brand is better or worse than any other.

[strictfunctor]

I buy Segates, Western Digitals, and Samsungs, whichever is cheaper. Have had very few fails, and I can't say which brands they were. They are so cheap, they can be considered disposable media. The important thing is to ensure you always have redundancy. A RAID enclosure makes that automatic. I use a Drobo enclosure to make it really easy.

[Xenedis]

The short answer is "myself".

I have four copies of my data (images as well as everything else):

1. laptop hard disk (Seagate);
2. on-site backup disk #1 (Hitachi, from memory);
3. on-site backup disk #2 (Hitachi, from memory);
4. off-site backup disk (Western Digital).

As a general rule based on experience, I tend to trust Seagate disks, but my laptop's original disk (Seagate) failed, and no disk is immune to failure. Disks are mechanical and will eventually fail.

My advice mirrors Rick's, in that you should keep multiple copies of your data, as well as keep at least one copy off site.

I have close to 33,000 images dating back as far 1999 and I'm not keen to lose anything, so I tend to be fairly careful with my data and adopt an approach that gives me disk redundancy as well as geographical redundancy.

[peterking]

NO ONE!!!!

I currently have all my images on my computers hard drive. An external off site Seagate and a HP Simple Save.
My images are more important than I trust any hard drive.
Having said that I put more faith in Seagate drives than any others.