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A: With the variety of options available, I think the fastest way is to back up to an external hard drive. I recommend two identical drives.

By Kim Herrera

Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop

I get calls from a lot of photographers who own external hard drives that just died on them. They always want to know if they have any options for saving the lost data. Sadly, I have to tell them that they can try to deal with third-party companies that charge ridiculous "ransom" fees (up to a dollar a MB)! 

Depending on whether or not the reason for the hard drive failure was something in the actual housing, like a fan or a bad connector port, you can order the external housing unit relatively cheap online and then transfer the internal hard disk into the new housing. That works… sometimes. However, if the drive is seriously overheated, the data may have been destroyed.

So are DVDs or CDs safer? Yes, I think so, but they’re not always practical. Let's face it, with so many versions of a photo shoot to backup these days – Camera RAW, previews, jpegs, tiffs, processed and unprocessed, 32 bit or 8 bit – most jobs fit on more than one DVD, not to mention the time you have to dedicate to burning them in the first place.

It's important to note that all media can go bad, even discs. With the price of external drives dropping every day, cost is not really a factor in deciding to use disc or drive for archiving.

The amount of time you promise to keep files available for your client is very important. I used to promise archival for five years. I ran into trouble as the technology for reading and writing CDs and DVDs evolved quicker than my Mac built-in Pioneer drives could handle. Older discs would crash my newer system.

Now I promise the client one year of file access. I still keep my discs in a disc storage book oldest to newest for faster retrieval. I also leave the job live on an external drive until I need the space. I figure if I've got the space available, why not?

If you're going to go the external hard drive route, then you should keep two mirrored copies at all times. I can't say which is the best brand of disc or drive to purchase because I have seen all of them go bad here and there, at least once. Discs go bad at a much smaller rate. For instance, if I burn a hundred discs a year, maybe one will go bad, even though it was verified as good. For more specific information about external hard drives and recommendations, click here to check out Tom Haunenstein’s article about that subject.

One more thing to consider is, will you ever need those RAW files again? I must confess I back them all up even though in the last three years maybe one client has ever needed one RAW file at the most. I just can't get out of my habit of backing everything up. It helps me sleep at night. So call me old-fashioned, but I haven't had to live with the heartache of losing a file in years. I burn discs on my second computer every couple of weeks while I do other tasking on my first.

A 2008 Peer2Peer survey of 1,400 respondents by imaginginfo.com showed equal percentages of hard drive backups to DVD backups. Overall, 98 percent of all respondents do back up their work. Ultimately, the media you choose is based on the time you have.

Kim Herrera, Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop, is the color management expert for Logan Photography at Studio Exchange, Santa Ana, Calif., and runs KCH Digital, a digital artistry, education, and consultancy firm.