Backing up is hard to do

I have a problem. I take pictures. Lots of them. Gigabytes of pictures. Many of them I actually quite like and I'd like to keep them around. But I shoot digitally and the one constant fact for digital storage is that it fails. All the time. Hard drives are just little time bombs spinning away, ready to destroy your data. So, at the first level, I make two copies of the images when I load them on to my computer. Straight from the memory cards they get copied once to a directory on my local PC and once into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. The local hard drive on the PC is a fast RAID 5 set-up, to give speed and some redundancy. Those are the copies I work on. The larger (1 Tb) NAS box is at the end of a 1Gb ethernet connection, which still somehow ends up too slow to work on. But it is fine for secondary online storage. When I work on an image, I store the final Photoshop version, with all the associated layers. This lets me go back and edit an image or easily recreate a print at different sizes. I've been caught out before by not keeping these files, thinking I could just recreate an image from the original RAW file. Then someone wanted 40 images with a short deadline and I had to turn down the opportunity - so now I keep the PSD files. Those can be 250Mb each. They get sync'ed to the NAS box as well, using Unison. I also occasionally go through and cull the terrible images. I don't believe in keeping everything from every shoot - there is plenty of bad stuff to cut out. But that takes time and if you are in a hurry, you have the opportunity to delete an important image. So the lazy approach is to not clean out things often enough.

So with all that, I must feel pretty secure, right ? Well - not really. Now I have a couple of copies of my images, so that's good. Except the drive space on the local PC is a bit tight, so I occasionally have to delete images from there. So I'm left with one copy on the NAS box. Now it is RAID too, so I have some protection if a drive fails in there, but I still only have one copy in the online storage. A virus on my machine could go on a rampage across the network corrupting files. Something less malicious but more common is that I could do something stupid and delete the files. Lighting could strike the power cable (Texas has a whole lot of thunderstorms) and fry my computer and the NAS box. Sure I have surge protection and UPS on all the power supplies. But not the network cables, so there is still a vector. I don't think I really trust the $30 surge protection from Fry's anyway.

So I make backups onto DVD. Well, occasionally I do. Problem is I can easily produce enough data to fill 2 DVDs each time I take my camera out. Sitting there, backing up files to DVD is a fairly long & boring chore so it doesn't get done as often as it should. Then those DVDs can suffer from the usual bitrot of all digital media. So to be on the safe side, you really need to burn 2 copies of each DVD. Suddenly that is 4 DVDs any time I pick up the camera and several hours of popping back to the PC to swap over disks. Then the pile of disks starts to well, pile up.

Even at that point, now that I've got my RAID backup & NAS and stack of (mostly fictional) DVDs. I'm actually thinking of buying another NAS box and only occasionally powering it up and connecting it - doing a weekly or monthly backup of the online NAS box to that as a stop-gap solution. But then I worry about those hard drive platters that are sitting non-spinning and worry if they'll start up each time or what that sort of operation does to the Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of the hard drives.

What happens if the house catches fire ? Or we have another typical Texan biblical flood ? Or if we get burgled ? So maybe those fictional DVDs need to be stored out of the house - but I don't know where that would be. We have a small safety deposit box in the bank, but it isn't going to fit all those DVDs. A larger disk format would be fantastic. Blu-ray or HD-DVD promise 25Gb or 50Gb writable disks. That's just about perfect for my needs right now. I just wish it was a bit more affordable and more importantly standardised. But then - do I need to do duplicate copies of the blu-ray DVDs ? Is there any faith that they won't suffer the same fate as DVDs or CDs now ? A few years lifetime in careful storage before the errors start to appear ?

I suppose I could shoot less, but why would I want my photographic process to be dictated by the availability of secure storage ? I've yet to see a solution that would give any confidence that the images were secure from accidental deletion when online or store enough for easy off-line maintenance. Please, please, please - if you have a good solution - let me know!