Vintage bicycle photos storage and preservation are imho, a very-much on-topic subject for this forum. Over the past 3 months I've been reading reviews and investigating strategies to back up 4 IBM thinkpads with several gigabytes of personal data (mostly photos) each.
Here is what I'm doing :
1. ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE SOFTWARE, NET COST $11.50 INCLUDING SHIPPING, AFTER $20 REBATE. This is one of the top-3 software backup packages, at an EXTREMELY compelling price (almost all packages retail for $40-$50 normally.) HURRY !!
http://www.newegg.com/
The Sale/Rebate ends today! Print the PDF rebate file when you buy!
2. Western Digital 320 Gb Drive (either SATA or PATA for older machines like mine), about $90, SATA is even cheaper. I got mine on amazon but there are many sources for 250Gb-320Gb hard drives.
3. Laptop Caddy (Ebay) or USB enclosure for the hard drive, about $25. Here's an example of the seller I used with decent prices :
When you think about it, the $90 disk drive with 320Mb is extraordinarily cheap, about $1 per DVD (3.5 GB) worth of data. And, the disk is much faster and MUCH MUCH easier to use and more reliable than a DVD burner. The best backup system is one that's so easy to use, you end up using it every day.
If you buy a drive caddy or USB enclosure, for PATA (parallel, pre-2006) or SATA (serial, newer, post-2007) disk drives, Acronis True Image can build a bootable mirror of your disk drive on the backup drive. If your main drive fails, just swap the drives. Alternately, you can just the use the drive as a cartridge and copy files or folders onto the disk drive every week, or automatically, according to a schedule established with Acronis True Image.
Then if the main drive fails, you reinstall your OS and major software and then copy over your files. (you DO have DVDs and keys for your OS and programs like MS-Office, don't you ??)
I hope this helps to prevent future storage loss in the CR community.
- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA, USA