I recently spent $1000 to recover my personal photos. I had them backed up on two separate external hard drives, both drives failed. 1999 (scans) to late 2009. I sent three disks in to be recovered. Two were not possible, all data lost, but thankfully one was (the backup). At a cost. I am still trying to work out what I have lost from the other drives, but it will be minimal due to another backup.

What I have experienced and seen more and more recently is that external hard drives break easily, they need to be treated like eggs. And if they don’t break, they can be stolen along with the your computer as friends sadly have recently experienced.

Workout your backup procedure now. It is devastating to lose photos of your family, holidays, treasured memories.
Here is mine, please feel free to share what works for you on my facebook discussion page.

a) backup on two external hard drives
b) upload chosen and processed jpgs to zenfolio (an annual fee, if you do sign up, use code K72-GND-SNR to get 10% off)
c) copy jpgs from zenfolio to smugmug(also an annual fee, use code Emo0efDu4p702 to get US$5 off)
d) documents, recent pictures, videos, music etc are all located in my dropbox (up to 2gb is free). Anything and everything (except my huge image collection) is located there.
e) Timemachine (macs) so if my computer dies or is stolen, can start her up the way she was.

Whew. I think I’m now covered

Dropbox, smugmug, zenfolio, all these online sites also allow you to share pics, videos etc with friends and family. Zenfolio also allows you to print your images directly using the consumer lab photobox (not sure on the quality, will test and let you know).