Digital Home Thoughts: Improve Your Photo Archiving Kung-Fu

"Digital photography has made it much easier to capture special moments in our lives. Folks who carry camera phones can always be ready to point and shoot everything from an impromptu family football game to a carefully staged portrait of folks in matching sweaters. There is no longer the need to worry about having only two shots left on a roll of film during the school play or coming back from the drive-through Fotomat or drugstore with fuzzy prints."

This article gives you the basics of what it takes to safely store and maintain your photo collection. Most of the tips are simple, and I doubt anyone reading this site would learn much from the article - but it might be exactly the sort of thing you should pass on to relatives and friends who are less tech-savvy. I'll take issue with one thing in this article: backing up to CDs or DVDs. Many of my home-burned CDs and DVDs are un-readable now; I only recommend backing up to other hard drives, or to the cloud. Optical media is too prone to decay and data loss - just don't do it. And given the prices of hard drives, there's really no smart reason to use optical discs.