With the popularity of digital music and digital photography and digital video, I just realized that I have terabytes of digital content stored on various portable hard drives, internal hard drives and DVD’s. In fact, as I digitize my music and video collection, it is becoming almost unmanageable. My quandary began this morning when I realized that I have no way of backing up that much data! As hard drives have gotten larger and larger, other types of storage haven’t kept up. How expensive is a 5 terabyte tape backup? Does it even exist? What kind of backup strategy should I adopt to make sure I don’t lose any of my digital content? My first thought was to back it up on DVD’s but at only 4.7 Gig per DVD or 9 Gig on double-layer disks, it would take me 250 regular DVD’s or 125 Double-layer DVD’s to back it all up. Most digital content is already compressed so I wouldn’t even save space by using compression.

I’d love to hear your suggestions. What are you doing to back-up all of your digital content?