Ron Dial wrote:
You should consider what happens when the external HD fails, as they all eventually do. Either buy two and keep one as a backup of a backup, or start copying the images onto DVD's. Disk format's change, even DVD formats change. Keeping all of your images where you can find them is a problem for every digital photographer. I now store copies on a second HD and send it off site. It ain't perfect, but better than nothing. Consider the worst and plan for the best.
Backup (and an off-site disaster recovery copy) is always good advice. Let me add a couple of choices. Consider Mdisks instead of DVDs. Almost all BluRay drives will read and write them, they come in sizes up to 250GB, and they are orders of magnitude more robust for long term storage compared to DVDs. Second, if you have decent internet speed, consider using a major cloud provider such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple... Best DR you can possibly buy, as in addition to enterprise quality redundant storage, professionally administered, they keep multiple copies of your data at seperate geographic locations (and you can restore/access you data from anywhere with an internet location).