Finding a safe place for my digital fotos

I always thought that hard disk crashes were happening to people who were rough on their hardware. I never experienced a hard disk crash since I started to work with PC's. Until half a year ago, that is. Since then I had 2 HD's crash on me.

The first one was the most serious. Because I'm terrible at backing up my systems, I lost all my pictures between July 06 and October 06. I don't care so much about email and other data.

That still didn't teach me a lesson. I just had my external Western Digital 500GB MyBook crash. Fortunately after a night of letting it sleep in the fridge I could recover the file using FileScavenger.

So now I'm going to deal with this seriously! I don't want to loose my families' digital memories.

I'm tackling this issue like this:

1. Rebuilding my home desktop machine (Dell Dimension 8300) with Vista

2. Figuring out a strategy to keep all my families' pictures in one folder (possibly with subfolders)

3. Uploading everything to my Flickr Pro account using 'some' tool

4. Installing a Windows Home Server for back ups

I'm hoping that redundany at home and over the web will create a truely safe home for our digital memories.

I'm about ready to blog about the first step...