What future digital?

If you have the patience, then doing many back-ups is a fool proof way of making sure those special images are saved.

I had an external drive fail a couple of years ago. It would not switch on & I feared the worst as it had the lion's share of my photographs in it. However, whilst the hard drive would not work, the disc inside still had all the data. My local pc shop (where they build computers to order) soon transferred all the pictures etc into a new external hard drive and all was well. Now I have two external drives plus quite a few RAW files and complete record of places & faces I'll probably never see again. I have no idea what the life span of a DVD or CD might be, but the way all things soon become obsolete, then we'll all be backing our images & files to some new "must have" system before our current way of working ceases to function. I doubt if many now use floppy discs for example and after all, they could not now really cope with the huge size of picture files.  

I have two PC's and I keep a copy of my RAW files on the PC I dont use for processing my images. All on photographic work is done on my other PC and I back up my files onto an external harddrive. My files are sorted as follows: Original RAW, work in progress, JPG for POE etc,finished images suitably sized for printing All files are further sorted into year and subject. I just wish I could apply this dedication to preservation to myself. Any ideas welcome!

I use memory sticks for transporting selected files, can't remember when I last saved to CD but I know many people save images of special events to give to friends.

I thought I would revive this thread to see how many people now use 'Cloud' storage, where data is stored on multiple web servers at various locations. This seems to be the way things are going, where local storage will give way to web-based storage.

Advantages are numerous.  Access is possible from anywhere, multiple servers give data security, and encryption and password protection of your data gives privacy.

There might be problems in the event of some global catastrophe, but memory sticks and DVDs are unlikely to survive this either. How soon before there is a back-up server on the moon? 

I use "Cloud" storage plus extrnal hard drives. One feature of Cloud storage is, that when away I can access my images via my wife's iPad as Edward alludes to. 

As for the future, well who knows. Technology makes every purchase almost immediatly obsolate and storage is probably no exception.