I recently had my primary and only photo hard drive fail with years of photo images utterly lost. It would cost me over a thousand dollars to hand the drive over to a hard drive recovery company. A technician at the Apple store told me to expect hard drives to not last more than three years. It struck me that my old film camera images are never lost so long as I still have the negatives and take good care of them. There just has to be a better solution for digital images. I think I just might have come up with a better idea. My digital camera takes SDHC cards. A 4GB card only costs $5 to $6 (Fall 2011). This is much cheaper than buying film for a film camera and getting it processed with prints. The problem with hard drives is they have moving parts. They are like light bulbs and due to burn out some time soon. SDHC cards are solid state and do not have any moving parts to wear out. My research shows the cards may last for ten years or longer, way longer than the life of a hard drive. That is my new solution. Shoot with the SDHC card and copy other images to it to fill it up and then slide the write protect tab over to lock it from any more writings, label it, and put it in a static free bag and into secure storage.

Keep in mind that technology devices do change. Make sure that you can still access your images off a SDHC memory card as years progresses.