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Since XP came out in the early 2000s, Windows has become a lot more stable than the crash-prone OS we all used to know and...know. So, while getting the dreaded "blue screen of death" (BSOD) the other day was annoying, it was a rare enough occurrence to be able to brush off. Or, at least, it was until the system came up again, and indicated that my relatively-young 1TB drive was now an unformatted "new volume." A check of the BIOS screen revealed more alarming news, as the terabyte drive was showing up as being only 33GB in size, even if I were to re-format it. Further tests with a system-administrator friend of mine confirmed that, as Monty Python might put it, "this is an ex-hard drive." Whether the apparent damage to the drive's logic board was caused by the BSOD, or whether the latter was a symptom of it, meant little -- either way, the drive was not merely dead, it was really most sincerely dead.
Fortunately, it was not a drive devoted to my photo storage, and the items of value I had stored there (mainly my music collection) were backed up to a couple of external hard drives, so I had no worries...until I installed a replacement drive and tried to restore the contents from one of those two external drives, only to find that the drive in question had apparently developed a number of bad sectors, previously undiscovered, that meant that about one-third of my music files were corrupted and unusable. Luckily, the other external drive was in working order, so I was able to restore everything as before. But this made me think about what might be done to mitigate the dameage had the same thing occurred to a photo storage drive.
Recently, I was at a gathering of local-area nature photographers. The general consensus of the members there was that the traditional method of backing up to optical media (CD-ROMs and DVD-Rs) is now obsolete, and that it's better to use portable hard drives for the task. They point out that DVD media, in particular, is insufficently archival, and will eventually degrade. (Personally, I've never had problems with DVD media, except for rewritable disks, but I won't deny that the possibility for corruption exists over the long-haul.) But, as my experience indicates, if optical media are not as reliable as they could be, the same could be said for hard drives as well -- and, although this is anecdotal from my point of view, it seems to me that newer, larger-capacity drives tend to fail a lot sooner than older, smaller ones. Even worse, while optical disks may fail in patches, meaning that you lose certain valuable files, hard drives are equally prone to total, instantaneous failure, wiping out every image file on the drive.
So, what's a photographer to do? If you want to go the hard-drive route, I would strongly recommend the two following steps:
Of course, another consideration is where you store those drives and media once you've backed them up. No drive, no matter how well-maintained, is going to be of use if it is lost in some catastrophe. While I don't want to get too much into my own asset-management system (which is pretty much what is found in Peter Krogh's excellent The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers), I'll cut to the chase and say that I use a hybrid system involving both hard drives and optical media.
When I'm ready to back up a new set of images, I'll copy them to two hard drives and two sets of DVD-Rs. One of the hard drives will remain near my office computer, for quick access if needed. The second is stored in my laptop case, which I carry with me and keep by my nightstand at night, so that I can grab it if an emergency requires an instant evacuation. One of the sets of DVD-Rs is stored off-site, and the other is kept somewhere in the house.
This system may take some time to implement each time I need to archive new photos, but nowhere near the time standard importing, keywording, and developing takes in Lightroom, so the toll is really quite low. And it's reassuring to know that whatever may befall, whether it be flood, fire, earthquake, drive corruption, or BSODs, there's every reason to believe I'll have safe access to my years of images.