Hosting sites

[mklotz]

Whatever you do relative to hosting sites/clouds/etc. keep full resolution copies of all your pictures locally. There are so many things that can go awry with remote storage that it simply can't be trusted for primary storage.

Your local storage should be duplicated in several different formats. All formats, thumb drives, hard disks, DVDs, etc. can fail (or the device needed to read them can). As has been pointed out, storage is now cheap. Your effort to reproduce all that material isn't, even if that were possible.

Remember that theft is another way to lose backups. If your "backups" are DVDs or a hard disk sitting on top of your computer or next to it, they may disappear when the computer is stolen. Keep at least one redundant set of backups in a remote location. Among other remote backups I keep a couple thumb drives in a kitchen drawer under some cooking utensils. Over the years we've been burglarized three times in two houses and never once has the kitchen been ransacked.