Lightroom Tips

Are DVDs Dead? (for Lightroom photo backup purposes that is)

Just curious… anyone using DVDs to backup their photos still? Some one asked me the other day how they should name their backup photo DVDs so that they’re easy to find later on in Lightroom. Honestly, it’s been YEARS since I’ve used a DVD to backup photos. The average DVD holds 4.7 Gigabytes per layer. Sure there’s different kind of DVDs but for the most part, you’re looking around 4 GB. So if you shoot with a 16 GB card (and fill it up), you’d need 4 DVDs just to back up that one card. If you’re shooting with a 32GB card (which I am), you’d need almost 8 DVDs. To me, it just doesn’t seem like a feasible backup solution any more. You can buy 1 TB external drives for under $150 now. That would be around 215 DVDs worth of storage. So you could even buy two of them to make sure you have two backups of your photos (something I rarely hear people who backup to DVDs do).

Are you still using DVDs to backup your photos? If so, why?

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