So, I have a full season of shooting. Between my originals, the LightRoom copies and those I keep my HD is getting pretty full. I was thinking of saving them off onto DVDs but that would take a lot of disks.
How do you archive your shots?
Lots of options. Perhaps the simplest, though likely not the best, is to buy another external drive to copy your 'archive' to. Doesn't sound like you already have back-up as part of your workflow. Is this the case? In other words, with what you've described ("originals, the LightRoom copies and those I keep..") it sounds like you have these on just one drive without backup. If that's the case and if having an archive is important to you, you also might want to think about an intermediate step, which would be backing up your images on a regular basis. There are more sophisticated options than simple external drives, and the best advice always includes off-site copies of your work. What you'll find is that the decisions you make will have a lot to do with how 'serious' you are about not losing/archiving your images.
Around here, digital requires 3 copies of data to be considered "backed up", one of which is kept off site. For me, that means 3 copies total, most of which go on hard drives. I have one internal drive that I archive to and a number of externals. I also burn DVDs occasionally, depending on the project and the mood I'm in (yes, I'm a bit erratic.)
FWIW, I consider it a good practice to buy my archiving drives from different manufacturers, or at least from different lots if from the same manufacturer. A run of bad HDs is not all that common, but it's sure not unheard of either.
Also, just because a HD is full doesn't mean you don't need to spin it up once in a while. My hardware geek friend says that just leaving a full HD on the shelf for months / years can end up being a very bad idea.
I have my working copy in my main box (which is raid 1 - aka a mirror set), that is backed up to TWO places - my NAS box (also a RAID-1 box) and then off site to Crashplan, which backs my whole PC, not just my photos. Crashplan is a competitor to Carbonite etc. Yes, my initial backup took 90 days on my slow to upload cable modem, but now it takes the system about 30 mins/week
Thanks everyone for your input. The more shots I collected, besides eating up my raid drive, had me worried if something went wrong. Looks like I had better get off my duff and get this stuff backed up.
