I use a service, that back up my hard drive over the internet. The one I use is http://mozy.com/, but there are several out there. Costs me less than $100 to have a frequently updated image of my laptop hard drive (automatic, transparent, and encrypted). I would not call this archival, per se, but it's useful to have. ALL of my digital images going back to the shots I started taking in '98 are on my laptop.
I spread sever CDs of Austin cave trips around back in 2000, I have no clue how they were stored, or if they still work. My hard drive has to get bigger every couple of years. Now that I am shooting video, there simply is not room on my laptop hard drive, so I have installed a 1 Tb raid array in the basement of my ex wifes house that is connected to the internet. The array has dual mirrored hard drives, if one fails, we have redundant backup. A mirror of THAT drive is located at my Son's house. As the drives start to fail, we simply replace them. It's not as cheap as CDs, but as drive technology changes, and drive interfaces change we can leapfrog with the technology. I can also give people read only access to specific directories. Again, throwing money at a problem helps. Not foolproof. A virus could wipe out my raid arrays, poor data management could corrupt the data. But it's worked so far... :) My, two cents from upstate New York Cheers y'all Rob PS.. I wonder if one day, people will start backing up digital images on Kodachrome, for archival storage... never mind.
