Once you really think about it, are your images really all that "safe" with digital? I invite rebuttals, opinions and informative disagreements.
This discussion has been had many times on RFF. You may have posted the question in innocence, but most who post it do so fully intending to once again proclaim the goodness of film and the badness of digital. If that is your intent, I invite you to go soak your head. If not, here is my reply.
Your bank (I presume you have one) does not store your financial records on paper, and hasn't for decades. They store those records digitally, on tape, hard drives, and other optical or electro-magnetic media. They store them in secure locations, redundantly, and they have and practice using BUR (backup and restore) on a regular basis, including having offsite third-party data centers located in other physical locations where they could take their data and restore in a matter of days even presuming the worst possible natural disaster.
As you may be aware, the 9/11 attacks on the USA were intended to bring down the financial center by attacking the twin towers. Do you know how much money was lost out of bank holder's accounts on account of the attacks, which utterly wiped out the financial records of several banks and brokerages? None. Not one penny was lost.
At the same time, 40,000 negatives of the John F. Kennedy years in office, the vast majority of them unprinted and unscanned, were destroyed when the towers fell. They were not recovered. The only remaining copies were those few negatives which had been printed over the years, which were scanned from the remaining prints. All was lost. They won't be back. They're gone.
Digital media is prone to failure. So is film. Entropy and natural and physical disasters ensure that nothing will last forever. Film, left to itself in a safe protected environment, may outlast digital media, such as a floppy disk or a CD or DVD.
However, digital media is not and was never intended to be a permanent storage solution. It is understood (by all those who are not complete luddites or flaming a-holes) that copies must be kept, and media must be updated. Unlike, say, 35mm film, which has remained unchanged in format for over a century, digital storage methods continue to change. A 5 1/4" floppy disk, even a 3.5 inch disk, is unlikely to be readable with the typical PC today, which lacks such drives entirely.
That means that the responsibility to maintain digital files is on the owner or caretaker of those files. Whether they are financial records or digital photos, the methods used for storage, backup, and recovery are the same.
Having recognized that one has a responsibility to maintain one's own digital photos, one must then decide to what extent one is willing to go. You can spend a lot or a little. You can devise complex schemes or simple ones. You can cut corners or not. There are levels of security, and it is up to the person whose photos they are to decide to what extent they wish to go.
The first problem to deal with is redundancy. Disks and drives fail, so duplicate (at the minimum) copies are a necessity. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, from using external drives (USB, Firewire, etc) to burning multiple copies on DVD.
The second problem is locality. Your home or office represents a single point of failure. If (God forbid) your home should burn down or be hit with a natural disaster of some sort, having your photos on two hard drives will not help you. So it behooves one to keep one's photos in more than one location. A friend or relative's house, hired third-party offsite storage, etc, etc. Fortunately, this is where digital media outshines film. Film copies are, by nature, inferior to the originals, even if only slightly. Subsequent copies of copies are more degraded yet. Digital files are exact. One file is the same as another, perfectly, if copied bit-for-bit, which is the normal method. So multiple copies stored in multiple locations are not only do-able, but they are also exact duplicates.
Having said this, there are those who proclaim this to be
'too much work'. Well, that is their choice, of course. However, it is what is required if one wants to protect their images. If one does not care what happens to one's images, then there is no reason to bother with backups, duplicates, remote storage, etc. It depends on what value you place on your work.
I have a friend who came back from a trip of a lifetime to Alaska, and he was very angry and upset because he had two compact flash microdrives of photos, and one of them failed. He had not copied the photos to his laptop or any other media while he was in Alaska, although he had his laptop with him, along with a card reader, so he could have done so. He did not blame digital - it wasn't the fault of digital. It was his fault.
He told me that years previous, he had dropped a critical roll of film over a bridge while standing on it taking photos and he tried to change rolls and got fumble-fingers. That was also his fault (and very bad luck), not the fault of film.
Digital media can fail. If that is understood, precautions can be taken. Failing to take those precautions is not the fault of the media, but of the person.
As an aside - anyone who imagines that in the years and decades after they shuffle off this mortal coil, some grandson or great-granddaughter will be holding your negatives up to the light to try to figure out what kind of person you were needs to take a closer look at eBay. Five minutes after you're dead, your children will have your precious cameras and lenses on eBay, and your treasured and well-preserved negatives will be at the local dump. Refer to the multiple posts by newbies on RFF that begin
"I just inherited this camera from my granddad...what's it worth?"
