You will find yourself restoring lots of pictures...bulk amounts, enormous amounts....
Your customer may want a copy of the restorations on CD or not. Either way, the minute you do not back up the pictures, you will have a customer come back to you to get more pictures made.
OK...I admit I have come close to disappointing a customer by forgetting where I put the pictures or using the wrong name in a search. Eventually, I find it after a bit of panic. I feel responsible for the preservation of all my customers' photos once I have scanned them.
I have run the gamut from individual DVD's stacked by year under my desk in cd/dvd spindle holders like you get when you buy new ones. I still do that for the very very long ago restorations...say 5 years or older...
Most of my restorations are on various hard drives...desktop drives from various companies that sell drives. However, I have had a couple of these drives fail...and it takes MONTHS to upload pictures to cloud sites (and who wants to pay for all that space, anyway?) When these drives fail, I take them out of their enclosure, remove whatever they have screwed into the drive to cover up the SATA connection and then see if it won't work in another hard drive reader. A hard drive reader is a box that the hard drive fits into (match up the connectors) and MOST of the time, they will work again.
I took a lot of courses on fixing hardware in my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer classes, but I never had the courage to tinker with a motherboard. So, I use my own type of RAID system to save my music and photos. (Random Assortment of Independent Discs). It's just a way to spread out your pictures in multiple places to ensure longevity of your information. I have 6 from previous computers--each of which quit because of a hard drive failure...Hmmmmm...but they work just great in a an external hard drive docking station..... Gamers know about these...check on amazon.com and pick on up for under 25.00. USB connection, no set up required. I just bought a StarTech.com USB Sata External Hard Drive Docking Station and it works great.
Watch for sales of USB Desktop External Hard Drive Storage ... and have a couple hooked up to your computer. The biggest problem you can ever have is loss of data. If you give a copy of the disk to the customer or a USB flashdrive (becoming my current choice because it is so easy for the customer to use in many laptops) that is the main storage. But, like I said earlier, I would rather be the hero than the restorer that didn't save someone's precious pictures....'nough said. Next week...I will talk about cloud storage even though I said it was expensive. :-)
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