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Our photos are stored on the hard disk drive and backed up periodically on to CD, but it has to be said that we have had at least one serious scare when we wondered whether the images would be recoverable. We have been talking for months about getting an external hard drive to back stuff up on and I think your story will prove the spur to actually do something. It does strike me though that as hard drives get bigger, the more devastating any crash is, and as they get cheaper, the more likely the quality control is increasingly poor.:(