Welcome to the pond

Now that I'm officially a digital photographer, I'm going through what I anticipated - worry about how to permanently store my digital photos.

Yes, I'll save them all to my hard drive. Yes, I'll burn them to CD-RWs and CD-Rs. I know, though, that those two methods are not foolproof. Hard Drives can crash or be formatted, and CDs can deteriorate over time.

On the other hand, those methods are probably still safer than negatives, fragile as those are. I still prefer negatives, though, because they can only be physically destroyed or lost.

So what to do? I'll look for the answer from other, more experienced photographers, but in the meantime I've thought about all of the following:

• Purchasing an external hard drive to store all my original files.
• Purchasing a DVD burner and burning my files to DVDs (which I've heard are more reliable than CDs)
• Giving prints, CDs or DVDs, or both to relatives for safekeeping in case our house should burn down or be robbed.
• Purchasing a fireproof safe to store CDs and prints here. If I did this, though, I'd have to get one that cannot be easily stolen.
• The best method, I believe, would be to put CDs and/or prints of my originals in a safe-deposit box in a bank.
  

Those are all options for future storage. I'll see what other people have to say about the subject.

I was also thinking about the potential for conversion of digital images to negatives sometime in the future. I think it could be done, if the right process was found. After all, film is simply a light-sensitive medium. If a high-resolution image could be projected onto the film (and obviously reduced in size), I think negatives of digital photos is possible. I'm sure someone out there is thinking about that even as I write, trying to find a way to make it happen.

I'd be interested in hearing from my photographer readers about this. What methods do you use to store your photos? One reason I'm interested in this is because I do want to eventually try and get my work recognized - either published in a magazine, online gallery, or real-life gallery. I have a lot of work to do and things to learn before that time, but I think I'm on the right path to producing professional-quality images.