How do you store photos?

How do you store photos? I really would like to know.

Yesterday I had a little scare. I was editing some photos when the screen started to play up. Who knows why. But it did make me think “Is my computer crashing?” It didn’t seem to be, but that made me think “What would happen if I lost my photos? Where else can I save them?”

That lead me to spend too many hours chasing my tail up and down blind alleys. [I like that image ~it’s just what I felt like!]

Like everyone I have lots of photos; mine are mostly stored on my main Apple computer. If that crashes, they are gone. I need a back-up system. These are the blind alleys I tried.

1. Burn them onto CD. Not the best long term option, given that the technology to support CDs will move on soon, but a good medium term one. I thought iPhotos had a neat little Burn CD button, but no. The best I could do was to export the photos into my documents, where there is a Burn CD button. It was going to be a slow process, but for some infuriating reason they wouldn’t burn. First blind alley.
2. Use my external hard drive. It seems that my hard drive (Apple’s Time Machine function) seems to only store documents. I say seems because the function seems to be playing up, telling me that Time Machine needs setting up when I know that it doesn’t. I couldn’t check if the photos were being saved or not. Second blind alley.
3. Okay, bite the bullet and set up iCloud. I haven’t done this before as I am an old fuddy-duddy ~ I don’t all my gadgets synchronised and I don’t want my photos sitting somewhere in the clouds. It doesn’t feel safe to me. As it turns out, iCloud doesn’t want my photos anyway! There are too many for the free storage and, as well as being a fuddy-duddy, I am a skinflint, and don’t want to pay for more storage. AND (hear that tone of outrage!) I couldn’t seem to select the photos I wanted to store. It was all of them or none of them as far as iCloud was concerned. Third blind alley.
4. Alley with a glimmer of light is putting them into photo books. That will give me nice hard copies of a select few. I did investigate a few of companies, but by that time my brain was truly hurting and I was deeply regretting the time spent on all of this.

So now I am opening it up to the universe, and not that pesky Cloud thingy, to ask:

How do you store your photos? What cunning system do you have to overcome changes in technology and maintenance of privacy?