Mark,
I think the most important morale of this story is that you back up your data somehow and keep it off site (in case of fire), and continually update the way you back things up as technology improves, and makes various media obsolete. Not too long ago, I was backed up on those 100 MB "zip" disks, and before that little 1.2 MB floppies Way before digi pics ate up multiple gigabytes.
Lets see, 3 DVDs now, about 14 GB, would be about 12,000 floppy disks!! Barely 1 digi pic per floppy......
You are sure on the nail with that. As the digital cameras get better the default pictures get larger and larger. Unless I am going to be printing large pictures I set mine at a lower setting then even the default and I just have a 7 Mega Pixel one. Same for the backup stuff. Now I have a DVD drive that writes to the dual DVDs and already that is obsolete. Just think if we still had to save all this stuff on tapes. It would take two days to get it all on them.
Ron