What is the best method to backup images?

Q: WHAT IS THE BEST METHOD TO BACK UP YOUR IMAGES FOR QUALITY AND VOLUME? I HAVE HEARD A CD, STICK, OR EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FROM DIFFERENT PEOPLE.

A: CD or DVD, two copies stored in different places. And don't shout.

You face these perils:
1) Electronic disaster (the drive gets corrupted or the smoke leaks out)
2) Physical disaster (the house burns down, the basement leaks)
3) Accidental deletion (OOPS!)

Another issue is file format obsolescence. Will the Photoshop of 10 years from now be able to read today's camera raw format (or PSD)? For this reason, some people recommend storing TIFF files instead of PSD or raw files for both the master and original image sets.

CD/DVD is a good option for all of these because it's cheap, durable, relatively permanent, and easy to make redundant copies. It's particularly good for archiving. The biggest downside is that people don't bother to make the disk. Also, they do tend to proliferate.

An external drive is no more safe than your internal drive. If the external drive *duplicates* your internal drive, then you have redundancy and are protected against 1 and to a degree 3.
It's common though to have a small drive in your laptop and a big external drive. Things get moved to the external drive to free up space, then it's on one drive. This leaves you subject to hard drive failure, etc.

Memory sticks are very expensive. $50 - $100 /gig, whereas CD/DVD is about $0.50 per gig or less.

Burn things to CD. Make an extra copy. Take the copy to the office.

Here's what I recommend:
1) Burn the original jpg or raw files (whatever you shoot) to CD-R or DVD-R as soon as they come out of the camera. Label it "Originals"
2) Do whatever manipulation you're going to do. When you're done working with a set, burn the manipulated images to another disk. Label it "Masters"
3) If you're working on a set over a long period of time, make a copy on DVD-RW or CD-RW as an interim step between 1 and 2. You can continue using this disk for different sets of images. It's your working backup.
4) If you'd really be unhappy if you lost the images, make a copy of the 1 & 2 disks and store them somewhere else.
5) About every 10 years, consider editing your collection and copying it to the latest media.