Laser damage is a key issue in high peak-power laser technology for the next decade.The appearance of titanium doped sapphire (Ti:Sa) in the development of ultra intense fs lasers, coupled with the chirped pulse amplification technique, allowed to progress towards very high peak powers and very high intensities.Today peak powers of the order of Petawatt (1015 W) at low repetition rate (1 shot/mn) and hundreds of Terawatt at high repetition rate (10 Hz) are possible in laboratories of reasonable size.The peak power up scaling, along with the increase of the pulse repetition rate, imply the use of large and robust active crystals, technologically difficult to grow and very expensive, that makes particularly crucial the problem of laser damage for builders of high-peak power laser systems.