How do you store your digital photos?

I know, print them and album them, but if you want to store the original photos, do you burn a CD, or put them on a memory stick?

I have a bunch I really need to move off my hard drive, and I was thinking the memory stick would be a lot easier.

Pros and cons?

I store mine on a re-writable DVD*. When that gets full it goes onto a DVD-R. You can do the same with CD's as well.

The nice part about this method is that many home DVD players can show the pictures on the disc, which makes it easy to show others if you have not printed them out.


* = I also have a copy of them on my media server so I can show them by using my Tivo, as well as to back them up.

My company is now recommending that people make a backup on a hard-drive. They're finding that CDs and DVDs are failing faster and less predictably than hard drives.

We already had a one-tera-byte hard that we now use as our back-up drive.

Adrienne

We already had a one-tera-byte hard that we now use as our back-up drive.
How much total hard drive storage do you have in your house?

We have:
500 GB in Jennifer's Dell desktop
500 GB in the DirecTiVo
80 GB in my Dell laptop
80 GB in offline file server storage
------
1160 GB or 1.16 TB total. :geek:

Ok, explain that to us that are not so technically proficient! ;)

You add to the hard drive in your computer to hold them? Do you not worry about it crashing?

And, are the memory sticks a good idea, or bad?

I'm confused! ;)

And if you're speaking Mac, I'm in TROUBLE! :D

You can buy small (physically) external hard drives that plug into your usb port. I think that's what they're talking about (at least that's what I theoretically have my computers backed up to).

Memory sticks get corrupt fairly easily, I wouldn't rely on them.

Like Drince88 said, we have an extra hard drive that connects to our computers with a USB cable.

These are not platform specific - when you buy a hard drive it can work on a Mac OR a PC. Right now, there's a one TB hard drive (1000 GB) available at Costco for around $200 or $300? It's a pretty decent drive.

Andrew - I don't know how much we have. :(

My computer has around 100 GB internal and then it has an external hard drive that is either 300 GB or 500 GB (it's completely formatted for Windoze so I don't feel like trying to figure out how much space it has.)

The iMac the boys use has a few hundred GB, Doc's has a few hundred plus the 1 TB hard drive. So. My guess is that we have 2 - 3 TB of hard drive space if you add it all up. :geek: But a lot of it is redundant with files and applications over the three computers.

Oh, we still have that Mac Mini floating around somewhere, too, I think...

Adrienne

Thanks so much, Drince! Now it makes sense!

All I could think of was internal drives!

So if you had a computer crash, likely it would only affect your internal hard drive, and not the external?

ADK, I didn't see your reply before I spoke! Thanks! ;)

Thanks so much, Drince! Now it makes sense!

All I could think of was internal drives!

So if you had a computer crash, likely it would only affect your internal hard drive, and not the external?

Typically , even if you had a secondary "internal" drive, if the computer "crashed" that drive would not be affected unless that drive was the one that physically failed.

I read a recommendation that your picture backup should be stored separately from your originals. With this in mind, I made backup DVDs (took 3!), and gave these DVDs to my sister (in a different state). I would hate to lose all my pictures in some sort of fire, hurricane, etc.

I use my smugmug account for my picture backup. :)

I use my smugmug account for my picture backup. :)

Here's a sincere question...

Once you upload your pictures to smugmug, can you get the files back again at full-size resolution?

I recently found out that a lot of people are using online services as picture STORAGE (not just backups!!), not realizing that once they're uploaded, they can't get them back at the full size of the original files.

Adrienne

Here's a sincere question...

Once you upload your pictures to smugmug, can you get the files back again at full-size resolution?

I recently found out that a lot of people are using online services as picture STORAGE (not just backups!!), not realizing that once they're uploaded, they can't get them back at the full size of the original files.

Adrienne

As far as I know you can. You hit the save as button (below the picture) and you can save it back to your desktop (or wherever). If you want to check it out, most of my pictures are in the 8MP range and you can try and download one of mine. (Note: some of them are only 3MP).

They also offer a service where you can order a DVD copy of your pictures. At this point, it would cost me about $1000 but since I could just download them for free. ;)

Hope this helps!

I wouldn't recommend external drives for long term storage of precious photos. It is certainly a step up from storing on the internal drive of a laptop/desktop, you are still exposed to a single spindle failure. Meaning that if the external drive takes it in the shorts, you're going to be out all of the data on that drive.

You either need to hope that you catch the failure before it is catestrophic and get your data off of the drive. Or you need to have a fairly decent backup strategy to constantly update your backup.

A great technology for the lazy is RAID:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

It will duplicate information automatically across multiple disks. If any one disk in the RAID array fails, then you can rebuild the entire array. It gives you more insurance against a single drive failure.

Some desktops support multiple disks in a RAID array.

Here is a highly rated NAS (network attached storage), if you have a home network, NAS is convenient since it provides safe storage to all machines that can connect to your network:

http://www.infrant.com/main.html

Here is more tutorial information:
http://www.infrant.com/download/NAS_at_a_Glance.pdf
http://www.infrant.com/download/RAID_at_a_Glance.pdf

Here is a link to their consumer product:
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus

Fill that w/750GB drive for ~2TB of RAID 5 storage.

If you don't have a home network, then try this:
http://www.drobo.com/

I don't have any direct experience with it, but it appears to be a USB-attached RAID array. So not as convenient in a multi-PC environment as a NAS, at least it can provide safe information for a single PC.

The other nice thing about the RAID solutions is that you can incrementally replace a single drive at a time. So on a yearly or longer schedule, you can replace one drive at a time and spread out your risk...

And here is a great photo blog to get you some more ideas:
http://musings.bluepixel.net/2007/08/command_center.htm