Digital Photos - How to 'store' them?

W

washparkhorn

2,500+ Posts
I woke up last week with a horrible thought. If my hard drive crashes, all of my family photos could be lost - as they are all digital and stored on that hard drive.

I need to back them up, but the question is to what? I am currently burning them onto a data CDs (TDK), but I thought I read somewhere that the CDs consumers burn lose their data over time.

Is a CD back up the best way to store digitial photos? Is there a better way?
 
There isn't a better way right now. Most CDRs have a life of 25 years or so. Some of the more expensive blanks (such as Mitsui) claim a life of 75 years, but that's just an estimate. The most expensive photo paper really only has a life of 75 years anyway.

btw, it's not just burned CDs and DVDs that lose their data, regular CDs and DVDs lose data too.
 
First of all, if you've anything important on your hard drive, it needs to be backed up. Doesn't matter if it's photos, financial info, or whatever. Cheapest and simplest way today is just to buy more hard drives. It's pretty likely your hard drive is going to fail. It's highly unlikely two or three drives are going to fail at the same time, though.
Optical media (such as CDs and DVDs) will fail. So will everything else. So it's up to you to decide how important those files are to you. Mulitple copies of optical and magnetic will be your safest long-term bet. Depending on how much data, the online services could help, with remote storage and all that.
(Kodachrome film, properly stored, will keep for at least fifty years without losing color, btw. And there will always be a sun.)

Exactly how much data, in bytes, are you talking about here?
 
pmg,

2.45 Gigs (2,999 Photos).

They all fit on 4 CD-R disks (that will be put into the safety deposit box).

As an aside, all of my parent's photos of my siblings and me were stolen in a burglary when we lived in San Antonio. I have very few pictures of me or my siblings as children. Kind of strange to not have those memories, so I want to make sure my kids do.
 
Yeah, that'll all fit, as you say, on 4 cds, or one dvd. As cheap as those media are, I'd burn several. Send some to your relatives. And do it again every few years. And probably use a lossless, non-proprietary format like tiff to save them as, so you won't have any problem reading them in the future.

And that website someone mentioned above looks good for what you have. I get about 500 megs (I think) on my .mac account, and back some thing up to there.
 
They were in a box with all of the camera equipment - labeled "Cameras." We were a military family that moved - a lot. So, we had a lot of boxes still unopened. We had just moved from DFW (Carswell AFB) to San Antonio. The cameras and the photos (with negatives) were in one box - and the burglar snatched it and the photos.
 
I'd set up some kind of "workflow." You figure out how you want to back them up (HD, CD, DVD, etc), and stick to a process. There are plenty of pros that burn their images to CD as soon as they download them to a computer, and then they work with/save/store/manipulate the copy on the computer but they still have the "digital negatives."

Currently, I backup my pictures folder about every month or after important downloads and my documents every 6mo. It takes me about 20 minutes to copy the pics to my second HD, and it's much easier than burning a bunch of CDs. I do think that in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to start burning to DVDs and keeping those at a different location (backing up my 6 GB now sounds like a real mess on CDs).
 
It also wouldn't be a bad idea to store some online. I use snapfish.com and like it a bit better than ofoto.com (Kodak).
 
I second Kodachrome film. My dad took pics for slides back in 1971 of his trip to Greece. We went to Greece this past summer and it got my dad thinking about his last trip, i.e. 1971. He got his slides out and I told him he could put them on CD. When he got them transfered, they look like there were just taken yesterday. The quality is amazing. I think slides were a pretty popular method of taking pictures back in the day. My mom has boxes upon boxes of slides back from her day. They must have some good stuff on them. Both my parents did amazing things, i.e. lived in Japan, Norway, Hawaii, worked for the CIA, climbed glaciers in Norway, Coast Guard, etc., etc.
 
Does anyone here use a zip drive for backing up data? I saw a 150 gig zip drive and wondered whether it was worth it. Considering how much prices have dropped on hard drives, I was wondering if having the external device to save things on was better than saving directly to an internal drive.
 
I am not a fan of zip disks. I would either go with an external hard drive or CD-R/DVD as already recommended.
 
8 tracks are gone, 5-1/4 floppis are gone, 3-1/2" drives are going and so will CD's .

In other words, just store them on whatever media is the most cost effective and universally accepted at that moment. You may have to do your 30 minutes of backing up every 10 years or so. You can handle it.
 
Maybe I wasn't using the correct terminology. I guess then, that external hard drives are preferable (maybe not so to internal hard drives) but I have a lap top that I need a lot more space than my 40 gig laptop provides. My problem is that I am working with a lot of video files in making a special project and I need something that will not only hold this massive amount of data, but also be readily accessible and transfers easily when working with my video editing program. Would an external hard drive do that?

I need probably about 120 gig memory because video is such as hog when it comes to memory.
 
Yes, an external drive will work. In fact, for about $50, you can buy an enclosure and put a regular old internal hard drive in the enclosure and....voila....you've made your own external hard drive.
 
throw a couple of drives in an old computer in a RAID 1. store them there (redundant hard drives). burn a copy or two. Put them on a website. Any one of those alone isn't that secure, but do 2 or 3 and you're pretty safe.
 
I bought a Western Digital 120 gb external hard drive for $149 at Best Buy, hooked it up to my laptop and within 5 minutes I was transferring photos and videos to the new drive. The device runs great and is very quiet. Except for the fact it's sitting right in front of you while you're transferring files, you wouldn't know it's there. The one thing I was worried about was speed of transfer, but that's not even an issue.
 
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