Storing/saving digital photos - best medium?
Discussion
Hi, for years I have been burning all my wife's photos onto CDs. These are then kept in wallet albums and rarely looked at.
She has recently been advised that the images on CD will degrade over time and that she should be saving them all onto flash drives instead.
Will the images degrade on CD and is a flash drive any better?
Advice please
Thanks
She has recently been advised that the images on CD will degrade over time and that she should be saving them all onto flash drives instead.
Will the images degrade on CD and is a flash drive any better?
Advice please
Thanks
i've just indexed last years photo's (16gb) and moved them to box.net as we had a free 50gb box with our HP Touchpad, just been invited to offer the same to all the family, so we now have 250gb of free cloud space.
The big issue is actually getting them on there, it took 5 days to move 16gb on, but now I have a sync folder that I store things in on my laptop, this trickles them on rather than me having to remember to do it frequently.
Skydrive and google drive work the same way but with lower free sizes.
I dont trust flash cards at all, I've had 1 SD and 1 MicroSD currupt contents and go unusable in the last year.
The big issue is actually getting them on there, it took 5 days to move 16gb on, but now I have a sync folder that I store things in on my laptop, this trickles them on rather than me having to remember to do it frequently.
Skydrive and google drive work the same way but with lower free sizes.
I dont trust flash cards at all, I've had 1 SD and 1 MicroSD currupt contents and go unusable in the last year.
I looked into online storage and decided it was not really fir for purpose on its own, though not to rule it out when used with other methods. I now have them spread across DVD, hard drives and another hard drive kept away from home. I will probably take up the on line at a later date but as an extra to all the rest.
Just need to be methodical in the backup process. As I use DVD as well, I normally wait until that folder is about DVD size and back it up locally anyway, once I burn a DVD it goes across all the drives, means getting the off site ones as well but worth it should the worst happen to the house.
Just need to be methodical in the backup process. As I use DVD as well, I normally wait until that folder is about DVD size and back it up locally anyway, once I burn a DVD it goes across all the drives, means getting the off site ones as well but worth it should the worst happen to the house.
I had an External HDD go south on me the other month, and whilst I'm quite good at backing stuff up I'd missed a month of backups including my daughters 1st birthday, was gutted, I'm putting mine on my Box account and USB sticks as they are apparently easier to recover than a HDD if needed.
Store in the cloud. Get a house fire, it doesn't matter what medium you use. I use www.dropbox.com for work and photos. Backs up automatically onto any 'puter you name.
Edited by GetCarter on Friday 21st December 14:57
GetCarter said:
Store in the cloud. Get a house fire, it doesn't matter what medium you use. I use www.dropbox.com for work and photos. Backs up automatically onto any 'puter you name.
$500/year for 500GB. That's a lot of money and the concept of recovering from a failure by having to download 500GB of data is impractical for many. Depends how much data you have though!Buy two external disks like this at £60 each. Use a script to continuously sync your main drive to the external disk and then about once a month rotate the two external disk so one is off site in a drawer at work.
alock said:
$500/year for 500GB. That's a lot of money and the concept of recovering from a failure by having to download 500GB of data is impractical for many. Depends how much data you have though!
Buy two external disks like this at £60 each. Use a script to continuously sync your main drive to the external disk and then about once a month rotate the two external disk so one is off site in a drawer at work.
I don't pay $500, I pay $9.99 a month, it's tax deductible and all the people I work with also use the same service, so it's a really good way of file sharing (with large files). I've had at least half a dozen external HDs fail. I don't trust them as far as I can throw them!Buy two external disks like this at £60 each. Use a script to continuously sync your main drive to the external disk and then about once a month rotate the two external disk so one is off site in a drawer at work.
If you're prepared to take the risk however...
Edited by GetCarter on Friday 21st December 15:20
GetCarter said:
I've had at least half a dozen external HDs fail. I don't trust them as far as I can throw them!
If you're prepared to take the risk however...
Where's the risk? All data is duplicated across multiple spindles in different locations. I actually have 3 external disks, and with the master disk in the laptop have 4 copies of everything at 3 different locations.If you're prepared to take the risk however...
I've been using the same basic backup mechanism since the 80's and documents written in Lotus Symphony. The media might have changed from 5¼" floppies through many others to external 2½" hard disks but the principal is the same; multiple copies that I am 100% in control of. My method has proven itself over 25 years of use and multiple disk failures. Can DropBox match that track record?
I have my local HDD in PC (1TB) for all photos... Which is slowly getting full. And I have backup drive in my network media station. Every week, after every event I just do a quick sync with backup drive (syncBack software, really helpful). It is wise to not keep all data on one system (even on two different HDDs).
Before I had two drivers in RAID 1 (mirror). This saved me once
Before I had two drivers in RAID 1 (mirror). This saved me once
alock said:
All data is duplicated across multiple spindles in different locations.
As is Dropbox. Difference is it's an industry standard fileshare. Horses for courses I guess. I'd always want a backup in the cloud as I work 6 months on one project and then use it, and need to know it's available anywhere, anytime, to anyone.ETA: I used it last week. Life saver.
Edited by GetCarter on Friday 21st December 16:30
alock said:
$500/year for 500GB. That's a lot of money and the concept of recovering from a failure by having to download 500GB of data is impractical for many. Depends how much data you have though!
Buy two external disks like this at £60 each. Use a script to continuously sync your main drive to the external disk and then about once a month rotate the two external disk so one is off site in a drawer at work.
Trouble is with this (if I understand it right) in the house fire scenario you are probably going to,loose files unless it happens the day you swap the drives. Buy two external disks like this at £60 each. Use a script to continuously sync your main drive to the external disk and then about once a month rotate the two external disk so one is off site in a drawer at work.
That said it's better than mine which is the standard amateur external hard drive. I really need to sort something cloud based out....it's the photo/video of the kids I care about most.
I archive video and images long term on Taiyo Yuden optical media and re-burn from the originals, held on a RAID-1 array, every 5 years. Just did a re-burn to blu-ray which stores a lot more per disk than DVD.
2 sets, kept at offsite locations
I've also started saving the same files to Kingston Hyper-X 256GB USB3 drives and store those at the same locations.
I think both the optical media and USBs are projected (not guaranteed) to be good for 10 years+
[edited to add] A couple of other thoughts: I use Dropbox for current projects and especially for collaboration. But if we're talking about long-term archiving and saving images for our kids, I really can't believe that many, if any, of the cloud storage companies are going to be around in 10 years; and more worrying is what they will do, as we have seen with Instagram, when they need to start returning the money that their investors expect.
Also: if burning optical media for long-term archiving, the general recommendation is not to burn at the media's or drive's max-rated speed, and always do a verification pass post-burn then load and check on a different machine before placing into storage.
2 sets, kept at offsite locations
I've also started saving the same files to Kingston Hyper-X 256GB USB3 drives and store those at the same locations.
I think both the optical media and USBs are projected (not guaranteed) to be good for 10 years+
[edited to add] A couple of other thoughts: I use Dropbox for current projects and especially for collaboration. But if we're talking about long-term archiving and saving images for our kids, I really can't believe that many, if any, of the cloud storage companies are going to be around in 10 years; and more worrying is what they will do, as we have seen with Instagram, when they need to start returning the money that their investors expect.
Also: if burning optical media for long-term archiving, the general recommendation is not to burn at the media's or drive's max-rated speed, and always do a verification pass post-burn then load and check on a different machine before placing into storage.
Edited by mikef on Friday 21st December 23:13
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