Where to put all our photographs?

Traveller1981

I would agree with Marty J - web uploads is a great idea. Very time consuming to start with but you get access to them anywhere around the world (where there is a computer and internet connection). I personally have mine backed up to a 2.5" external hard drive, and DVD's. DVD's are definitely more resilient than external hard drives, so it worth making a couple of back ups. Use good quality dual layer DVDs as these take twice the capacity of normal blank DVD's.

Of course if you are backing up to DVD's, don't start handing these around for people to view as a few scratches could make the disc useless. Make a back up to DVD, put it in a case and keep it somewhere safe. If people want to look at them, make additional copies.

Darth_Marty

See I disagree that dvds are more resiliant than external hard drives. Personally I no longer bother backing up to dvd as they will fail at some point. I have all my pictures on each of my home computers and 1 external hard drive, that way they are on 3 seperate hard drives. I also back up to - http://www.adrive.com/
which is completely free and allows you up to 50gb storage free of charge.
The initial upload takes an age and its better to do small amounts rather than say 1 10gb file but once its done its excellent and easily accessable.
I must admit to printing a lot off now that bulk ordering is so cheap, there is no substitute for physically having your pictures as opposed to digital versions.

Leopard

Personal photographs and videos are irreplaceable - they're far more valuable than any computer you have.

Back them up to a hard drive (preferably more than one) for ease of immediate access AND to DVD for storage. Then keep these at more than one location (remember that a DVD is cheap to make and to mail - to anywhere in the world).

Don't keep everything on the same premises - fires, floods and burglaries do happen.

It really doesn't cost much to do this. And how would you feel if you lost them forever...? :eek:

'Nuff said.


PS. These are great, if you should buy a Mac.

darude

Marty_J wrote: »

A Flickr pro account is $24.95 a year and gives you unlimited uploads and photo storage.

Someone is selling a Flickr Pro accout on ebay, could possibly end up cheaper than the $25 advertised. Worth considering if you wanna test drive Flickr Pro.

gazzak_2

I use truprint online printing. Not only do they offer the best price and fastest delivery times, but when you upload your photos for printing they stay there forever, for free! I use it as a printing AND backup service.

darude

All depends on what you want to do with your photos, if you just want to store/safe keep them then a quick burn on a DVD will do, if you want to share them amongst friends/certain contacts, tag certain photos, allow comments, pin it on a map, Flickr is great for all that.

Linbox

There are several options available for you, personally I use Google's Picasa web albums 1G space or Dropbox 2G space.There are several others web_photo_sharing_face off but I would also invest in portable media either hdd/Flash or DVD or indeed using all and achieve multiple redundancy

Linbox

SoUtHeRn_NoRtHeRnEr

The German company, 'Medion' do extremely cheap external hard drives- they plug in the USB port on your computer and away you go! We picked up our 500GB one from Aldi for about £50 and it works a treat! You could also back up your whole computer onto one of these meaning you would be safer from the prospect of losing everything from something like an accidental power surge.
Hope this helps!

edi7on

My photos are backed up to my Yahoo Mail and Gmail via Shozu (straight from my phone) + Dvd.
I also had an ext hard drive which failed, so I will be getting another one soon

Oblivion

For the most reliable home backup, I'm a great believer in USB External Hard Drives. I currently have four LaCie drives varying from 250GB to 500GB, plus a Fujitsu USB HandyDrive 300GB, with a further Fujitsu USB HandyDrive 500GB currently on order.

I use these in rotation for making regular (weekly) backups of all My Documents, including my huge photo collection (I keep original RAW files as well as the processed and down-sized jpgs from them).

Typically once a month, but no longer than two months, I use Norton Ghost to make a complete Ghost 'mirror' image of my C: Drive to my second internal Drive and when complete, I make a copy of it to one of my external USB drives. This has saved my bacon no less than four times this year when hardware faults and / or viruses have crippled my PC. Just overwrote the C: Drive with the last Ghost image and I'm immediately back in business with a safe setup again.

The price of all USB external drives has been coming down, and with the current woes in the retail sector, look out for some amazing bargains after Christmas.

EDIT: Oh yes, forgot to mention, for sharing photos with friends or just exhibiting them for public viewing, I have an account with Pbase ... http://www.pbase.com/davecq

Dave.