Storing Digital Photographs

Dillence

Hi

Can anyone help me with the best place to store digital photographs. My husband is changing jobs and has a lot of personal photographs store on his work laptop. We can just swap them on to mine but really need to back them up with some kind of hard storage.

Do we use disks or is something else better?

Thanks

Dillence

aloise

I have mine backed up on CDs. I do 2 copies just in case I CD gets damaged. I also put important ones on a memory stick. Have done this since my computer went down and I lost a lot of photos.

roddydogs

Cheapest way is DVD if yours has a DVD burner, 7x the storage over CD, not much difference in the cost per disc.

googler

Copy them to USB stick, external Hard Drive, CD or DVD.

Preferably to more than one of these media, so that if one fails, you have a backup.

savemoney

If they are precious copy them on dvdr and make 2 copies and verify them with copier like imgburn. Thats what I do and I also have them on two computers mainly for viewing

Browntoa

I have done back ups to DVD , various copies distributed around my family (if you were unlucky enough to have a fire then you could lose all copies at home ) , external hard drive and also cloned PC hard disk to another hard disk

chunter

Same as. A couple of copies on cd / dvd (in different places).
Hard drives and flash drives have a lot shorter shelf life than an optical disk.

By the time the optical disc starts to have problems there'll be a whole new medium...

[Deleted User]

I've got 20gb of image space with Google - when i want to move a large photo collection from one PC to another, i dump it online there, then download it elsewhere.

Saves using up DVDs

petecarter

I would just put them on an external hard drive. I wouldnt bother with any optical media such as DVDs or CDs to be honest. How big are the files? If we are talking less than 16gb it would be cheapest to buy one or two usb thumb drives to put them on. If more, use an external hard drive.

[Deleted User]

Very true, something like this would do the trick nicely - http://www.maplin.co.uk/320gb-core-external-portable-usb-2.0-hard-drive-510783

320gb, 40 quid. Also handy for keeping a backup.

Dillence

Thanks everyone, some great ideas, not sure which one I will go with, I like the idea of a hard drive, so might go for that.