Whats the best method of saving digital photos

lonestarfan

I would like advice on what is the the up todate technical way to store a back up copy of digital photos from my digital camera or iphone.
I currently transfer the photos to my desktop and then burn a cd of them all. Burning a cd is a bit of a long process.
Once the cd is burned I delete the photos from my camera and iphone.
Is this a really old fashioned way?

I have once put them on a memory stick but not sure if thats the right way either as I'll end up with lots of memory sticks like I have of cds.
Thanks alot.

scheming_gypsy

there isn't really any other way unless you back up your backups or upload to an online storage space.

USM

It's worth being aware that CDs and DVDs have a limited lifespan and will degrade after a few years taking your data with them.

An external hard drive (or even better, multiple external hard drives / memory sticks) is a better solution

closed

leave one copy on the c drive
one or more copies on dvd's or cd's (which shouldn't be time consuming)
one copy on external hard disk

a dvd holds much more than a cd.

trets77

upload them to online storage . Picassa charges a very reasonable £10ish a year for more storage space than most people will need. you can organise your albums very well too.

I bet you will spend more than £10 a year on cd's .

your house can burn down , your hard drive can fail, and your memory stick can get lost . none of which will bother you . plus you can share your photos with friends and family easily .

jmc160

Skydrive will give you 25GB storage for free. It integrates nicely with Live Services too.

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive

lonestarfan

Thanks for all this info. What I liked about the the memory stick as opposed to burning to cd is that it was quite fast to copy and paste and drop but transferring to cd requires burning and takes a lot longer.
Someone mentioned dvds hold more - do you still have to burn a dvd or can you do that by copying and pasting?
Thanks.

4Fingus

All removable media is subject to being lost or damaged. You should always have at least 3 copies of your data to ensure again disaster. Online backup solutions are also a good way and if used in conjuction with removable media your pretty much covered.

esuhl

Flash media isn't really reliable for long-term storage, and optical disks can degrade quite quickly. The best long-term solution is to store backups on multiple hard drives. You can simply copy files with synchronising software such as FreeFileSync or create proprietary-format images of disk contents using software such as Acronis True Image.

closed

A dvd holds 1000's of photo's, and shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to burn. Put them all in the same directory, and burn the lot to a new disc every so often.

An external hard disk would be a better backup choice than a flash drive, with dvd's as a third copy (in addition to retaining the master copy on the c drive)

jazzy

Jpeg's can also go corrupt sometimes through a virus. So the CD/DVD option may be a safer bet.