Preserving photos for ever

bazster

I keep my photos on (i) the hard drive in my computer (ii) an external hard drive and (iii) SkyDrive.

However, keeping them in multiple places means checking them all regularly. If your computer's hard drive fails, it's a bit late to discover that your external drive failed 3 months earlier!

anotheruser

ringo_24601 wrote: »

...and I don't have the time to go through and select the best ones.

What makes you think anyone will have time to go through and look at them in the future if you don't even have time now? Especially 130Gb worth of photos (which I assume are JPEGs).

Herein lies your problem. I will bet any money you will have very similar photos, perhaps some blurry ones, maybe the odd black photo because the flash didn't fire, even photos that are of practically nothing. I deleted over 60% of my photos earlier this year because I realised they were rubbish and fell into the above categories. I am now left with a lovely album of phtoos that remind me of what I did and where I went.
So many people take hundreds of photos that then stay on memory cards or in a folder "to sort out".

Q: What do really want out of your photos?
Yes, storage and archiving is great... but why? In the digital age we live in, photos are very easy to keep and store but what do you hope will happen to them?

I personally select a number of photos, then print a photobook of the previous year, every year. Then I can go through and enjoy remembering the significant events of that particular year.

A photo of a nice duck or a pretty deer isn't telling much of a story. Someone feeding a duck or a deer... maybe.

In the end, there is no way to ensure the life of these photos.
I backup my hard drive on to an external once a year. Once every two years or so I will write that data to a bunch of DVDs. They are all stored on site. I don't use the cloud for anything.

All storage comes with some risk. Copying to a safe box at the bank, a safe in your house, plus an external hard drive and a few DVDs has better chances of surviving, but also costs extra money not to mention the time it takes. Perhaps that time would be better spent slimming down your collection.

However as others have said, an external hard drive that is connected and disconnected each time, once a year would be more than enough I should think.