Storing photographs- but not on a cloud

Lupus_Lou

I have 20 years + of photos which means a lot to me and I would like to store them somewhere secure - but not on a cloud. I want something I can physically see and hold.
I have seen a number of "sticks" on Amazin but have been left very confused with all their speak of IOS etc
I have a computer with windows 10 and a Samsung pad and phone
I have trawled through pages on here and also done a search but everything seems to point to clouds
Any suggestions?

Jo x

arciere

Anything that you can see and hold is prone to damage or getting lost or stolen.
Best practice is to store data in different media in different locations. The more you have, the better.
You could use a NAS, DVD, external drives, there's nothing 100% fail safe.

RumRat

By all means buy a memory stick or external HD to store your pics, but, don't dismiss the cloud as a backup, backup.....Google Photos is free and easy to use from your device.

Browntoa

As above , mine are on Google photos , Nas hard drive , of hard drive and dvd ( multiple copies round the family ) 

Robisere

I keep my pics in two locations: Windows 10 "One Drive" and Google photos. I also have an external SSD case to back up the whole system, including photos. I mostly use Google photos for temporary photos, which I convert to One Drive.

dan958

Have your originals. Then a backup on an external drive, and then a cloud backup.

jim1999

The general rule is to have one copy at home, where you can quickly access them.  This protect against your computer breaking.  Then also have a second copy away from home.  This protects against theft, fire etc.

For photos which go back a long way and are obviously precious, my instinct would be the following.

1) Buy a USB DVD drive that can write DVDs
2) Buy a large pack of DVDs (10 or 25)
3) Figure out how many discs you need to fit all of your photos on.  For most people that would be 1-2.  Make four separate disc sets that contain all of your photos.  Keep two in your house.  The other two sets stored at someone else's house or at a safety deposit box or similar.

The total cost is extremely low, and it's a pretty resilient storage medium.  The fact that additional discs are so cheap means that you can easily make 3/4/5 copies etc and store in more locations.  So even if one set gets broken, lost, damaged etc, there are others you can rely on.

flashg67

99.9% certainty that any USB stick or external USB hard drive that you buy on Amazon will work with Windows so I wouldn't worry about what you end up purchasing. They're cheap enough that you could back up to 2 or more different sticks or hard drive and leave with family etc just in case. As pointed out, physical devices  can get lost, fail mechanically etc so don't dismiss the cloud fully - worth having stuff backed up to a cloud service even if you you only ever use i as a last resort emergency service

knightstyle

It may be SF at the moment but work is being done to develop a bomb which will send out pulses to destroy all memory files so all media stored on chips will be lost.
Perhaps we should all print our most important documents and pics?

RumRat

knightstyle said:

It may be SF at the moment but work is being done to develop a bomb which will send out pulses to destroy all memory files so all media stored on chips will be lost.
Perhaps we should all print our most important documents and pics?

In the aftermath of that you will be too busy trying to save your @rse from whoever is invading to worry about any photos.

wongataa

jim1999 said:

The general rule is to have one copy at home, where you can quickly access them.  This protect against your computer breaking.  Then also have a second copy away from home.  This protects against theft, fire etc.

For photos which go back a long way and are obviously precious, my instinct would be the following.

1) Buy a USB DVD drive that can write DVDs
2) Buy a large pack of DVDs (10 or 25)
3) Figure out how many discs you need to fit all of your photos on.  For most people that would be 1-2.  Make four separate disc sets that contain all of your photos.  Keep two in your house.  The other two sets stored at someone else's house or at a safety deposit box or similar.

The total cost is extremely low, and it's a pretty resilient storage medium.  The fact that additional discs are so cheap means that you can easily make 3/4/5 copies etc and store in more locations.  So even if one set gets broken, lost, damaged etc, there are others you can rely on.

The problem with this is DVD's take ages to write and they degrade over time.  There is a real risk that when you come to read them again in the future they will be unreadable.  Any storage medium can fail so multiple formats are best and for large quantities of data hard disk are better as they are cheap per gigabyte and hugely quicker to read and write to.