Ditching OneDrive suggestions for online photo storage (not Google)

Frozen_up_north

Hoseman said:

Try https://mega.nz as you get 15gb for free. 

No idea who they are, or how secure. Proton, Google and Microsoft are well known…

Dicentra

finbaar said:

Get hard copies of your important photos. Having them in the cloud is very risky and local backups can corrupt.

Is that really practical to do these days when you can have 1000s of photos and the cost of doing so, beside it is also a risk having hard copies e.g. fire. I would think several local backups on different hard drives and stored at different locations reduces the risk.

Undervalued

Dicentra said:

finbaar said:

Get hard copies of your important photos. Having them in the cloud is very risky and local backups can corrupt.

Is that really practical to do these days when you can have 1000s of photos and the cost of doing so, beside it is also a risk having hard copies e.g. fire. I would think several local backups on different hard drives and stored at different locations reduces the risk.

It is a difficult one. I am old enough to remember the pre digital photography days where all you had were delicate film negatives or colour slides plus any prints that had been made. There was no easy or cheap way of duplicating the negatives and any copies were of lower quality than the original. The opportunity of endless lossless backups simply didn't exist. And you know what, the sun still came up each morning and we all managed.

Remember carbon copies of typed letters?

  

Grumpysally

Undervalued said:

It is a difficult one. I am old enough to remember the pre digital photography days where all you had were delicate film negatives or colour slides plus any prints that had been made. There was no easy or cheap way of duplicating the negatives and any copies were of lower quality than the original. The opportunity of endless lossless backups simply didn't exist. And you know what, the sun still came up each morning and we all managed.

Remember carbon copies of typed letters?

  

"Remember carbon copies of typed letters?"

The purple ones with the distinctive smell? And the thrill of being allowed to operate the machine in the school office. 🙂

I'm both digitising old photos and using an online service to print my favourite digital photos. Belt and braces and possibly an extra pair of trousers approach.

There seems to be a trend at the moment for young people to use 'old fashioned' 😆instamatic style cameras

flaneurs_lobster

Grumpysally said:

"Remember carbon copies of typed letters?"

The purple ones with the distinctive smell? And the thrill of being allowed to operate the machine in the school office. 🙂

You have confused two copying methods.

1) Carbon Copy (aka cc) - a sheet of carbon paper (paper coated on one side with ink loosely bound with wax or polymer) was inserted between two or more sheets of plain paper then fed into a typewriter. A good typist knew just how much extra force to apply when typing to take account of the extra thickness without driving the keys through the paper.

Carbon paper is still used as a way of transferring designs onto eg glass or ceramic.

2) Spirit duplicators, often a brand called Gestetner - original document was typed onto a special stencil sheet which was then attached to a cylinder on the machine. Spirit-based ink was forced through a mesh on the roller through the stencil onto plain paper when the roller was rotated.

Pretty sure that ink solution was toxic, prolonged use was a decent high.

Both methods were made obsolete once photocopiers became cheap enough to replace them.

Grumpysally

flaneurs_lobster said:

Grumpysally said:

"Remember carbon copies of typed letters?"

The purple ones with the distinctive smell? And the thrill of being allowed to operate the machine in the school office. 🙂

You have confused two copying methods.

1) Carbon Copy (aka cc) - a sheet of carbon paper (paper coated on one side with ink loosely bound with wax or polymer) was inserted between two or more sheets of plain paper then fed into a typewriter. A good typist knew just how much extra force to apply when typing to take account of the extra thickness without driving the keys through the paper.

Carbon paper is still used as a way of transferring designs onto eg glass or ceramic.

2) Spirit duplicators, often a brand called Gestetner - original document was typed onto a special stencil sheet which was then attached to a cylinder on the machine. Spirit-based ink was forced through a mesh on the roller through the stencil onto plain paper when the roller was rotated.

Pretty sure that ink solution was toxic, prolonged use was a decent high.

Both methods were made obsolete once photocopiers became cheap enough to replace them.

To be fair I was only about eight at the time so the technical details went over my head 😆

steviebuk

Grumpysally said:

I need recommendations please for online photo storage.

I currently automatically back up my photos to both Google and OneDrive and to a seperate hard drive.

A bit of overkill based on paranoia of losing important photos and frankly laziness. 

Whilst One Drive is handy for accessing  things across devices I'm sure I could manage with Google, I would like to have a second back up for my photos.

Thanks
 
    

Not overkill. Should always do a 3 2 1 backup. 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite.

If you know someone who can set it up for you, there is always Immich. Which is open source and free, although also still in development so you'll want backups.

ih8stress

flaneurs_lobster said:

Grumpysally said:

"Remember carbon copies of typed letters?"

The purple ones with the distinctive smell? And the thrill of being allowed to operate the machine in the school office. 🙂

You have confused two copying methods.

1) Carbon Copy (aka cc) - a sheet of carbon paper (paper coated on one side with ink loosely bound with wax or polymer) was inserted between two or more sheets of plain paper then fed into a typewriter. A good typist knew just how much extra force to apply when typing to take account of the extra thickness without driving the keys through the paper.

Carbon paper is still used as a way of transferring designs onto eg glass or ceramic.

2) Spirit duplicators, often a brand called Gestetner - original document was typed onto a special stencil sheet which was then attached to a cylinder on the machine. Spirit-based ink was forced through a mesh on the roller through the stencil onto plain paper when the roller was rotated.

Pretty sure that ink solution was toxic, prolonged use was a decent high.

Both methods were made obsolete once photocopiers became cheap enough to replace them.

Oh, the memories - I actually learnt how to type on a manual typewriter (only one electric one in the class for the chosen few), where you have to press down hard on each key for it to type clearly.

And if you typed too fast (once you had learnt all the keys without looking at them), then the typebars would all catch on each other and you had to disentangle them to continue.

Also you had to be very careful not to make any spelling mistakes, or out would come the Tippex bottle to brush over the letter, leaving a permanent white blob to type the correct letter onto.

And if you were doing a carbon copy - you had to Tippex that one too, then try to put both pieces of paper back

to the exact space, to continue. And try not to get blue fingerprints from the carbon paper all over the letter.

I also had to type the 'stencils' and print them out in one office I worked in. You had to be very careful not to type too hard, especially with underscoring, or it would tear through the stencil.

I STILL type as though I'm on a typewriter - very heavy-handedly and quite noisy, ha ha.

flaneurs_lobster

ih8stress said:

I STILL type as though I'm on a typewriter - very heavy-handedly and quite noisy, ha ha.

I too learnt to type on an old (even then) manual typewriter that needed some decent welly to make any kind of impression (literally). The next keyboards I came to use were big chunky IBM jobs attached to dumb terminals - very robust, these actually thrived on being hit really hard and only gave problems when the fag-ash built up under the keys.

Standard procedure to scare the permies was for the contractors to type VERY FAST and VERY LOUDLY while looking out of the window.

I can still touch type but lack of practice (and flimsy modern laptop keyboards) mean my two-finger technique is now quicker and less damaging.