How do you store your digital photos?

Alain Quay

What do you do when you have so many they clog up your pc/laptop?
Flickr or similar, external drive, or onto disc? Would be grateful advice

Stewie Griffin

pc? Buy a bigger internal hard disk. Laptop, buy a big external one.

daviesee

There is only one safe route for this in my opinion.

Use 2 external hard drives and back up to both at the same time.
They are getting cheaper by the week :P Buy big!
That way, if one fails and aparently they do, you will have a back up.
The other reason for using 2 is to keep one at home and one at work.
That way in the event of a fire you will still have one copy.

Ask anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of a house fire. One of the things they miss the most are their family photos.

nicklouse

daviesee
+1

also my ripped music is likewise stored.

cjw

daviesee wrote:

There is only one safe route for this in my opinion.

Use 2 external hard drives and back up to both at the same time.
They are getting cheaper by the week :P Buy big!
That way, if one fails and aparently they do, you will have a back up.
The other reason for using 2 is to keep one at home and one at work.
That way in the event of a fire you will still have one copy.

Ask anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of a house fire. One of the things they miss the most are their family photos.

That's almost exactly what we do. Have photos on main drive - which backs up automatically to second drive in the PC and also to an external Terastation network drive. Every now and again (eg after holidays or birthdays), a further backup is made to a plug in USB drive that is left at work incase of house fire.

Also have a number of the best photos selected into albums and burnt onto DVDs - but these are also in the house so not really a backup.

sampras38

I shoot quite a lot in RAW so the files are big. I tend to save them, plus all my jpgs on a terrabyte external drive. I don't have any pics on my laptop as storage is so cheap these days there really is no need.

bompington

I've made most of the possible mistakes in my computing career, I would say the important things to do are
1. backup
2. backup again to a different location (preferably different building, as mentioned above)
3. repeat steps 1 & 2. Daily, for ever.

Plenty of free software to do it automatically or you can pay a bit to get more sophisicated stuff, I have a network to run so I've paid a whole $30 for Second Copy, this does everything for a network with 40 computers and 50 users.

If you have heaps of stuff then external HDDs are the thing, unless you have multiple computers you can swap backups between. If you can sort out a few Gb of stuff you really want then a phone or even mp3 player is really handy.

As also mentioned above, all media can fail - one reason why it's worth having multiple backups. In particular I've had to console sobbing colleagues (OK I'm exaggerating, but not much) when their flash drives fail completely without warning. At least it's a couple of years now since anyone came to me asking to recover the data on a floppy.
HDDs are, in my experience, the most reliable storage.

owenlars

I use a second (big) hardrive in my desktop PC and a network drive, both backed up simultaneously.

ride_whenever

For my important stuff i tend to back up on my desktop (1.25Tb) our home server (not sure how large it is at the moment, but pretty huge) then also onto the work server.

ex-pat scot

Had a couple of HDs fail on me over the past few years.


Can back up to second HD in your PC, but no use if stolen / fire/ virus.

Better is external HD.
Better still is 2 x external HDs: 1 at home and 1 at work / family / neighbours. Ask around - other PC literate people would happily return the favour (although you might want to secure the data on yours).

External drives - good ones- are now pretty darn cheap.
Less than £70 gets you a 1TB Iomega drive.

Make sure you back up all personal stuff:
-mailbox
-all documents
-all photos
-music and video you can't easily replace

Do it regularly

daviesee

sampras38 wrote:

I shoot quite a lot in RAW so the files are big. I tend to save them, plus all my jpgs on a terrabyte external drive. I don't have any pics on my laptop as storage is so cheap these days there really is no need.

I only back up my RAW files. They are big files but if I don't save the jpegs I gain some back there. Work in progress is kept on the laptop until printed. Yes, I still print :shock:
Re-processing RAW files if necessary is not such a big deal as my post-processing skills have increased over the years so any I do now are better than my "originals" from a couple of years ago :P

MattC59

In a photo album

sicknewt

Use picasa http://picasa.google.co.uk/

It helps you manage your photos and backs them up to the web for you. You get 1Gb of storage free, I think 10Gig cost me $10 for a year...

Takes a while to upload when you want to copy everything up when you start using it but now when I copy files onto my laptop it only takes a few mins to upload the new files.

Also has the benifit of being able to share the files online if you want to...

fungus_the_muffin_man

I used to make the mistake of keeping them all on the main computer which decided to give up the ghost last week and now all my music and photo's have gone

The missus's bro has tried to get onto the hard drive via his PC but he can't access a single file on it. I'll be buying an external drive soon to back everything up to and making sure all my pics get uploaded to flikr or something as well.

I'm gutted there were some very special pics on there

APIII

Back up to dvds. As someone else said, no media is entirely safe, but any hardrive stands a good chance of failure eventually (I've had several go). DVDs are not foolproof, but clearly they have no moving parts, so they will only fail if you treat them poorly. 4.7gb is still a decent amount of storage space for most photographers, so you can get your whole library backed up reasonably cheaply and easily. Make two copies, 1 that you actually use, and another stored safely somewhere.

Porgy

I'm doing everything - two external hard drives and i'm about to buy a third as my music collection is outgrowing the 160 GB drive I have at the moment - I have a load backed up on-line, most of them are also stored on two laptops, and i've burned a fair few onto disc. I'm taking no chances.

ride_whenever

dvds in a waterproof box in a fireproof safe...

perfect.

fungus_the_muffin_man

Is the best way to stoe on disc to compress and zip file? or is there any other way compact the info so to get more to disc?

APIII

Fungus The Muffin Man wrote:

Is the best way to stoe on disc to compress and zip file? or is there any other way compact the info so to get more to disc?

No offence, but discs are about 20p, and you should be able to get a few thousand pics on each, so I wouldn't worry about compressing.

hamstrich

APIII wrote:

Fungus The Muffin Man wrote:

Is the best way to stoe on disc to compress and zip file? or is there any other way compact the info so to get more to disc?

No offence, but discs are about 20p, and you should be able to get a few thousand pics on each, so I wouldn't worry about compressing.

Also, if your pics are in JPEG format then they're already highly compressed, so zipping them probably won't have much of an effect on their size.

daviesee

sicknewt wrote:

Use picasa http://picasa.google.co.uk/

It helps you manage your photos and backs them up to the web for you. You get 1Gb of storage free, I think 10Gig cost me $10 for a year...

Takes a while to upload when you want to copy everything up when you start using it but now when I copy files onto my laptop it only takes a few mins to upload the new files.

Also has the benifit of being able to share the files online if you want to...

Everone has different levels of requirements, like bikes
I have around 300GB of photos and 90GB of music.

HDD's are the only viable option for me.

northstar

If you are really into photography flickr is more than worth the cost.

shouldbeinbed

APIII wrote:

Back up to dvds. As someone else said, no media is entirely safe, but any hardrive stands a good chance of failure eventually (I've had several go). DVDs are not foolproof, but clearly they have no moving parts, so they will only fail if you treat them poorly.

DVD's and CD-R's deteriorate over time and even if safely and properly stored with no wild light, humidity or temperature fluctuations that can fail or develop some problems over a number of years. You can buy archive quality ones which are better but are still not guaranteed to be 100% long term.

whatever hard media backup you feel safest with and internet storage as well so they're readily accessible wherever you are does it for me.

el_presidente

Fungus The Muffin Man wrote:

I used to make the mistake of keeping them all on the main computer which decided to give up the ghost last week and now all my music and photo's have gone

The missus's bro has tried to get onto the hard drive via his PC but he can't access a single file on it. I'll be buying an external drive soon to back everything up to and making sure all my pics get uploaded to flikr or something as well.

I'm gutted there were some very special pics on there

Fungus - there are plenty of professional outfits who will recover files from hard drives, most things are recoverable especially with just a basic failed computer. Do some reearch, it will cost but sounds like it will be worth it.

beverick

hamstrich wrote:

APIII wrote:

Fungus The Muffin Man wrote:

Is the best way to stoe on disc to compress and zip file? or is there any other way compact the info so to get more to disc?

No offence, but discs are about 20p, and you should be able to get a few thousand pics on each, so I wouldn't worry about compressing.

Also, if your pics are in JPEG format then they're already highly compressed, so zipping them probably won't have much of an effect on their size.

You can also "resize" JPEGs down to a few kb.

fossyant

I run raid (two mirrored HD's) on my home pc - covers me if a drive fails....has done twice !

HonestAl

If you've got any need to get to them from more than 1 computer, or don't want the hassle of cabling up your laptop each time, you might think about a network drive, prices are way low. For example attach one to your router (assuming you use one) then a second drive to the network drive for secondary backups. Transfer of files is slower than cabled to a USB port, but there's no hassle in doing it at all.

pneumatic

el_presidente wrote:

Fungus The Muffin Man wrote:

I used to make the mistake of keeping them all on the main computer which decided to give up the ghost last week and now all my music and photo's have gone

The missus's bro has tried to get onto the hard drive via his PC but he can't access a single file on it. I'll be buying an external drive soon to back everything up to and making sure all my pics get uploaded to flikr or something as well.

I'm gutted there were some very special pics on there

Fungus - there are plenty of professional outfits who will recover files from hard drives, most things are recoverable especially with just a basic failed computer. Do some reearch, it will cost but sounds like it will be worth it.

+1

I have a good friend who runs a computer business. She managed to rescue all the data off our dead PC using specialist equipment. If she had charged, it would have been worth the money. As it is, a bottle of wine or two and we were back up and running.