Where do you keep all of your photos?
Discussion
Just a quick question, what is your method of storage, do you keep them all on your PC, external hard drive or other forms? I have just moved about three quarters of my desktop to another folder on the desktop 
(over 40 Gigabyte!) which is a minute amount of my photos ( i also have 100+ CD's all full up, each 750 MB) and im only 17, so was wondering how i should store them all. Is an external hard drive a good investment?
thanks
(over 40 Gigabyte!) which is a minute amount of my photos ( i also have 100+ CD's all full up, each 750 MB) and im only 17, so was wondering how i should store them all. Is an external hard drive a good investment? thanks
couple of hard drives covering the last years stuff.. Apertures Vaults written to hard drive.
One here, one in the office.
Swap them every month so the last months is in the office.
Anything older than a year is archived to DVD and put in the fire safe.
I'm looking to change that based on Apples Time Machine software - I'll figure that out this coming week or two as I think it may offer me more options especially with the cost of hard drives getting stupidly cheap and large in size.
A hard drive a year seems like a good idea..
One here, one in the office.
Swap them every month so the last months is in the office.
Anything older than a year is archived to DVD and put in the fire safe.
I'm looking to change that based on Apples Time Machine software - I'll figure that out this coming week or two as I think it may offer me more options especially with the cost of hard drives getting stupidly cheap and large in size.
A hard drive a year seems like a good idea..
personally - anything that comes down from the camera. If I've deleted it on the camera it's gone, if it's down to the Mac its backed up unless I decide that it's useless. I generally do think about photographs before clicking the shutter so I don't have a lot of garbage except when experimenting.
Just as a general piece of advice, CDs and DVDs are only really suitable for transient data, not for use as an archive media since they degrade with time. Some companies have claimed a 50 year life (but this has not been proved!) when in reality, most decent branded discs will last upto 7 years in ideal conditions (so dark and cool with no temperature fluctuations).
My advice would be to use a hard disk in the PC, with a separate hard disk as a backup – unless you fancy going down the tape route…
My advice would be to use a hard disk in the PC, with a separate hard disk as a backup – unless you fancy going down the tape route…
john185k said:
^^ as above, however without the DVD's or fireproof safe - and his photos are alot better than mine.... lol
To be fair, one of the most useful and unusual Christmas presents ever from my Dad, nearly killed me getting it into the house from the car 
. It's so useful for those hard to replace docs like birth certificate, marriage certificates, house and travel insurance, passports etc.Podie raises a good point about the transient nature of DVDs / CDs but I think for most of us the additional tape drive is an optino too far. I suspect I will add another external hard drive in the future and so effectively be running 3 full copies of my hard disk I hope the chnes of 3 simultaneouis failures will be low !
I suspect development of either solid state type memory a la Compact Flash or reliability of hard drive types of storage will all increase in the next few years so we should be able to move our data to more reliable storage devices/formats.
Chris
^^ Wot Podie said - don't rely on DVDs to last very long.
I keep everything on my (large) laptop harddrive, which at last count had just short of twenty thousand photos on it. They're copied onto a second 'backup' laptop and an external hard drive, which is periodically checked and re-written.
If I were taking things seriously, I'd get an external RAID box which should be fairly fault tolerant - when we've built our house I'll probably build a home server that would withstand a nuclear hit.
I keep everything on my (large) laptop harddrive, which at last count had just short of twenty thousand photos on it. They're copied onto a second 'backup' laptop and an external hard drive, which is periodically checked and re-written.
If I were taking things seriously, I'd get an external RAID box which should be fairly fault tolerant - when we've built our house I'll probably build a home server that would withstand a nuclear hit.
Edited by Tuna on Friday 21st December 10:05
DanH said:
Tapes aren't exactly robust either... Normally used for constant rotating backups so data is frequently archived and replaced on them. The tapes get replaced quite often too...
Agreed, but with the appropriate software, you can do incremental backups, so you further minimise risk.Personally we have a RAID5 solution...
Tapes are a pain though... and the more effort you need to backup your data, the less likely it is to be backed up, plus if you need to retreive a file, it's much quicker to just copy it off a drive than dig out a tape, then extract the file from an archive.
Personally, I have mine stored on a mirrored RAID 1 drive on my Mac, and copied to a RAID 5 external array. I'm also about to copy important stuff (company accounts, emails, RAW files) onto an additional external RAID 1 mirrored drive which will be stored at my parents.
Personally, I have mine stored on a mirrored RAID 1 drive on my Mac, and copied to a RAID 5 external array. I'm also about to copy important stuff (company accounts, emails, RAW files) onto an additional external RAID 1 mirrored drive which will be stored at my parents.
Not just photo's, but other data as well.
Main copy on server, backup copy on other PC, another backup copy on an external USB disk, and finally, a monthly backup on a removable disk thats kept at work. So always have 4 copies of the data including off site.
I've had too many hard drives just die, and DVD-R are not good enough for longer term storage. Hard drives are cheap compared to the photo's/data/music you could lose.
Main copy on server, backup copy on other PC, another backup copy on an external USB disk, and finally, a monthly backup on a removable disk thats kept at work. So always have 4 copies of the data including off site.
I've had too many hard drives just die, and DVD-R are not good enough for longer term storage. Hard drives are cheap compared to the photo's/data/music you could lose.
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