Storing electronic pictures

[Kelemvor]

Howdy,

Looking for advice or ideas on storing archive copies of our family photos. We currently have over 50 gigs of them spanning back a number of years. (Darn 12 meg camera takes huge pictures these days)

Anyway, the options I'm considering are:
1) Burning to DVDs and storing in a safe deposit box at the bank.
2) Copying to multiple large flash drives and storing at the bank.
3) Finding some sort of online backup type program like dropbox, skydrive, etc and using that to store them. Free would be great but I haven't found one with as much space as I need.
4) Anything else I haven't thought of yet.

I currently have my pictures stored on 3 PCs via synctoy so I'm not worried about my computer crashing. I'm worried about like the house burning down or some major catastrophe like that.

So what would everyone recommend or not recommend? Are flash drives safe in a safe deposit box? Are DVDs or Flash drives not recommend for storing things for long periods of time like that for any reason?

Just looking at all the options so we can pick the best one.

UPDATE:
Hmm, Crashplan looks interesting. I can park an old PC at my parents house and use that to store my backups. hmm. And it's free for that? Very tempting.


Thanks!!

 

[corwin]

One large HD and store at the bank...cheaper than flash drives and DVD/CD break down after long periods of time, like 10 years or so I think...

I have a network HD plugged in inside a firesafe in my home personally...

 

[Gooberlx2]

Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite, etc...

Crashplan is free, and allows you to backup onsite + offsite to a family member or friend also running the software.

Frankly, the costs of the online services aren't unreasonable and their reliability is likely going to be much greater than yours or your friends/family.

 

[Modelworks]

Flash drives are going to be the safest long term. If inside a metal box the chances of erasure for the next 20 years are slim.

If you really want permanent storage there should be soon coming on the market OTP drives. OTP drives are a return to the older PROM chips. Once the information is written it is permanent and cannot be erased and is immune to radiation, emp type stuff, light, water and temperatures from -25F - 150F.


The biggest thing to consider for really long term storage is that you have some way to read the media you use. I know people that have bought a laptop and stored it with the DVD backups they are archiving just for that purpose. May seem crazy, but can you guarantee that in 20 years you can find something to read a DVD ?

 

[sdifox]

all of the above. You cannot have enough backups.

 

[corwin]

Flash drives are going to be the safest long term. If inside a metal box the chances of erasure for the next 20 years are slim. If you really want permanent storage there should be soon coming on the market OTP drives. OTP drives are a return to the older PROM chips. Once the information is written it is permanent and cannot be erased and is immune to radiation, emp type stuff, light, water and temperatures from -25F - 150F.

An HD would be just as safe as flash and infinitely cheaper...and seems like an HD would be just about as secure as the OTP with the exception of water

 

[EagleKeeper]

I found a 10yr old flash drive that still had some pics on it. So that should last.

I would recommend burning to DVD and putting in a fire proof box. A second copy could go to the bank if you already have a box.

Or just purchase a 1TB drive; copy to it and store the drive. Update it every time you dump the camera and have determined which phtos you want to save

 

[corwin]

The biggest thing to consider for really long term storage is that you have some way to read the media you use. I know people that have bought a laptop and stored it with the DVD backups they are archiving just for that purpose. May seem crazy, but can you guarantee that in 20 years you can find something to read a DVD ?

Same can be said for a USB port...but the odds are good for any of the curernt options, or if something you're using is becoming hard to find you can always update your storage to a newer system before it's completely obsolete

 

[Kelemvor]

Hmm, Crashplan looks interesting. I can park an old PC at my parents house and use that to store my backups. hmm. And it's free for that? Very tempting.

 

[Texashiker]

This is how I store and backup my images:

Take pictures
Copy images to two external drives - one drive is a passport drive
Fill up drives, buy new drives

Backup images to DVD once a year or so, send disk to my moms house as an offsite backup.

Both external drives have matching folders labeled with the month and year, + various folders for related images.

My current passport drive is 500 gigs, I started on this drive in January 2011, and still have 248 gigs free.

My plan is to buy a new passport drive every january, even if the drive is not full, and then label the drives per year. These drives are cheap and do not require a power source besides USB. That way I do not have to keep up with a power supply for the drive.

Besides the passport drives, I have a 1.5 terabyte external drive that images are stored on. When its filled up, I will buy another one. But this drive requires a power supply.

This gives me 3 copies of my files - 2 external drives and DVD offsite.

 

[mvbighead]

A coworker of man keeps two external drives for his backups. One he updates at home, the other stays in his desk. When he's ready to update, he swaps them around.

Can you store it at work OP?

 

[lxskllr]

Same can be said for a USB port...but the odds are good for any of the curernt options, or if something you're using is becoming hard to find you can always update your storage to a newer system before it's completely obsolete

USB is kind of a core technology. When picking a solution, it's better to make a best effort to use something with staying power. Converting to newer tech is always appropriate if you remember to do it. My old office lost a bunch of files that were stored on proprietary tape backup. The stuff wasn't super important, but still fell into the "would be really nice to have" category. No one thought to switch them to something else, so the files were virtually lost. I think USB will be around a lot longer than DVD.

 

[Modelworks]

Same can be said for a USB port...but the odds are good for any of the curernt options, or if something you're using is becoming hard to find you can always update your storage to a newer system before it's completely obsolete

The important part is you have to keep up with the storage and realize that options to read it are getting fewer. I know someone who found some old documents stored on worm media. Try finding working worm drives now and then try getting it up and running .

 

[Eli]

DVDs and HDDs are a terrible idea. Very unreliable in the scheme of things.

 

[sdifox]

anyone got a spare punch card reader head in their storage? mine is worn.

 

[rivan]

anyone got a spare punch card reader head in their storage? mine is worn.

WTB Jaz drive.

 

[uhohs]

i wonder if i still have that Syquest SparQ drive boxed away. 1gb disks were so amazing back in the day. ;_;

 

[Texashiker]

DVDs and HDDs are a terrible idea. Very unreliable in the scheme of things.

Then what do you suggest?

It seems to me the only "real" way to store your images is to have them printed out, and have offsite storage. Between my wife and I, we take an average of 20,000 pictures a year, plus or minus a few.

But as it stands right now, I will stay with external drives, DVDs and printing out some of my images.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I have a picture folder with year folders in them. So 2009 2010 etc. Within each folder I have decription folders such as "Toronto trip - July" or something like that.

As far as backing it all up, I have a HDD dock that I run regular backups of my entire environment including the pictures. Two of those drives end up at a post office box every 2 weeks or so. Since my bandwidth sucks, I can't upload the pictures anywhere. I only upload code and other data to my online server.

If something happened to my city I'd be screwed I guess, but I'm safe from a house fire, flood etc.

The nice thing about a PO box is I can also use the number for the whois info on my domains, so I don't have to put my real address. I also have a free phone number to voicemail service that I use so I put that as the number.

 

[Red Squirrel]

DVDs and HDDs are a terrible idea. Very unreliable in the scheme of things.

If you always duplicate on 2 drives, you should be fine. The odds of two drives failing is not that great. Probably a good idea to add new drives to the pool over time, and maybe retire older ones as archives.

Tapes are also fairly reliable, but very expensive. A tape drive will cost around 10k, and each tape is 100 bucks or more. So its cheaper to just go with 2 hard drives per backup job.

 

[ViviTheMage]

use backblaze...
personally I just have 3 copies...1 production, back up + offsite backup...I NEED my data .

 

[ElFenix]

multiple offsite backups using different media. BR discs are about 4 cents a GB right now, which is a tiny bit more than DVDs at 3 cents a GB, but they write so much faster that the BRs are more convenient. hard drives are about 3 cents a GB as well, and the fastest storage solution, but i wouldn't mail one of those.

 

[Cienja]

This is how I store and backup my images:

Take pictures
Copy images to two external drives - one drive is a passport drive
Fill up drives, buy new drives

Backup images to DVD once a year or so, send disk to my moms house as an offsite backup.

Both external drives have matching folders labeled with the month and year, + various folders for related images.

My current passport drive is 500 gigs, I started on this drive in January 2011, and still have 248 gigs free.

My plan is to buy a new passport drive every january, even if the drive is not full, and then label the drives per year. These drives are cheap and do not require a power source besides USB. That way I do not have to keep up with a power supply for the drive.

Besides the passport drives, I have a 1.5 terabyte external drive that images are stored on. When its filled up, I will buy another one. But this drive requires a power supply.

This gives me 3 copies of my files - 2 external drives and DVD offsite.

This. Except, I hadn't thought about burning DVDs and storing them offsite - I need to do that.

 

[Texashiker]

This. Except, I hadn't thought about burning DVDs and storing them offsite - I need to do that.

The problem I run into, I do video blogging on youtube and include a bunch of video files on the DVDs. Sometimes I have to use 3, 4 and even 5 disk for a single month.

I thought about buying another 1.5 terabyte or 2 terabyte external drive, copying my files to it, and then sending it to my moms house.

 

[SMOGZINN]

You might want to check out Shutterfly. Shutterfly lets you store unlimited images at full size, and show compressed images in web albums, but charges you if you ever want to get your full size images back. Personally I think this is an acceptable trade off, as I don't expect to ever need the service but would like to have it if needed.

EDIT: anyone interested in photo hosting websites can check out this Wikipedia entry.