photo storage advice please

[hereyago]

Hi. I am usually a lurker,however, I need advice. Or opinions. I am buying dd14 a digital camera for Christmas. She will be going to NYC on spring break with drama class at school, so she wants a camera besides her camera on her phone. What do you use for photo storage? I mean should I get her photobooks or photo boxes or is online photo storage the way to go? TIA.

[photo_chick]

Storage while on spring break? Or storage in general?

[DSLRuser]

As the previous poster asked, we need details about what exactly you are asking.

But in general, and i mean general.... you shuld have 3 coppies of all you ir replaceable data. 2 copies on your local machine and a 3rd offsite.

my scheme actually uses 4 copies for my photots.

2 copies on my d: drive (using windows 8 storage pools with data redundancy)

1 copy on external hard drive kept at my work (updated monthly)

1 copy in the cloud (updated monthly)

so, if a hard drives fails, if my house catches on fire and destroys my computer, if a nuke takes out my city.....i will always have a back up

[photo_chick]

Oh yeah, you should totally have multiple backups, on multiple media and at least one of those really should be off site. No one form of storage is safe from failure or being made obsolete so the more copies of your image library you have the better.

However, monthly isn't often enough to back up IMO. Take it from someone who was robbed and hadn't backed up thier images in a couple of weeks. And there is no predicting hard drive crashes, do you really want to risk loosing your kid's birthday pictures because you didn't backup more often? I think it's a good practice to update at least one backup every time you download image files from your camera.

[Maria1985]

Originally Posted by DSLRuser

As the previous poster asked, we need details about what exactly you are asking.

But in general, and i mean general.... you shuld have 3 coppies of all you ir replaceable data. 2 copies on your local machine and a 3rd offsite.

my scheme actually uses 4 copies for my photots.

2 copies on my d: drive (using windows 8 storage pools with data redundancy)

1 copy on external hard drive kept at my work (updated monthly)

1 copy in the cloud (updated monthly)

so, if a hard drives fails, if my house catches on fire and destroys my computer, if a nuke takes out my city.....i will always have a back up

I thought you did a great job!No doubt about it.

[hereyago]

OP here: I apologize, I meant general long term storage. But thanks to all of you because I adnt thought about more then 1 back up. Than you again.

[boBQuincy]

As noted, redundancy is the key for reliability. Hard drives *will* fail, some sooner, some later, but just about all of them will quit someday. The idea is to have more than one copy and then we can replace/replicate a storage site when it fails.

By the numbers, if we have one copy at 90% reliability and add a second copy at the same reliability our total reliability then goes to 99%, not bad. The third copy gets us to 99.9% and so on. Having a copy offsite helps protect us from dangers other than drive failure.

Some of us (me included) go pretty far with this but my photos are worth a lot to me. I know a few people who have lost many photos due to having only one storage location. A few more $$$ and a little time/work to get almost foolproof storage seems worth it.

[Bonniec]

Agreed, they will fail at some point. I also keep them in 3 areas. One my hard drive, on an external hard drive, and on DVD/CDs. You can also store them online for a fourth option.

[DSLRuser]

Originally Posted by boBQuincy

I know a few people who have lost many photos due to having only one storage location. A few more $$$ and a little time/work to get almost foolproof storage seems worth it.

yep. me being the IT guy for my family and freinds. i cant tell you how many times I have been asked for help only after it's too late and data has been lost.

My wife used to scream at me because of all the $100 here and $100 there I spend on computer and camera gear.

But when her brother, and now a freind both lost 11 years worth of baby / kid photo and video. She understands.

We had a pretty bad lightning strike. Fried the home pc a few years ago. Not an issue. portable hard drive at work was brought home, all data restored in a day.

Whats funny, no matter how preachy i get, 9 out of 10 people i talk with / help still wont back up propperly.

[DSLRuser]

Originally Posted by photo_chick

I think it's a good practice to update at least one backup every time you download image files from your camera.

Thats were the "storage pools" in windows 8 is awesome. All data in the pool is automatically mirrored on 2 drives. So I have a copy the moment i transfer to my pc.

I will update the external and cloud drive more or less than every month, based on photo shoots. but you get the idea.

[traylorc]

I do not mean to hi jack the thread....but any recommendations regarding companies who offer to back up your information to the cloud?

[BirdsOfPreyDave]

I have many layers of redundancy.

I keep my primary copy on my laptop hard drive. I use the backup tool in my Norton 360 antivirus software to make two nightly backups. The first is to an external USB 1TB drive that I have attached to the back of my laptop with velcro. It stays on there permanently. The second is to an on-site Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex unit. This is a wireless device that you can put anywhere in the house. I have mine hidden in a closet so it isn't obvious if there's a break-in. It has 2 2TB drives attached to it, and both our laptops use this device to back up to every night.

In addition to those backups, I also have my files backed up in the cloud. I use www.crashplan.com, and have their CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan, which gives me unlimited online storage for up to 10 computers. I purchased several years of service at once, so the price worked out to be about $6 a month. This is a continuous backup, so as soon as I add or change files on my PC, they start replicating out to the cloud. It took almost a full month for my initial backup to complete, but now that it's finally all out there I feel comfortable that I'm covered even if there's a major incident here in the area. (We live near the ocean, so hurricanes are alway a possibility.)

I also use CrashPlan's software to schedule a monthly backup to a second external hard drive that I keep off site. I'd like to say it's kept in my office (which is the plan), but more likely than not, it's in my car. I'll bring it in and connect it to the laptop to do the backup (when prompted), then put it back in my car when the backup finishes.

In addition to those services that back up all my original files, I also keep copies of many photographs on both PhotoBucket.com and Flickr.com. I pay for the pro plans on both these sites. (I wish I'd looked at SmugMug before paying two years of Flickr because if its ability to block right-clicking, but what's done is done and I'm not paying for a 3rd site.) I have these sites mostly for sharing purposes, but it can be considered another version of a backup. I don't have the original RAW files on here, but there are some fairly-high resolution JPEGs uploaded there.

I like that I have multiple on-site, an off-site, and a cloud backup. I also use two different software packages to perform these backups. Those multiple layers of redundancy should cover me for all situations. (Knock on wood.) Fortunately (or not) we'll always have that picture of what I looked like in my swim suit at Disney World in 2012, no matter what.

[photo_chick]

Originally Posted by traylorc

I do not mean to hi jack the thread....but any recommendations regarding companies who offer to back up your information to the cloud?

How many computers and how much data?

I used Carbonite for a while but it was too expensive for the amount of data we were getting into and the multiple computers we have. I've heard good reviews of Mozy but that it also has trouble with multiple computers.

Right now I'm using Dropbox as a temporary backup of the files I'm working with at the moment and am using a hard drive stashed off site for my complete backup and so far it works well, especially considering I work with multiple computers on a regular basis. but it's definitely not a long term or large scale backup solution.