digital photo storage recommendations

[lovetheprincesses]

Hi, everyone on this board is always so helpful, I am hoping you can help me again....my computer has thousands of pictures on it, and is really slow. What do I need so that I can automatically pull all photos and possibly music as well off my hard drive. I would like something small enough so that I can store this "something" in my bank safety deposit box for safekeeping a copy of my photos. Can you recommend what I need? Thank you in advance!!

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

Carbonite is an online solution that some people use (assuming you have broadband internet access).

For me, I have adopted the rule of three-two-one

A file does not exist unless there are three copies of it, on two different forms of media, and at least one of those copies is off-site.

I went out and bought two 1TB portable hard drives. I keep copies of all my pictures on my PC hard drive. At the end of the month I copy the entire folder off to portable hard drive #1. That drive goes to the safety deposit box and I go grab portable hard drive #2 and bring it home. At the end of the next month, I will repeat the process and put drive #2 in the safety deposit box and bring drive #1 home.

I also make a DVD of each card when I'm done shooting it and keep that in a fire safe in my home.

I know that workflow isn't automatic, but I have always been afraid of losing my pictures. A guy I work with was in the situation you are and he lost the hard drive - totally unrecoverable. Lost all the pics of his daughter from child birth up until 2 years old.

I bought Western Digital MyBook portable hard drives for about $100. They are small and easily fit in my safety deposit box.

 

[lovetheprincesses]

Thank you SO much!!!

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

You are welcome.

I guess I should clarify that the drives were about $100 each when I bought them. I'm sure you can get 1.5TB drives now for around that price.

 

[lovetheprincesses]

Even better! Thanks again!

 

[Luv2Scrap]

Carbonite is an online solution that some people use (assuming you have broadband internet access).

For me, I have adopted the rule of three-two-one

A file does not exist unless there are three copies of it, on two different forms of media, and at least one of those copies is off-site.

I went out and bought two 1TB portable hard drives. I keep copies of all my pictures on my PC hard drive. At the end of the month I copy the entire folder off to portable hard drive #1. That drive goes to the safety deposit box and I go grab portable hard drive #2 and bring it home. At the end of the next month, I will repeat the process and put drive #2 in the safety deposit box and bring drive #1 home.

I also make a DVD of each card when I'm done shooting it and keep that in a fire safe in my home.

I know that workflow isn't automatic, but I have always been afraid of losing my pictures. A guy I work with was in the situation you are and he lost the hard drive - totally unrecoverable. Lost all the pics of his daughter from child birth up until 2 years old.

I bought Western Digital MyBook portable hard drives for about $100. They are small and easily fit in my safety deposit box.

I am also trying to figure out how to deal with this. I think I like your idea here. Just to clarify, do both of your portable hard drives have complete copies of all of your pictures? And after you've done that, do you then delete them off your computer hard drive, so they don't bog it down?

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

I have a large enough hard drive on my PC that I don't have to delete them off of it (once they are on the portable drives) but it will probably get to that point soon.

When a drive comes back from the safety deposit box, I wipe it and then just copy everything over again from the PC.

It really would be better if there was an app like Time Machine on the mac that automatically did backups for me rather than this manual process.

 

[ssanders79]

On a monthly basis I typically backup my images from my laptop to a DVDr (this goes in a fire proof box) and to and external drive. Then I remove the image files from my laptop. Lightroom keeps track of them on the external so I do not need to be connected to the external to view a thumbnail when browsing for older images.

So far the external drive is working great.

 

[AlbertZeroK]

We use JungleDisk with Amazon S3 as our backup medium. Works great and the archive is available online through a simple web interface, but you will pay per GB for storage.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

I'm always worried about cloud based solutions. Like one day they go belly up and everyone is scrambling to get their data off there servers.

 

[MICKEY88]

I have a large enough hard drive on my PC that I don't have to delete them off of it (once they are on the portable drives) but it will probably get to that point soon.

When a drive comes back from the safety deposit box, I wipe it and then just copy everything over again from the PC.

It really would be better if there was an app like Time Machine on the mac that automatically did backups for me rather than this manual process.

I'm curious, why wipe the drive and recopy everything, why not just copy the new stuff over

 

[MICKEY88]

another option, is a dock with internal drives, more cost effective than external drives, takes up less space, and if you have an esata connection on your pc, way faster than an external connected to a usb port

I actually have a dual dock, I took it and 2 1TB internal drives with me to florida in January, at the end of each day I uploaded my pics to my laptop, then copied them over to one of the drives in the dock, then copied from that drive to the other one, so I had 3 copies of my pics, when I got home...

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

I'm curious, why wipe the drive and recopy everything, why not just copy the new stuff over

Yes, I could do that. Up until recently I have not had a good folder structure in my library. But this summer I went through and organized everything by year, etc, so that method would be much easier.

 

[MICKEY88]

Yes, I could do that. Up until recently I have not had a good folder structure in my library. But this summer I went through and organized everything by year, etc, so that method would be much easier.

even if you try copying everything over, it will alert you that there is a folder, file etc with that name already and ask if you want to replace it or skip it..

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

True enough.

 

[bonoriffic]

And after you've done that, do you then delete them off your computer hard drive, so they don't bog it down?

Having thousands of pictures or music files shouldn't ever "bog" your computer down. If it is, that is signs of larger problems.

Is your hard drive nearly full? Do you have every picture in one huge folder? As long as neither of these two conditions are met, your computer shouldn't appear slower with 1 or 10,000 pictures.

 

[Luv2Scrap]

Having thousands of pictures or music files shouldn't ever "bog" your computer down. If it is, that is signs of larger problems.

Is your hard drive nearly full? Do you have every picture in one huge folder? As long as neither of these two conditions are met, your computer shouldn't appear slower with 1 or 10,000 pictures.

How about 40,000 pictures? And now that my Canon T2i is 18mp, I fear it will fill up everything!

So far I don't think it's bogging down the computer, but I thought I'd heard that it could happen.

edited to add: I've started the process of "cleaning up" my picture files. I know there are several thousand bad pics and duplicates that I never had time to deal with. This will be a step in the right direction!

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

As long as you have space on your hard drive for the swap file, you can have as many pics as you want on your hard drive.

Storage is cheap!

 

[bonoriffic]

How about 40,000 pictures? And now that my Canon T2i is 18mp, I fear it will fill up everything!

So far I don't think it's bogging down the computer, but I thought I'd heard that it could happen.

Assuming you have at least 10% of your hard drive free and are running Windows 7, you will not have any performance impact by 40,000 pictures. Disk fragmentation will eventually impact performance, but Windows 7 (and to some extent Vista) take care of this in the background. If you are editing and deleting duplicates as you plan to do, you are setting yourself up for fragmentation and you should probably manually intervene just to make sure it isn't getting too out of hand.

There are other factors and any sort of background indexing program will be impacted by thousands of files. If you have background face tagging in action, non-standard search tools and toolbars, and other programs which constantly index and re-index files you might slow down.