Digital photo storage

[belle&beast]

How do you store your digital photos? I am looking into an external hard drive, but have no idea how much memory I will need. I am sure my photos are taking up too much space on my computer, but I just cannot delete them without another source. (I have burned them to CDs, but it is just too final to me!) Any advice? Oh- if it helps, I take 100-200 pictures/month on the average. On a week long WDW vacation, I took 1000+ and had photopass. I delete the bad shots and scrapbook the majority of the photos, so they are really important to me.

 

[cjstarr]

How do you store your digital photos? I am looking into an external hard drive, but have no idea how much memory I will need. I am sure my photos are taking up too much space on my computer, but I just cannot delete them without another source. (I have burned them to CDs, but it is just too final to me!) Any advice? Oh- if it helps, I take 100-200 pictures/month on the average. On a week long WDW vacation, I took 1000+ and had photopass. I delete the bad shots and scrapbook the majority of the photos, so they are really important to me.

Putting them on a CD is one of the best thing you can do to preserve your photos. (I do this) I also have a WD 500 Gig external hard drive to store pictures on, but remember anything stored on a HD that goes bad more then likely is lost and not recoverable.

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

Putting them on a CD is one of the best thing you can do to preserve your photos. (I do this) I also have a WD 500 Gig external hard drive to store pictures on, but remember anything stored on a HD that goes bad more then likely is lost and not recoverable.

I've had more CD/DVD failures than I have hard drive crashes. That being said I am paranoid and have 2 external hard drives and a stack of DVDs.

The other problem with CD/DVD storage is that technology changes. CDs have pretty much given way to DVD for mass storage and I expect Blu-Ray will probably take over for DVD at some point. I for one am looking forward to that since you can get 25 Gigabytes per side of a Blu-Ray disc versus 4.7 Gigabytes for single-side DVD versus 650-700 Megabytes for a CD. If I can cut down the number of discs I have by a factor of 5 I am all for it.

 

[cjstarr]

I've had more CD/DVD failures than I have hard drive crashes. That being said I am paranoid and have 2 external hard drives and a stack of DVDs.

The other problem with CD/DVD storage is that technology changes. CDs have pretty much given way to DVD for mass storage and I expect Blu-Ray will probably take over for DVD at some point. I for one am looking forward to that since you can get 25 Gigabytes per side of a Blu-Ray disc versus 4.7 Gigabytes for single-side DVD versus 650-700 Megabytes for a CD. If I can cut down the number of discs I have by a factor of 5 I am all for it.

I agree with the Blu-Ray disc AZ JazzyJ though I'm just the reverse when it comes with CD's. I have had way more HD failures then CD's.

 

[DVCRon]

To be safe you can do both. Back up the images to an external HD dedicated for that purpose as well as some quality DVDs. You can get 500GB of storage for about $100. I use Western Digital but there are many good brands out there.

 

[BuzzLiteyear]

I have (2) 500GB externals (1 backs up the other), I burn DVD's (1 set @ home and 1 @ work), and I upload everything in JPEG to smugmug (4 copies on three servers, I think). I am a bit paranoid, so I back-up as much as possible. Even with my triple-double-double-quadruple back-up, I still worry and wish I had one more place to put them. Oh yeah, I also have copies on my laptop too .

 

[Groucho]

Hard drives are way, way less reliable than CDs and DVDs... and leaving a hard drive in a box somewhere or on a shelf is no guarantee that it'll still work when you check it later.

I burn stuff to two DVDs, one of which goes into a firesafe. I try to keep them online one of my PCs on my network too but those darn RAWs really take up a lot of space. I may have to pick up another drive one of these days...

You can also use an online backup, some of them offer a lot of storage for not that much money. This means that it's their responsibility to keep duplicates, backups, etc. You should still have a CD/DVD burnt yourself, but it's not so critical.

Re: CD vs DVD, remember that DVDs are a good bit cheaper per meg of storage than CDs are - I almost never burn CDs any more. Good internal DVD burners can be had for about $30 nowadays so there's little excuse to not have one. I'm also looking forward to BluRay burners dropping in price, I'm glad that BluRay won the HD battle, just for the extra 5 gigs of storage over HD-DVD. Use dual-layer blanks and you're up to 50 gigs! That's a whole lotta photos by any measure.