External Hard Drive?

[crisi]

I use Mozy - which is offsite backup (its an EMC company) - in addition to having a small NAS in our house for local backup. That way if the house gets robbed and the electronics stolen, or the house burns down, the important files are offsite. Mozy will give you some storage for free.

 

[HLDisney]

I'm very anal about losing my pictures and digital scrapbooking pages so I have my photos on my computer hard drive, an external hard drive, uploaded to Smugmug.com and backed up by Mozy (Mozy backs up all my files) Smugmug and Mozy have small yearly fees but I consider it insurance. I've had my share of computer failures in the past and I'm just not willing to chance losing all of my photos from the past 7 years (when I first started using a digital camera)

I have several portable external hard drives and I always get Western Digital.

Helen

 

[disneyfan551]

Oh my...just the thought of my photos being lost TOTALLY FREAKS ME OUT! This is a good thread, because I've been trying to figure out what I need to do with my photos too. I have two laptops, and BOTH of them are so full with photos that I can not add more to them until I take some off! (And that's very frustrating, when I just returned from a week at Disney and a week on the DCL...with tons of pictures to look at! )
Any further advice is greatly welcome!!

 

[dawson5]

you can view them on your pc without downloading them on to it. Just point to the slot and explore, click on the pic and you should be able to "page" through them. This is how mine works at least.

 

[manning]

That's all well and good, as long as the SD cards don't become obsolete. I can recall the days of saving stuff on floppy disks. Disks that I can no longer read.

You can buy a floppy reader cheap, also it is easy to transfer to a cd/dvd. Just copy and paste.

PLEASE do not just move the pictures to the external drive. As one PP already stated, it's not IF a hard drive will crash, it's WHEN. Look at your computer and see if the pictures are truly taking up too much space. Go to My Computer, right click your C drive and go to properties. See how much space is available. If the computer is fairly new, I'm willing to bet you have plenty of free disk space available and you can use the external as a backup drive. If you do not have enough space, consider adding another large internal drive to your computer, storing your pictures on it, then backing that drive up to the external.

My boys are 2 and 5. I got my first digital camera when my oldest was 3 months old. Their entire lives are on my computer. I have logged over 10,000 pictures on my current camera alone. One of my friends once told me they love looking at my vacation pictures because they feel like they were right there with us. If I lost those pictures I would be devastated! I store my pictures on a 1TB internal drive and back them up to an external. I always back up before leaving for vacation and I either take the external with me or leave it with my Mom - for fear of someone breaking in while we are away and stealing my computer equipment.

I have been in the IT field for 12 years and have seen many people lose all their family pictures due to a crashed hard dive with no backup. It's well worth the $100 to safeguard these memories.

Also do not erase your memory cards until you have the backup made. A couple of months ago I had a seagate external hd crash on me. I copied my pictures to it and when I went to copy from the one drive to the backup dvd I couldn't get it to work. Luckily I still had the pictures on the cards.

Not only do I backup on an external drive, I backup to a dvd. I am seriously considering a flash drive. It is the same as the card in your camera except it has bigger capacity.

 

[nunzia]

man...isn't technology great
I also make prints of pictures as soon as I can, since I scrapbook and have dreams of someday actually ahving time, so right now I pick the good ones, print and file to the 'someday" I've gotten where I upload and get prints from WalGreens since I have their storage and I have yet to be able to beat them with al the online photo places (i wait for their 10 cent sales and pick them up so there is no shipping),

 

[manning]

man...isn't technology great
I also make prints of pictures as soon as I can, since I scrapbook and have dreams of someday actually ahving time, so right now I pick the good ones, print and file to the 'someday" I've gotten where I upload and get prints from WalGreens since I have their storage and I have yet to be able to beat them with al the online photo places (i wait for their 10 cent sales and pick them up so there is no shipping),

Keep them in a dark dry place. In time they will fade. The only picture that will last almost forever is a black and white print. If you are going to put the picture in a frame and show it make sure you put the picture behind glass to cut the ultra violet light. that is what causes fading the fastest.

I have some pictures made over ten years sitting in my family room not under glass but not in sunlight. They were printed on an HP printer before pigment ink appeared. They are holding up very well, but there is some fading.