Photo Storage Question

[ToodlesRN]

What do you do with your photos for storage? It seems that I might be missing something else on storing our photo's.

What I do is download them onto a keycard and then on our online Smugmug account. I do erase them off our camera disk should I be saving those as well and just keep buying new camera cards? I want to have a back up in case something happens to one of them.

Should I be doing something else to protect the photos?

 

[funkychunkymonkey]

DVD's! I put all my photos on dvds (labeled by month of course) and havent lost any photos yet. Though at times its a real PITA to figure out what DVD has "that one picture of aunt sally sleeping on her side with the cat".

 

[Raindown]

All my photos go on to two hard drives. I copy the photos from the card to each drive separately, both getting the files from the card. I work with the photos on one of the drives and the other remains a backup.

 

[Gianna'sPapa]

I have them on two separate external hard drives and a group of favorites on Flickr. After I have downloaded the images, the SD cards are re-formatted.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

Images for me exist in 3 places.

1) My local hard drive.
2) External hard drive.
3) External hard drive sitting in a safety deposit box.

First weekend of the month I switch the two external drives so I always have an off site backup.

Once the data is off the card, and onto the two local hard drives.....I reformat the card in the camera.

 

[photo_chick]

I have my images copied a few times over. Most of what I do evolved form working on different computers in the house.

My current year's images are on my laptop. Everything is on my desktop. I have an external hard drive with everything that I use with my laptop. I have a network drive with everything on it, so I can get to it form anywhere. I have some stashed on smugmug, but that's mostly to share. I use Carbonite, mainly so I can backup my laptop on the go, but I also have my image library there. And I used to back up every year to DVD, but when I went to start the 2010 images it was simply too much so I may switch to blu-ray.

IMO, you can never have too many backups and it pays to have them on different formats because you just never know what's going to happen.

As far as my cards... once I have the images on my laptop and copied to my network drive as well I reformat the card in camera.

 

[cosine4]

I used to keep everything on my hard drive and back up DVDs. After a "scare" I bought a 1 TB external hard drive to back up my internal hard drive. I eventually ran out of space on my internal hard drive and bought an ethernet 1 TB hard drive to use as my primary storage, it is connected to my home network and I can access the photos from anywhere on the internet but it is pretty slow. I then use my USB 1 TB hard drive as my primary back up. I also have DVDs (CDs for my older photos) labeled by event/date that I keep at my office (seperate location) in case there were fire/water damage at my home.

 

[ToodlesRN]

Thank you for your replies, I will look into a external hard drive to add my photo collection onto!!

 

[w0rM]

I have a 1TB external hard drive I keep them on. I can plug it into any computer with USB so it's great for storage AND great for transfering them to other computers.

 

[atsolomon]

I keep my photos in three separate geographic locations: laptop hard drive, an external USB hard drive, my work PC, and my mother-in-law's PC.

I do have a fair number of my favorites up on Flickr and Snapfish too.

I also have boxes of unscanned pre-digital era photos in a storage space and I hate that! Last year I scanned in one of my books of negatives, so at least some of those are protected now too.

--Adam

 

[Luv2Scrap]

Images for me exist in 3 places.

1) My local hard drive.
2) External hard drive.
3) External hard drive sitting in a safety deposit box.

First weekend of the month I switch the two external drives so I always have an off site backup.

Once the data is off the card, and onto the two local hard drives.....I reformat the card in the camera.

This is what I've started doing as well, at the recommendation of some very helpful DIS'ers! (I think ChiSoxKeith was probably one of them!)

 

[MICKEY88]

I found that external drives were too slow, So I bought a dual dock that I load 2 1TB internal drives in, I installed an ESATA card in my pc, to connect the dock, that way if performs like an internal drive, when on vacation I take my laptop, the dual dock and 2 drives, the dock connects to my laptob via usb, which is definitely slower than the ESATA... I copy my cards to my pc, then copy from there over to both of the drives in the dock..,

the internal drives also take up less space on my desk...than external drives do

 

[tmoret]

I use a few 1TB external USB drives. I also run my Photoshop off one.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

I found that external drives were too slow, So I bought a dual dock that I load 2 1TB internal drives in, I installed an ESATA card in my pc, to connect the dock, that way if performs like an internal drive, when on vacation I take my laptop, the dual dock and 2 drives, the dock connects to my laptob via usb, which is definitely slower than the ESATA... I copy my cards to my pc, then copy from there over to both of the drives in the dock..,

the internal drives also take up less space on my desk...than external drives do

My PC has an internal raid controller but I'm not using it at the moment. I have been tempted to go ahead and get another internal drive and enable the RAID configuration. That or getting an SSD drive. They are pricey, but the speed is phenomenal. My PC at work has an SSD drive and programs just launch instantly and it boots incredibly fast.

 

[zackiedawg]

Nervous Nellie here - I keep so many copies of my stuff, I almost can't remember how many I have! The idea of losing them is so repugnant, that any time I think about it, I make another copy.

Currently, I have a twin-harddrive computer with a RAID mirror array, and have an automatically backed up twin 1TB drive external HD system (also RAID)...the external backup drive backs up everything on the main drive to the backup drive, and both the main drive and backup drive are mirrored. I also keep a separate external hardrive stored cold, only plugging in for monthly backups to a third source, which is kept offsite. I then have redundant backups of my photos on my laptop and my office computer, which are only occasionally updated (maybe every 6 months or so). So I have as many as 7 drives with my data on them in some stage or another, in 3 different locations. I'm weighing the idea of cloud storage too. You know, just to be safe!

 

[ToodlesRN]

What is this; 1TB external hard drive, can someone show me a link to where it's sold?
Thanks!

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

There are many places to find them.

BestBuy, costco, etc.

But here is one online retailer...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...A=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=1TB+USB+Drive

 

[MICKEY88]

My PC has an internal raid controller but I'm not using it at the moment. I have been tempted to go ahead and get another internal drive and enable the RAID configuration. That or getting an SSD drive. They are pricey, but the speed is phenomenal. My PC at work has an SSD drive and programs just launch instantly and it boots incredibly fast.

the reason I prefer the dual dock, over another internal drive is the ease and speed of swapping drives, I currently have 8 1tb Drives that I swap out depending on what pics I want to work on, 2 of them are just WDW pics.

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

the reason I prefer the dual dock, over another internal drive is the ease and speed of swapping drives, I currently have 8 1tb Drives that I swap out depending on what pics I want to work on, 2 of them are just WDW pics.

Slick system.