Storing Your Digital Images

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/General/Storing_Your_Digital_Images_01.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/General/Storing_Your_Digital_Images_01.htm</a><br /><br /></div><i>"If you value your digital images, you should have a proper backup system in place. In this article, we will look at two storage methods and some backup tips so that you can enjoy your images not only in the short term, but also much further into the future. Magnetic Storage - Hard disks - If you store images on your computer, it is recommended to store them on a dedicated partition... Optical Storage - CDs and DVDs - If you burn for example 300 MB of images onto a blank 700 MB CD-R and "close" the disk, you will not be able to add information in the future."</i><br /><br />Nice article from dpreview on tips for storing your images. Personally, all my images (almost 10K now) are sitting on a RAID-1 mirrored hard drive, with tape backups. This way, a number of things would have to fail all at once for me to lose everything. What is your backup strategy?

[Chris Gohlke]

All pictures on the Hard drive of my computer. Copied periodically to a USB hard drive which is only connected for doing back-ups. Copied periodically to DVD which is stored off-site at my office. I've recently added smugmug as an extra level of protection. I'm uploading all my pictures to them. They have a service where they will dump everything to a DVD and send it to you for a fee. So pretty much, my house, my office, and smugmug all would have to simultanteously disappear for me to lose my pictures. I think if that happens, I'll have worse problems than losing my pictures.

[Neil Enns]

After my last computer meltdown I've settled on three separate drives. I have two in my machine with duplicates of everything (no fancy raid setup, I just do it manually), and a third external firewire drive that I turn on to copy backups to, then shut off.

Neil

[ctmagnus]

I have a backup on my D: drive, on a network drive (just a folder I created on another computer) and on removable storage.

Reinstalling is bearable, recreating is a b!tch.

[Chris Gohlke]

If your not already doing it, I can't overstate the importance of offsite storage. Even something simple like storing it at the office/safty deposit box/friend or relatives house, can make all the difference when the worst happens.

[Bob12]

My method is quite similar to Chris's except that my off-site facility is my safe deposit box. I also carry it a bit further since I have two PCs that I use with my photos - one a desktop and the other a notebook that travels with me. The current and previous years' photos are stored on the notebook and older shots are stored on the notebook's external HD. So, since it's 2006, my 2005 shots reside in 5 places - desktop and its external HD, notebook and its external HD, and DVDs in the safe deposit box. Plus, some of the more special shots from various years are on a 4gb Microdrive in my Pocket PC. Overkill maybe, but I'm not worried about losing any of them.

[mcsouth]

I currently back up to DVD once a month, and keep three generations at a time. I know that I should probably back up more often, but the time it takes makes it tough to get done any more frequently than that.

As far as photos are concerned, that is generally not a problem, as I don't take so many photos in a month that I would lose much in a disaster. What I DO need to do is to move my backups offsite to another storage facility, like a safety deposit box. If we were to experience a house fire today, everything would go, and the backups would do me no good at all.

I agree that online storage will probably be the way to go in the future - someone else takes care of the maintenance of the servers, and you can set backups to occur automatically at a time convenient to you. My biggest concern with offsite storage like this would be the overall security aspects - what measures are in place to protect my content from others? Perish the thought of that photo of Aunt Myrtle at the family reunion from getting out into the public domain!!! :D

[Jason Dunn]

I use www.foldershare.com to mirror my data across five different PCs, but all are in my home/office. I've fiddled with offsite storage in the past via FTP, but I can never get a solution that's stable enough to really rely on. I also need a LOT of storage, so even using one of my two dedicated servers isn't much of an option. And FTP is so clunky, it wasn't designed for this sort of thing. Smugmug or Carbonite would seem to be a better solution, but that's only for photos and not for general data.