Reply To: Personal snap shots. What do YOU do?

[EvilDaystar]

I’ll be buying a new computer this spring dedicated to  my photography.  I want to clean up the family computer, and get it running on top of its game, but it holds so much, and I’m a little overwhelmed.

do I buy another external and cram all our pics and video on it?  Do I try to archive them in print?  Burn to discs?  I’ve got discs of this at that, and DVDs with video, and I’ve printed some, not most though.  I don’t want to lose them.

my actual photography I print as I go, have been arciving all along, and have a paper portfolio, I also back them up on a dedicated external.  Should I treat my family photos the same?

how do YOU keep organized, and keep your pictures safe?  This whole thing makes me want to go back to film

I have a copy on my computer (2, 2 terrybte HD in replication), I have a copy on two external HDD drives (2 500 gig external HDD) and a copy on a NAS (Netowrk Attached Storage, like a mini file server).

So I technically have 4 copies of all my, and my clients, files.

– You don’t want to store just one copy on DVD … consumer grade DVDs color warp over time making the disk unreadable.
– Hard disk drives are magnetic storage devices and can become corrupted with time on top of that, they have moving parts that can fail as well.

Ideally, USB Flash drives would be best. They are non volatile and will last literally forever (or close enough that it shouldn’t matter). I saw a 32Gig USB flash drive on sale yesterday for 15$. If you are saving full resolution JPEGS (and not RAW files) that drive can hold approximately 3200 pictures (around 10MB a picture froma 22MP camera). If you shoot about 100 pictures a week,  you would need about 2 sticks a year making your storage cost around 30$ per year (or about half a penny a picture) that’s pretty cheap.

You would, of course, only use these as long term storage/backups and not for daily use.