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Since my son was born (a little more than 3 weeks) I took more than 3 GB worth of pictures, and I know I'm not going to stop. At this rate all my hard drives will fill up soon, so I was wondering how to back them up in the near future. What do you use? DVDs? Online services? What is your experience? |
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As someone who (stupidly) LOST about FIVE YEARS worth of photos I believe I have the ultimate (and inexpensive) solution for you... I personally have over 27,000 photos going back about 10 years and here's how I keep everything organized:
Once or twice a month (more often if I go on a trip or take lost of pics) I will sit down and "copy/upload" everything to my USB drive and to Jungledisk. Its EASY to synchronize the folders if you named them like I recommended in "Step 2" because everything will be in order. So... with that in mind... I will NEVER lose pictures again. If my computer crashes, I'm fine... if my house burns down... I'm fine... if my laptop, etc is stolen... I'm fine. I can't begin to tell you what it feels like to lose 5 years worth of photos. Its almost like losing a small piece of your life. After it happened to me the first time I swore I would always have "too many" backups of my photos. Hope this helps. Reference: |
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I have taken a TON of pictures of my child as well. I save all my pictures on an online service called Smugmug. This way I know they are backed up if my computer crashes (this has happened to me before and that is why our friends got us the Smugmug site). I would definitely back them all up, whether it is on an external hard drive, online service, Cds, etc. The way that I share all my pictures with family and friends is I have started a blog. This does take some work always "updating" the blog but I think it is well worth it. There are also sites where you can get your blog printed so this may be a good way to record your child growing up and then later turning it into a book, one less scrapbook to make! One more piece of advice would be to keep on top of your pictures (printing them and scrap booking them) because once you get behind it is hard to catch up!!! |
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I use Google's Picasa for managing and sharing our photos. I haven't found an easier program to work with. The desktop program makes it very easy to import photos from your camera and to ultimately manage the photos in your albums. I periodically upload the "best" photos to the online web albums that is available through Picasa as well, and send a link to family and friends so they can view the photos as well. 1
We also use Picasa. Its pretty wonderful, the latest update even has a face recognition feature too! The whole filing & storage system and editing tools are easy to use as well! Worth checking out!
(24 Oct '09, 03:52)
Emi
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When I had no children, My photos were travel pictures. Now most are of my children! I use two big hard drives (500 GB each) for handling photos and videos. The first contains my multimedia libraries. The second is a clone of the first. Some pictures are sent to family as well, so I know that if my computer fails, some of my digital souvenirs are somewhere around. |
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Hard drives are really cheap. You can get a 1 terabyte (~1000 gigabytes) for under $100 and the prices continue to drop yearly. Online services and DVDs are affordable also. There are lots of great ideas from other users for this part and I don't have much to add. My question is: how are you going to enjoy them? If you're just stockpiling them, what's the point? I'm not that big on tons o' photos but one of my best friends is. What their family did, which I think is really smart, is to have a screensaver on the living room family computer which displays random family photos and videos. They get to see lots of photos and videos they forgot they even had. It allowed them to enjoy many more photos than they would have otherwise. |
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I'm getting into the photography biz, so I have a lot of large pictures. I back them up to my home server and to a dedicated external hard drive. I also make dvds for the people that I take pictures of. So far, it's worked out well for me to do it this way. There are some questions similar to this over on: http://photographr.info/ |
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I organize photos on my hard drive by date, then occasionally I take the old stuff and burn it to DVD-ROMs. I make multiple copies of each DVD and give a set to the grandparents and I also take one to work for safe keeping. Recordable media doesn't last forever, so every 5 years or so, you should probably take everything you have and burn new copies of it. I haven't done this, but it's a good idea. |
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Backups that are never tested may as well not exist, as the likelihood of them not working when you need it approaches 100% as time goes on. I've found over the years that "backup" copies tend to go bad for various reasons (bad disks, incorrect storage, physical damage, etc), and you don't notice until it's too late. So, instead of (or in addition to, if you're the paranoid sort) making a backup that just sits on a shelf, make one that gets used. Get a couple of large USB disks, and copy all your family photos to them. Make them read-only (many drives have a switch for this) and bring them over to baby's grandparents. They're sure to go through every photo over and over, so you'll have a guaranteed working backup. Every few months, bring the disk home and update the photos. |
