How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

mxhf writes "I just came back from a four-week vacation to Mexico. This is the country for Aztecs and Maya Ruins and we visited plenty of them. Needless to say we took thousands of pictures with two cameras. Having arrived back home I realize that my hard-disk does not have enough space left to hold the additional 16GB that I collected on the other side of the globe. Now, my hard disk already is 250GB. I work exclusively on a laptop and do not want to change this. I know that there are larger disks today. But I figured that the time has come to finally move my image collection from my laptop to somewhere else. But where should I go? So, how do you store your photo collections? And how do you keep backups? These are obviously images that I want to keep for my life. So the need to survive fires, burglaries, etc. I think the amount of data I have rules online storage out. Should I just get two USB disks and leave one at a reasonably save location? I think this must be a common problem today. And yes — before you ask — I do know that the first thing to do is to go through your collection and dump what is not worth keeping."

Comments

Same as always

[MrLogic17]

This type of question comes up a lot. How do I store for the long term?

Simple answer. Have it spinning on disk (or flash, or SSD, or...) and live accessable, plus an off-site backup.

Any off-line media will at some point be unreadable. Keep it accessable & live, and migrate it each time you upgrade your system.

Sure, I've got a few 5.25" floppies around, but how to read them? Keep it spinning & live.

combination

[Pojut]

Buy a larger internal hard drive for your laptop...that will solve your "immedeate access" needs.

If you're really serious about actual back up:

1. Buy a 1 TB external hard drive. Copy all of your pictures on there, then put the hard drive in a safe deposit box. This will be your "iron-clad" backup, one which you only update after major trips such as the one you came back from.

2. Buy a second 1 TB external hard drive that you keep at home. This will be your "primary" backup, one that gets updated every time you have new pictures.

3. For extra protection, buy a crap-ton of DVD-Rs, and burn all your photos on them.

Importance, prioritising

[arikol]

Seriously, are all those thousands of vacation pictures worth storing?
Or could the feeling of the vacation be summarised by less than a hundred pictures? What about less than fifty? Less than 30? 20?

We really are behaving like mad magpies, hoarding this data as if it really were the memories of the event (well, if one takes multiple thousands of pictures then one may actually have spent the whole vacation behind the camera instead of enjoying the experience. See "experiencing self vs remembering self" http://sheshtawy.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/experience-self-vs-remembering-self-experience-vs-memory/ )

I've recently taken to culling my selection of pictures which I actively back up; selecting only a dozen or so images from each month. That still results in less than 150 images a year. This selection gets backed up both on multiple media here at home as well as backed up online. The other thousands of pictures are saved only at home, on an external drive (external USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme) an on my laptop's internal drive. These extra images just don't require the safety of an off-site backup. They're just not that important!
And nobody will care about the 500 pictures of an Aztec pyramid in a couple of years. Even if you and a loved one are in the pictures it will end up that there are two or three pics which are great, the rest serve only to bore housegests senseless when subjected to the torture of a thousand picture slideshow of places they haven't been and people they don't know...

When I think to my childhood I actually remember large parts of it, especially extremely good or bad events. This is independent of whether pictures exist from that event. Where pictures exist, they tend to colour my memory, and in many cases change it (events which I KNOW weren't fully positive, but the single picture from the event shows something enjoyable happening and everyone smiling).
Pictures LIE, and they change how you remember. Taking them also changes how you experience life. Live a little.

Re:Might I suggest?....

[Manos_Of_Fate]

Maybe they didn't take a ton of photos for the memories, but because they are hobby photographers? Having new and different environments to take pictures of is one of my favorite aspects of travel. What makes a trip enjoyable for you is not necessarily the same for everyone.