How Do You Store Your Personal Photos?

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 20, 2011 @09:47AM from the and-where-do-you-put-the-negatives? dept.

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."

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Same as always by MrLogic17 · 2011-01-20 09:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.