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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."
That's 3 to 5 cents a shot, not negligible.
Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?
Really, for that much data, you really want to mirror a couple of TB drives, and then share with your neighbor/friend/family member far away/ like you're doing. On a similar setup.
I think the original question really boils down to, "In this day and age of hundreds of GB of personal data, how do you store it and back it up?"
I read a nice article some time ago about us becoming too attached to our data. That we were really keeping too much, and that we should gracefully let it die. Because really, when we pass away, who's going to want to dig through 1100 pictures of Mexico that we took? Nobody. They'll want the two pictures of us on our honeymoon. The picture a year that shows some kid growing up. They're not going to want to read every email we ever received - they want to see the dozen of when we fell in love.
Personally, I've got a pair of mirrored TB drives, and a chock-full 250gb drive in a box in the other room that has a copy of everything essential from about 3 months ago. My home and work computer each have copies of important work stuff, roughly up to date. If my house burns down? I'm going to lose a ton of shit, including a lot of data. But you know what? I probably don't need 99% of it. I don't need all the music and movies, D&D campaigns, papers I wrote in college, etc. When I set up these TB drives, I made a dir in my home directory that was called "old home dir". I didn't move anything out of it that I didn't need. And you know what? 95% of the stuff in it is still there after 4 months. When I did that a couple years ago, the percentage was about the same.
When it comes right down to it, our electronic data is going to be pretty much the same as our physical data from a century ago. Water leaks, mold, and sunlight destroyed most of our photos and documents. Failed HDs will destroy most of them now. But the world will go on.
Getting back onto topic, look into DropBox. Distributed copies on multiple computers, drag and drop interface, history and version control. Damn handy.
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