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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."
Might I suggest... not taking so many pictures and just enjoy your vacation. And don't concern yourself about the best technological solution for storing your images. Whatever technical solution you come up with will be both obsolete within a decade (endangering the ability to retrieve your images), and expensive, and easily lost (or more likely) stolen in a backward third-world country, or held for ransom by customs (or border security) {"Senor, because of the possibility that you have photographed secret sensitive military installations, even inadvertently, we must view all 10000 of the photos on your laptop hard disk. It is too bad that you will miss your plane connection. However, for $300, we can make a copy of your hard disk and send you an e-mail if we find any photos that you should remove, and, of course, you will not miss your plane connection. A wonderful deal for you, senor"}
Ain't I just an insensitive racist jerk?! Nobody in the real-world would ever act like that! Just another stupid paranoid American buffoon who is too stupid and too scared to travel farther than Disneyland!!
You have the best memory and image storage system between your ears. Are you going to look at a thousand pictures of Mexico next year? Or are you just going to go someplace else? Or (heaven forbid) are you planning to sit friends and family down and make them view with you a thousand photos of your vacation?
Don't take a camera or laptop with you on vacation!!! It negates the whole idea of 'vacation'. The only technical thing that you should take on vacation is a good pair of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These are glasses that you wear when you are in a place where noone speaks your language. The tiny microphone in the frames and the nanotechnology-based AI computer chips also in the frame analyse the words that are spoken to you, translate them into English, and project them onto the insides of your glasses where you see them like old-fashioned 'subtitles' in foreign movies. Cool as hell, and very useful while traveling. Unfortunately they don't exist yet and probably won't for another fifty years.