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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."
In your case, since it sounds like you don't create that much data, you'd probably be fine picking up a couple of portable USB drives (2.5" drive, powered over USB = tiny). For consumer use, the Samsung Goflex 1TB (the 2.5" version) is around $100, widely available, and works great in my experience. Buy two. Use one as your master repository, one as a backup of that, and keep the second in a water-proof container (hint: try rubbermaid containers, they're waterproof and cost about $4), locked in an inexpensive fire safe, safety deposit box, or at a nearby friend's or relative's house. If you aren't needing to store more than 64GB of material then you could substitute "thumb drive" or "CF/SD card and reader" for portable USB drive ... solid state media will be 'safer' for long-term storage but obviously afford less space-per-dollar.
A better option, but beyond what you wanted is a SAN/NAS. Drobo makes some decent products, and I currently have a DroboFS at my home, loaded with 2TB drives. This gives me a little over 7TB of RAID storage to backup all my footage, images, documents, and so forth. It's network addressable, so any of the several machines in my house (both Mac and Windows) can access it. The total cost (Drobo + drives) was around $1100 or $1200 iirc. The downside to the FS is that its max transfer speed is around 20MB/sec, but they do offer other models with transfer speeds that are better suited to live editing — I only use the FS for backup, I have 4TB [in the machine I am posting from now] dedicated to live editing. The Drobo is nice, imo, because it's a consumer-oriented appliance (with RAID built in) that can take any SATA drive, will allow you to mix and match drive capacities on the fly, and they offer 'Time Machine' style automated backups (along with other apps) if you want that sort of thing. Beyond the Drobo, I also do separate backups to portable drives and keep them offsite (as I mentioned above), just as an extra level of paranoia in case my house burns down. If you are really paranoid or into safety, LTO would be a better way to go for this.
Actually, given how little data you (the original poster) might need to backup, an old LTO machine bought on craigslist (LTO 1 will do 100GB, 2 does 200GB) might be the solution. The tapes are relatively cheap, and the format is both open and reverse-compatible for a few generations (so when your LTO 1 craigslist machine dies you can buy an LTO 2 or 3 machine from the same venue and still access your content (and then migrate it forward to LTO 2 or 3)).
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I definitely wouldn't rule online backup out. Unlimited backup providers like Crashplan, Carbonite, etc. certainly provide a service that can be very useful.
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.
It's the safest, most secure and private place on the internet I can think of.
I made an app! Shoutium
That's the simple solution. Then have that backup to the web via something like Crashplan.
Get a couple of NAS drives. Have your laptop run backups between the two devices in case 1 drive fails, or just run 1 device with RAID 1/5. Burn Blu-ray backups every 6 months or so, throw them in a fireproof safe or safe deposit box. Or take a separate USB drive to do the backups and throw that in the safe. If you're running Windows and the NAS is available as a windows share, you can run the free SyncToy app to do incremental backups.
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.
Living With a Nerd
As a part time pro photographer, I'll let you on a little secret. You rarely need more than 5 MP of data. Downsample all your images to 2500px on the long side, with the appropriate aspect ratio, save as 98% JPG and enjoy. Unless you are going to print 30x40-inch high gloss roll off prints, or crop massively, your 12-15 MP camera is really chewing up disk space for no good reason.
...that leaves external hard drives. So buy a couple, back up from one to the other, and keep one somewhere else.
I put the best of the best of my pictures up on Flickr pro account, but that only works out to a couple dozen a month on average at most.
You'll never ever look at the vast majority of them. If you don't have time to look through them and only keep the good ones why not just delete them.
I upload them to 4chan, from where they will be stored on a multitude of /b/tards' harddrives forever.
$25 / year. Easy to use. Easy to share. My 70 y/o dad harasses me on a regular basis when we'll post new photos. Currently have 10k+ pics online. Back up of our Flickr is Carbonite. -K
God is good all the time! -K
It is well worth the $100/year to shell out for an online webspace to store your photos if you want to keep them for life.
10 gb is nothing, just setup a background process to sync and limit it's upload bandwidth, and it'll do it over a few days/weeks, no matter how big your file is.
That way even if your external dies, or gets stolen, you have that ace in the hole.
Peace of mind, especially for valuable memories, is worth the money, plus it has the added benefit of giving you a way to share photos with friends/family easily. Plus any other things you want to do with some webspace.
The reason i recommend buying a full webspace somewhere rather than dedicated backup utilities is because you can normally get more storage/cheaper, and have a little better direct control over your data, with the added convenience of access through http!
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
5 2TB drives in RaidZ2 (Yes, it's not optimal, but it'll take 2x failures.
2 external 2x2TB enclosures with the drives mirrored. Rotated off site every week. When an enclosure comes home I scrub it make sure I didn't break anything and then for the next week everything is synced nightly.
If I'm not shooting any photos, then I really don't rotate stuff.
I'm not quite at a TB of photos, but shooting 8GB at a time does start to add up. Last resort nearly everything is on Facebook. They do allow photos up to 2000 pixels / side. It's not a lossless backup, but if it means having children's photos vs not, it's better than nothing.
Sadly NOTHING has happened. No drive failures, nothing. I haven't been able to test any of it out other than when I upgraded to 2TB drives from 1.5TB drives with a ...
zpool replace tank
I like to keep them in picasa. I trust the cloud (especially for a company like google) much more than my own management of a couple hard drives.
Plus, I like the service (its interface, being able to download the original, easy sharing, transparent sync to my phone, etc..).
The big downside is not being able to download entire albums in one download (maybe there are 3rd party apps that do that), and the fact that you can't upload videos unless you are using the windows client (I usually just use the web).
Funny enough, I was just thinking about this insofar as my backup disk died, while the main disk in the machine is still running fine. I've listened to enough TWiTs and the like to know about Drobo and checked out the site. I like that the size can be increased over time (up to whatever limit the firmware supports in the enclosure). I was thinking I could also justify it by getting the version that sits on the network as a NAS and use it for all my Time Machine backups, etc.
I also have a separate external disk (not a Drobo or NAS or anything fancy) that I do an overnight copy of all the important files using rsync with the disk plugged directly into the Firewire 800 port, then I take the disk with me to my folks house and let it sit there. After a week or two I bring it home and the whole process repeats.
I've also got a private vpn to a Linux machine I set up, but even though I did a full update on it for backup, rsync takes forever (many many hours) to determine what files need to be updated/added, and the machine gets pretty bogged down. Still working on a good solution for automatic offsite backups...
I'd be interested to know what others think of the Drobo before plunking down the $$$ for one.
Every single one? Why? Everything you feel you must have for life is another thing you'll be "paying" interest on for the rest of your life, in the time and money spent managing it. When you die, will anyone want to continue saving these thousands of photos from a single trip, or even have time to look through them?
You either take way too many pictures. Are you really going to look at thousands of pictures of ruins? Hardly. However, since that's not the kind of advice you asked for, I'd suggest an external HD. It's cheaper than a similarly sized pen drive (1.5Tb ~$80).
>I do know that the first thing to do is to go through your collection
>and dump what is not worthwhile keeping.
I'm not sure why you say this in such an authoritative tone, but this is a great example of something you *shouldn't* do. There's nothing to say that a shot that you're not particularly fond of today will remain so forever. This is especially true when you shoot in RAW, since there's so much to work with and techniques you can learn to salvage a so-so picture.
Moreover, your attitude of 'I have a laptop with an internal disk and don't wish to change' is a terrible one to have. If your data's security is important to you, you'll need to expand your horizons quite a bit.
I use three hard drives in my main computer. One small drive for the OS and installed applications, a second large drive to store my media (1 TB is sufficient for me), and a third drive to hold backups. Differential backups are automatically made for WIP data on a nightly schedule, everything else is automatically done on a weekly schedule.
Every few years I pull the hard drive and wrap it in some bubble wrap, package it into a cardboard box with the date on the outside and give it to my parents to store in their attic as a fallback.
The total cost of this operation comes down to about $100 every three years.
I print them out in Cauzin Softstrip format on archival paper. It's the only way to be certain that my blurry thumb will be preserved for my grateful descendants.
... particularly those that predate ubiquitous image capturing (I can't in good conscience call it photography), I just don't take many personal photos. A few each time to document the event, but not enough to warrant a question about how to store all that stuff.
Instead, I prefer to *live* the moments, seeing them personally through my own eyes, rather than experience them through the camera viewfinder and then later via images. My epiphany came in the hospital when I was faced with the choice of documenting the birth of my daughter with a video camera plastered to my face, or putting the fucking thing down and living the experience myself. You can probably guess from my choice of words which option I chose. So I'm left with my own imperfect memory of the event rather than a memory as seen through the viewfinder and replayable later.
Your precious personal photos and videos are like the dreaded vacation movies/slideshows back when people did that kind of thing. Odds are you will never look at your archive of photos very much - if you did, you wouldn't be experiencing new things, you'd just be reviewing your old experiences over and over again.
So stop worrying about your "precious" photos and just go out and experience some new things. Pay attention while you're doing so, and you can tell stories later about the wonderfullness of it all.
IMHO, this is much better than compulsive photo-documentation.
But I don't expect many to agree. Shiny gadgets have captured our souls, and I'm afraid they may be lost forever.
probably won't care much about the pictures...
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.
OH the HORROR! What should I DO? Please slashdot, help me solve this difficult problem!!! I need a team of NERDS for this!
Seriously, with HD prices at under $100 for 1.5 TB, who gives a flying fuck? If you don't know how to plug in a USB drive you should be shot.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I am a semipro photographer. One raw picture is >20M, and I tend to take between 500 and 2000 pictures for an event.
I keep all pictures. All of them. With the usual exceptions of the black ones or a very blurry ceiling.
My computer is also a laptop. I removed the useless DVD drive to host a second hard drive, only for the pictures. That gives me 750gb for pics.
I also have a 2TB external hard drive, and a general backup 4TB drive.
The workflow I use is as follows:
- I put all my pictures on my computer.
- Once transferred, I plug and copy all the new pictures on my 2TB, never removing anything from there, only adding.
- I then process the pictures, adjust them, do whatever needs to be done. I sort them in 3 buckets (deleted, meh, good).
- I copy the working copies for the good ones to the 2TB also.
- I delete the deleted/meh from my laptop, only keeping the good ones.
- I do a general incremental rsync backup of my laptop to my 4TB.
For me that's enough protection, I always have my "good" pictures with me on my laptop, and have access to everything else on my dump drive.
For fires and burglars, I also have a second encrypted 2TB at work. I can safely recreate everything else from that part...
So far it has served me well, and I haven't lost anything. I've been burned badly in the past after crashing a HD while doing a backup, and having 6 HDD failing me in the same year (yeah, lan partys will do that to your gear) so I am very anal about my data.
Be careful with fire safes. They are generally designed and rated for paper, not electronic media, and will get too hot for electronics to survive. Be sure the safe you get is rated for electronic media. Also such electronic media rated safes I've seen are really designed for disaster not security, a claw hammer can probably open them. If you are just storing your family photos this is probably a plus.
External harddrive. Second harddrive in different location and/or a flickr account so you don't have it only at home.
Now, seriously? I have photography as a hobby too, and in the very best case about one in ten shots are actually worth saving, and that proportion drops the more shots you take. Most pictures end up being crap - that's not an indictment, just a fact. Most shots Adams or Bresson took ended up as crap too. You have perhaps two hundred pictures, tops, that you or anybody else would care about.
Chances are you're never ever going to look at most of those thousands of shots ever again, and your kids will simply throw it all away unseen in the far future when they're cleaning out your belongings. Problem is, if you haven't edited the collection and thrown away all the thousands of duds, they will end up throwing away those good, important images along with the rest.
So, best approach: go through and delete all the crap, all the duplicates, all the technical duds. Then delete all the ho-hum images. Aim for, say, two hundred images to save, or better, fifty. No matter how eventful a vacation, you don't have more than fifty great places or events to record. And the more pictures you keep, the more you dilute the impact of the good images.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
only worried about read compatibility in a decade or more; my blu-ray drive reads my late 90s cd-r
1) Print them all out.
2) Post them all to your Face Book page.
Really? You don't know how to back up your data?
USB Drives, Flash Drives, DVD's, BluRay's, On-line backup.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
When your house burns down so does that general pusrpose server and with it those archives. And did you say "hard drive" as in singular as in keep your fingers crossed?
I really doubt paying $2 a month for offsite backup is going to be financially infeasible.
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.
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
Main store is on a MAC
Can't store a lot of data in 6 bytes...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Main store is on a MAC
Can't store a lot of data in 6 bytes...
It's compressed... a lot.
I know that many people have problems to keep their photo collections down to a managable size. I always recommend to first somehow mark photos for deletion and then delete them later. Why? Because deleting a photo is something nobody likes to do -- you *may* want to look at it again, so you don't delete it outright and later you never come around to go through all your photos and delete those you don't need.
So use some photo managing app and flag those photos as soon as you see them. If you use some app that has this one to five stars thing, use a one star rating for photos you think you could delete (because "no star" could also mean you haven't rated them at all yet). Later then it's easy to just delete all photos flagged this way.
Everything else is futile. Keep your photo collection small. Do not try to delete photos immediatly because you very probably won't do it anyway. Flag them for deletion. A year later or so you will have no problem at all to wipe them away then.
Two separate computers in the same house with a photo directory on each set up with automatic two way sync between those computers every night.
Plus a remote computer about 10 miles away with one way backup every night.
Drop a pic or directory of pics into the synced directory on either of the home computers and boom next day photos are stored in 3 separate locations.
Fast simple and hands off.
It's señor.
It's really funny how you talk about 'third-world countries taking your stuff for ransom' when most of the western world laughs while you get grouped by the TSA.
And about your comment how 'You have the best memory and image storage system between your ears.', well, that's really funny. If some day you need to rely on such perfect memory devices to prove you are innocent of something, you'll be wishing some camera would have captured it.
Dilbert RSS feed
If you are archiving to optical discs, make sure that you use dvdisaster:
http://dvdisaster.net/
It allows you to utilize all of the unused (otherwise wasted!) space on a disc with distributed error-correcting data. It is free, cross-platform, and trivial to use. As an experiment, I burned a dvdisaster-padded CD-R and made a deep scratch on the surface with a key. Dvdisaster was able to recover the data without any trouble.
It's quite brilliant software!
I use a mixed strategy for backup.
My regular machine is a laptop with 340GB hard drive, with a copy of this data. I have a 1TB USB hard drive (Seagate, bought at Walmart) where I copy everything to (backup 1).
I also have a web site, which I use as on-line storage. It is not the primary reason for getting the web site, but I do have "unlimited storage space" (my ISP is 1 & 1) and I access it via FTP. That costs me $7/month. So for that sum, I have a web site and on-line storage (backup 2).
I also have a desktop with a 1TB drive where I occasionally copy the data too (from the USB drive) (backup 3).
I find several advantages to that strategy. My data is always accessible from anywhere (through the ftp site) and having a local copy on the USB drive makes it easy to view the data from another machine if the need arises. The USB drive is faster (at least not slower) than most SAN solutions, at least those priced for the home market, at a fraction of the cost.
I also have a copy of everything on a desktop (500GB local hard drive) which I do not use very much, but that is nice to see pictures with because of the 22" HDTV monitor.
Finally, for the day-to-day documents that I work on, I use Dropbox. That allows me to work from different machines without having to carry a flash drive. Of course, I do not use Dropbox for long term storage, as the price is quite a bit higher than my ISP, so once documents are archived, I move them to the ftp site. I have a free 2GB Dropbox account, and I must admit that it works remarkably well.
I admit that this strategy would not scale well if I had 10 times as much data, particularly maintaining the backups up to date is a mostly manual solution at this time, so it only works for me because I do not edit older data. I simply add new documents to the repository. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a cheap (I would like free, but I would not mind paying a reasonable price for it) incremental backup software that will work across all these storage methods. My ISP does not provide me with a shell account, so for automating, I am limited to what I can do via cgi or php scripts. At this point, I think I will have to write the software myself.