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Ask Slashdot: Storing Family Videos and Pictures For Posterity?
New submitter jalvarez13 writes: I'm in my early 40's and I will become a dad in less than a month. Until now I've been quite happy with a Canon Powershot S110 for taking pictures and video, but now I'm thinking in longer terms. If some of you have already thought or done something about this, what did you consider when buying photo/video equipment? What about a plan to store the files you generate? I guess there are important decisions you made about to image quality, file formats, storage type, organizing and labelling software, etc.
I'm also wondering if there are any other technologies (stereoscopic cameras?) that I haven't thought about and may be interesting to look at.
I'm also wondering if there are any other technologies (stereoscopic cameras?) that I haven't thought about and may be interesting to look at.
I have a NAS that I regularly upgrade with new hard drives when the old ones' warranties expire. I just recently went from 4x 1 TB + 4x 750 GB in two RAID5 arrays to 8x 2TB in RAID6. That NAS is backed up off-site to another, similar NAS at trusted, non-corporate location, but only the parts of it which are 100% irreplaceable: pictures, video, financial paperwork, schoolwork, etc. The drives in the second NAS are from different batch and are 4x 3TB in RAID5.
I've considered also paying for a service like Amazon Glacier to archive those really important things, but the price still seems too high for the amount I have to store and I have concerns about the security of it. Tarsnap is a crowd favorite, but you certainly pay for its paranoid level of security. I'm eager to see what comes of Maidsafe and Storj, which are distributed systems to which I could certainly lend a whole lot of spare space.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Your question is going to be answered by people who are biased one way or another. The question you really have to ask is what you are looking at spending. I personally own a Canon Rebel T3i that was bought as a gift and love using it. Others will swear by Nikon, or even Fuji. As to software, the primary that most people use tends to be Adobe Lightroom for editing and organization. For storage, a rotating backup drive stored in a safe deposit box is one of the best choices you can make. Backup your current files to the drive you have at the house, then unplug and move that drive to your box, taking the previous drive out to rinse and repeat. There are online storage options, but there are still massive questions as to who truly owns the data stored in them, you the consumer or the company providing the storage.
For storage, I have a 4 bay WD NAS, DL4100. Populated with 4x4TB drives in RAID5. Store all my photos and video on there. I have a 8TB USB Seagate Archive v2 Drive attached to it that I plug in once in a while to back it up to. The RAID5 helps with hardware failure, but backing up to the USB drive guarantees if it somehow gets deleted I'm good. WD has "recycle bin" like feature, but I never trust it. The WD NAS has DLNA and Media Server capabilities to stream to many TV's that have it built in. Synology also has a few models that are comparable as well. Whatever model you get check storage transfer speeds and get something that can max out giabit, copying a 1080p video file can take a while if it's a long video at slow speeds.
I bought a fancy new DSLR camera five years ago when my first child was born. During the first 12 months of the child's life, I'd say I generated close to 15 GB of photos of her - every first burp, every time she went for a walk, etc. was absolutely precious.
Flash forward a couple years and the DSLR sits on a shelf because I realized that 1.) all the photos I took of her seemed incredibly important at the time but are never looked at any more, 2.) I don't really need 16 megapixels of every moment of her life, and 3.) what's most important to me is always having the camera with me for the truly cute and memorable times I do want to take pictures of her or her little sister.
So all the photos of my older daughter since age 1 1/2 or so and all the photos since her little sister was born have been taken with a cellphone camera. It's good enough for anything but a portrait/Christmas card staged photo, and it's with me all the time. The only time I wish I still carried the DSLR all the time is when the kids are doing something split-second and the cellphone camera doesn't shoot quickly enough to capture it. Your mileage may vary, but just don't be surprised if whatever awesome setup you invest in becomes less and less used over time...
"95% of all Slashdot
Stuff happens with technology and our memories are volatile too. Every once a while, print a picture and store it in a way it won't get damaged easily.
For data storage for family stuff I use unRAID, I find it more resilient when multiple drives fails (can do partial recoveries and file-system level recoveries as well). FlexRAID is another competitor in some of those aspects.
I can't speak about the cameras themselves, my partner has been more involved with that.
Panasonic dmc-zs50 for the camera with a 64gb high speed card. Does raw capture for post processing and hd quality video capture for all those kid movie moments.
Picasa for picture organization. Great face recognition. Also have a folder naming convention which helps group the pictures into events.
Finally, backblaze to save it all.
Order is...
Been cleaning up 30 years of digital storages for plex server. Using exiftest and convert to catalog and help sort the information. Been taking a while.
Issue was cascading file storage as wife's machine as systems moved in multi direction at once: .... Then wife was to clean out what she needed and delete the rest *never happened*
CPU: 486dx33 to P5 to K6 to PIII to Q6660
OSs 3.1 to 95 to 98 to ME to XP to 7 to 8.1 (looking at 10)
har drives" 10MB, 250MB, multi 2GB SCSI, 33GB SCSI, 500GB PATA, multi 5000 SATA, multi- 1TB. and added SDD (now looking at 1TB SDD for her)
With each upgrade, a new C:\ was installed and all old data was stored in to C:\OLDMACHINE\C\ D\ E\
So cleaning up I grap here total drive and placed it on externel to my machine and stated writing bash scripts to claim down thought it all and read it up and out. Found scanning of baby ultra-sounds, old movies made with "eyebal" cramea, tiif files from old scanners. Some of the images have internal dates and times so storing out in corect order is easy. Others (scans mainly) do not have internal dates and times. So order by date is hard.
Am I worried of losing anything. No, I have 4 copies of every thing on 2 big machines, a NAS and finally backblase. The downside is purely ORDER.
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Umph. Tried to comment using G+ but it vanished. Argh.
I am a long time photographer. Processed film - if kept away from heat, light, water and physical abuse - has a good shelf life. However, I am currently scanning my old negatives to .PNG format and keeping multiple copies of the files. Using different formats helps improve the chance that at least one of them will be readable in the future.
A minimum precaution (in addition to standard backups, which I assume you're doing) is to copy important files to a good quality USB hard drive. Keep it in a fireproof, waterproof box when it isn't in use.
Backup early and backup often!
Can't you just live life in the moment? Why feel the need to take hundreds of thousands of pictures?
Back before digital pictures people kept photo albums with maybe a few hundred pictures in spanning the course of several decades, why not do the same?
Keep photos and videos of important occasions and events and get rid of the rest. Encode videos to h264, images to jpg if they were taken raw and that shouldn't take up more than a few dozen GB which can easily be backed up to a couple of blurays, an external hd or a large usb stick.
Personal pictures are meant to jog your memory of an event, not as a means of documenting it. If you want to document your kid's life superglue a gopro to its forehead.
LUMIX dmc-zs50 as the camera. Fits in a pocket, 30x optical zoom, captures raw, and does nice hd video. Has a standard tripod mount. Put a nice 64gb high speed card in it. Seriously you don't want or need some massive slr or production-ready video cam. Don't be that guy at soccer games and school plays.
Use a folder structure to group pictures by event. Don't worry about dates-all of that is in pic metadata if you set date/time correctly. Use picasa to organize pictures and do the facial recognize each time you add shots. Star the favorites for later. Add metadata you desire.
Backblaze to protect all files in the cloud.
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The YouTube library will likely be maintained and available for eternity. Make montage videos in the highest resolution available and upload them to YouTube. This could be considered a lower-fidelity emergency backup.
Easiest solution is likely to get some of them printed, in a photographer's shop for example.
If you're taking hundreds of photos, perhaps delete half of them outright and print like a tenth or a twelfth of them. It's dead easy to have multiple prints of a photo too.
For digital storage, on the hardware side you might have three hard drives. Backup, backup's backup. If one is well off enough I guess it'd be easy to have a 2.5" HDD just for that purpose. Soon they'll be up to 1TB per platter (so, 2TB dual platter drive for instance or a somewhat durable 1TB single platter). 2.5" HDD might go in a tower, a laptop, a USB dock or a plastic case with label (not unlike audio cassette cases)
people used to build statues for posterity
though I guess now you could 3D-print one. Maybe make matrioska dolls over time to save space?
Grab one out of Hungary and offer them a Q a day to snap a pic at your command. Have him, heck, the his whole remaining family, with cameras at the ready, so you will NEVER MISS THAT SHOT again - DAMN THE TORPEDOES - they don't have to live like a refugee.
For snapahots. It will be easy, convenient, compact. If you want to step up then get a DSLR for higher def photos. As a amateur photographer using Pentax products since 1976, I've collected quite a stash of their cameras and lenses. I now have a Pentax DSLR that has the same lens mount as all those lenses I've collected, some very rare and hard to get, but I always grab my Cannon Powershot for those need it now times.
I have an off topic suggestion for you. I saw someone do this years ago and thought it was a great idea. What you do is buy a set of clothes that an average 21 year old would wear. Then, you set the newborn on the clothes. Every year you take the clothes out and do a picture. Up through the time they can actually wear them.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Quit being such an arse.
This is just nesting behaviour; men do it too.
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Depends on what you intend to capture. The issue is that the cutest/funnest/best moments are fleeting. Something small like a cell phone camera is much more convenient when you want to snap a shot quickly, but those cameras have slow focus, slow recovery time and do not handle low-light or motion very well. A DSLR can* be much faster to focus, can* often burst and can* do significantly better with motion and low-light, but they are much more cumbersome and require some planning. You can't just whip one out and expect to capture those unexpected first moments. The larger sensors mean larger and heavier optics.
However, if I were to recommend anything it would probably be either the Sony a6000 or the smaller Sony a5100. They're both mirrorless compact cameras with e-mount interchangeable lenses. They're insanely fast to focus and can burst shot upwards of 10 FPS. The a5100 is lighter and less expensive but doesn't have an electronic view-finder. There aren't a lot of e-mount lenses on the market unfortunately but you can find adapters to other mounts.
As for storage, I have a couple of USB drives at different locations plus 1 TB on Google Drive.
* Can is a huge word here. A DSLR isn't some magic tool that will instantly take amazing photos. A fantastic DSLR won't take much better pictures than a standard P&S if you leave it on auto with the stock lens and don't know what to do with it.
Seriously, 1200x800 is "good enough" for anything but portraiture or serious landscape work. The JPG format isn't going away any time soon. And offsite archives in M-Disc (DVDs but etched in stone, literally) will outlast anything but fire or geological disturbance.
A few years ago I decided the only thing I cared about in my mess of digital stuff was my photo collection so went through the same thing.
So far what I'm doing is maintaining a bunch of separate backups of my photo collection. I have a "master" copy at home on my desktop PC. I recently put this in a Dropbox folder too, so the local copy is also automagically backed up online (I know Dropbox isn't everyone's cup of tea; I don't like the non-encrypted nature of it but for me it's a good balance of features & services).
I then have a separate external USB drive that I keep for backups. I have another one of these drives at my parents (that I update when I'm there every few months). I have another one in my office which I update less often.
BUT, that is only part of it - I've been worried about subtle disk failure screwing up my files. So a while back I wrote some scripts to store hashes of all the files and stuff them into a database. Every few months I run scripts to compare the actual contents of my file stores against "known good" hashes.
On two occasions I've found a bunch of photos that had been silently corrupted (once on my "master" and once on one of the backups). I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed.
I've also started to think about using par2 files to add another layer of redundancy; it's kinda trivial to script but it'd add a bit of storage overhead. For now though I'm kinda happy with what I've got - as long as I check the backups every few months against the known good setup, I can be confident in my storage.
I have a Sony Alpha a6000, anything similar is good.
LTO-6 tape will give you 15 to 30 years of shelf life storage.
First of all, this question comes up every 4-6 months "How to store data long term?".
Take the best pictures, get them printed on quality material, and laminate that and make a photo album. It can now easily be shown to anyone who visits and will survive past the lifespan of your children. I have family pictures from 130 years ago in non-digital format.
I used to be an advanced amateur photographer before I had kids. The kids were born in the days of film photography. I digitized all my film, and I've been storing all of my pictures in a NAS at home, of which I also keep an off-site backup. I don't worry too much about the possible obsolescence of file formats.
Problem with a good camera is that it is seldom there when you really need it for moments that just happen unexpectedly. Super picture quality isn't as important as having a camera easily and quickly available at the right moments.
Buy a phone with a good camera, that you then always will have on/near you. Some of them are quite good now (not going to name brands and sidetrack the discussion, search for reviews).
And set it up with automatic backup to a cloud account. That way your pictures will not only always be backed up, but can be easily viewed from anywhere.
You take yourself too seriously. Why should anyone give a shit what you think?
I always wondered about bitrot and lately ransomware encryption.
I too have a RAID setup for redundancy and backup to an external HDD, all get replaced every few years. But bitrot can set in and ruin pictures and if the worst happens, such as ransomware encrypting your data, everything can be ruined when you backup your data and overwrite the old files with the encrypted ones.
I've been thinking lately of using something like ZFS with versioning. I'm still researching this, but apparently ZFS can help with bitrot if set up correctly, plus with a versioning system any ransomware encryption would just create another version you could roll back to.
Perhaps I'm being a bit paranoid, but there's nothing wrong with being paranoid about your data... right?
Clone them once in a while so you have the latest data, keep one at work, keep one at home, etc... just encrypt them if you don't want anyone snooping.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
For family snapshots, you're probably better off with a new phone with a good camera than a dedicated camera like a powershot these days. The image quality is getting surprisingly close, and the availability difference inherent in having your phone's camera in arms reach all day every day will likely lead to capturing more interesting moments. The latest iPhones are a safe bet, and some androids are getting pretty good these days as well, but you'll want to research the exact model you're getting to make sure it's one of the good ones.
If you're really interested in quality, you can supplement your phone with a DSLR for events when you know you're going to be taking pictures. Or for special events you could rent equipment from your local camera shop, or hire a photographer.
There are interesting things coming down the pipe in terms of multi-lens and light-field cameras, but if you're thinking in terms of saving things for posterity, you might want to be conservative about that sort of thing until they become a bit more mainstream and standardized. Remember, they had 3D cameras back when you were a kid too, but when's the last time you looked at an old stereo-photo?
I'd also recommend you read up on shot composition, lighting, depth of field, speed, aperture, etc... And mabe take a photography class. Understanding how to take a good photo makes the difference between boring and beautiful.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Your family photos will get an automatic backup at Microsoft without you having to do anything. And if you ever forget a password, they got them for you too. If you ever want to retrieve your photos, just contact the NSA.
To capture anything good in low light you need a fast lens. A fast lens is one where the aperture number is small, like 1.8 or 1.4. A fast lens means that you don't have to wait for a flash to warm up and you don't have to carry it around.
The downside to a large aperture is that focusing will be hard, even with autofocus, and the exposure will get all weird. The exposure will be weird because your focus area is small, but the exposure logic generally is set to measure the entire picture. You don't really care about the rest of the frame because it'll be blurry due to your huge aperture. Also, autofocus will hunt all over the place because the depth-of-field is short.
So, be sure to set the autofocus on your center point only and exposure should also be spot (right there) until you get used to it.
Luckily, you'll have time to practice.
You'll also have to stash all your pictures somewhere. You can use Apple's photos or some other Windows/Linux solution. However, you should also put them offsite. Flickr has like 1TB free, and google pictures (or whatever it's called now) should be the equivalent. Also, your photo library is prone to corruption, so be sure to use Time Machine or the platform equivalent to back up your metadata etc.
You can capture JPEGs, they're fine. You might want to consider JPEG + RAW or RAW too, since space really isn't an issue these days.
For camera I would recommend a mid-high end compact. Look for ease of use and fast autofocus, not for megapixels or many features. I would not get a DSLR if you have not had one before.
For storage there are any number of options but if you are serious about durability get m-disc and recorder; this is a special type of DVD that is predicted to last for a thousand years.
The most important thing is being there in the moment. Cell phones are fine for a couple of pictures or short videos but spend time actually experiencing life, not watching it through a 6" screen.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Several things make this possible, with everything available locally plus redundant offsite backups.
Get one or a pair of big hard drives. 4 TB drives are cheap. Various tests put 4 TB drives as a class as more reliable than 3 or 5 TB drives. If you get a pair, RAID 1 them, either with software raid or lvm. Put everything on there. I really like lvm, so that when one drive fails, or is close to failing, you can replace it and keep the whole collection intact locally. Hardware RAID is not necessary, and potentially *less* reliable, since its more complex to replace things. Consider making the volume slightly smaller than the drive to allow for slightly differently sized replacements. As newer drives get cheaper, get bigger drives. Every time I've had to replace drives, they've been twice as large, faster, and cheaper than the last time.
Files are organized by year/month-event. Use whatever format works for you, but definitely have some level of simple organization, ideally using a folder structure so you aren't tied to a particular tool to manage them.
Keep everything as it comes off the camera. I don't keep RAW files, but you should have room for plenty.
Use Crashplan for online backup. This is a moderate cost for all the computers in your house, but with unlimited storage. (If you don't have reasonable internet access to do this, you are stuck shuffling tapes or drives offsite, which is a royal pain). If you have friends with similar desires, you can (for free) use the software to back up to each other's computers, but you each need lots of free space.
Put all the pictures and videos on flickr. Flickr has a 1 TB limit for free. I've got 40,000 pictures and videos on there (almost 10 years worth) and have only gotten up to about 300 GB. Flickr may require some format conversion for video. I recommend getting familiar with ffmpeg and similar command line tools, use the open source flickr library (and language) of your choice, and script the whole thing. Once the pictures and videos are on flickr, put them into albums that mirror your folder structure.
Flickr also lets you share your photos with exactly who you want to share them with, relatively securely. The downside is that everyone needs to create a flickr (yahoo) account. You can also share by album with a link (slightly less secure). Services with better/more convenient sharing like google are significantly more expensive. But of course, you could keep a rotating set of pictures in google free storage and also keep everything on flickr as a backup.
If you have an android phone (I assume Iphone is similar) also let it have multiple automatic backups: There are a number of apps that will automatically sync all pictures to their service, including flickr, google photos, and many others. Pick one or two and let them sync everything. Flickr lets them be private by default, but you'll have the backup. Then also use FolderSync to automatically sync them to your computer, where they will also be backed up by Crashplan and be accessible on the computer directly.
Use any of a hundred tools to view the pictures at home. With a home network and a shared folder, kodi is great for showing them on the TV (pictures and video).
Good luck, and congrats on the kid!
I hope my wife doesn't read your post - I'm 40, and have been telling her for several years now that it is too late, and I am too old, to become a dad. Anyway: It's not clear to me if you're asking the question "what is the best technology I can use to capture the most information about this object" or "what is the best/safest means I can use to store these images, once recorded, so that they have the best chance of surviving many years". On the first question, it absolutely doesn't matter. By the time this creature is old enough to be looking at these images, the technology you used to capture them will be long obsolete regardless of what you use. People our age grew up with scratchy, poorly-exposed 35mm color prints and Super 8 film of ourselves. Our parents grew up with some black and white photos, some color. The thing you have to keep in mind is that unless you happen to be a president, serial killer or rock star, these recordings are of absolutely no documentary interest whatsoever to the world at large and have no intrinsic value. The only purpose they serve is to remind you, and the kid, and potentially a few family members or friends, of the occasion that is being recorded. The quality of the recording is immaterial because it's just a stimulus to unlock a memory cascade in you, the viewer, who was present at the event anyway. And those memories will be much higher quality than any recording you can make. You could create a daguerrotype, use a brownie box camera, or aim a hand-cranked silent movie camera with B&W film and the pleasure you get from watching the result at a later date will be absolutely identical to that you'd receive from a 3D IMAX recording with octophonic sound and Feelarama(tm). TL;DR: don't sweat the tech, because it won't matter. 10 years from now you'll look at whatever you recorded and think "that ancient tech was so quaint", regardless. The second question is more interesting. There is no storage medium of high enough density for your needs that will last "indefinitely", and you also have the fun problem that codecs evolve. You should absolutely not use any file format that doesn't have an open-source decoder (not that there are many of those in common use these days). And as for the physical storage of the bits, you'll have to keep rolling them from media to media. Since most people can't be bothered making offsite backups, etc - I'd advise picking two disparate technologies for your backup strategy, e.g. writable DVDs and hard drives, and refresh them regularly. If you're comfortable with it, paid cloud storage is also an option (again, diversity is your friend - one copy on amazon and one copy on google and you can be fairly sure a single disaster won't wipe out both). Frankly, you probably don't feel this way right now, but if you think back objectively to your own childhood, you'll know that 99% of these irreplaceable memories sit in shoeboxes from the moment shortly after they were developed to the moment they're rummaged through while people are sorting your estate. So, don't over-invest in this.
With old time photos, you could write all the names of people (and descriptions) on the back... please be sure to add metadata to the jpeg files, so that 50 years from now your grandkids will know who is who.
You don't need no backup. All you picture already are stored at NSA servers. Getting access permission is another story though. But you asked for *storage* only, right?
See with prints, you must edit them for a photo album.
You don't have to worry about drives and keeping them going or a cloud business going bust and you having to scramble to download everything.
A couple if photos at any age is more than enough. And in a couple of generations, no one is going to give a shit.
Being a father of two and started to use digital cameras in last century, I collected sizable archive. It's too easy to take them and costly to process them. After each session (vacation, getway, event) I quickly sit down and process them using Picassa. Delete ones that are grosly bad, let my wife have a pass too, then adjust the rest. Last step is to download them to my picture frames which I build from old laptops. This is where the fun is as my fam constantly sees the pictures and we often stop and marvel and refresh our memories. Actually I am thinking about buying a ~40" tv and rebuilding it into a monster picture frame with DLNA.
And backup on several USB external drives, kept in different locations so I do not loose them to fire or theft. When I run out of space on older drives, get a new one but keep the old.
4wdloop
RAW format is bulky, so I store each terabyte of new images on a 1TB external drive, and maintain a continuous cloud secondary backup to the CrashPlan subscription service. Because I only have one or two of the external drives (I have a whole drawerful of them by now) connected at one time, I keep everything organized in Adobe Lightroom 6. It's the only photo editor/organizer I know of that keeps track of external disks that are not mounted.
I am on my way to have 100 hours of video and I have several thousand pictures and I made a very similar question. My solution;
- an external hard disk at home (60 euros, 2 TiB)
- Amazon cloud drive (75 euros per year, no space limit)
I synchronized them at first, and now I synchronize them once in a while with new material. I informed several people about the existence of these copies.
Main problem: the application of Amazon for tablets/smartphones is too slow and mixes photos with other jpg files from other directories I own. (I'm considering iCloud to see pictures on mobile devices, but it's much more expensive)
PS-> Please note that having several disks is not a good solution as a thief could leave you empty handed. Putting them in different houses makes synchronization difficult and risky (when you bring them together). A personal cloud is possibly not as safe as Amazon cloud drive, and besides, the upload speed is typically low.
A short photography or film class will teach you how to improve your images. I've learned quite a few things making a few documentary shorts: The two best ways to improve your images are adding light and stability. If nothing else, turn on the lights even during the day. Better, have an on-camera light or something bigger on a stand. Get a tripod, and when shooting "free," use a monopod AND strap. If you are going to buy a new camera, look for something with good low-light performance. Shoot video in progressive (24p, 30p, 60p) mode.
In terms of storage, the most important part is offsite backup. Remember that the RAID in your NAS is NOT a backup. Keep a spinning disk hard drive backup of your RAW files at a family member's place.
My grandmother died recently, almost 100 years old. My grandfather 20 years ago.
They loved making 8mm movies, today. He spent a lot of time doing special effects on his movies. Also filming my mother and later on me and the rest of family.
So when we had to empty the apartment, a few things occurred to me. First of all, most of their films were important to them, not to me. Looking through it all took weeks. We sorted it and divided the films among us according to who was mostly on them. I would like them all to be transferred to a digital media but that is just too expensive so most of them will perish. We are getting the ones that are most relevant to us, transferred to digital media, 720p/1080p.
So this is what I do.
1) I have all my pictures and video on my NAS boks
2) I have a offline backup of my most important stuff on a 4TB drive(about 2TB data on it) on a shelf with a note on it, explaining which format it is in, partitions etc, and that it contains my pictures and video.
3) I have a "off-site" cloud backup of this 2 TB. You can use Backblaze, Crashplan or whatever.
4) Passwords to the cloud backup are stored in a document along with a description of what it it on the account where all my legal papers are sent to.
Now, the storage method will change, the offsite backup are likely to change over the years, so you have to update it from time to time.
I have arranged all pictures and video so I can easily find them myself so others should be able to go through them fast. But like with my grandmother, I realize that most of what I have saved, are mosty important to me. There might be some family that would like to salvage 10 percent of those pictures.
As to which format, I must admit that it is a combination of .jpeg, .raw. .mkv(h.264), and whatever my camcorder outputs. But I am thinking that it might be easier in the future to salvage digital media than analog, as long as the integrity of the data is good. How to prevent bit-rot is the thing I haven't cracked.
Repeat after me until it sinks in. RAID is not backup.
RAID is not backup.
If you want to keep your pictures, make multiple copies and keep one in a different location. Tape has a 30-year shelf-life and no logic board or mechanical parts to fail, and there will always be services available to restore them. Tape drives are unfortunately prohibitively expensive.
Find a way. But remember. RAID is not backup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
RAW is really huge on disk, but you'll never regret being able to fix that low-exposure shot of the first birthday candle in the dark! Light room works pretty well on local NAS. If you'll be mounting it over WiFi, invest in a really good router. Quality matters when you're wondering why your throughput just fell off a cliff.
RAW is really huge on disk, but you'll never regret being able to fix that low-exposure shot of the first birthday candle in the dark! Light room works pretty well on local NAS. If you'll be mounting it over WiFi, invest in a really good router. Quality matters when you're wondering why your throughput just fell off a cliff.
Social media and technology thoughts: http://jasonkinner.wordpress.com
Backup is the process whereby you make several copies of the "Great American Novel" while you are writing it. You backup everything on a regular basis, auto save in your word processor, frequent system backups. I read of a writer whose backup process included printing pages. He kept them on his desk for a week, then on the floor next to his desk, then in a box down the hall, then by the back door, until they finally went into the trash can on pickup day. He conceded that he some time went into the trash can, looking for some pages.
When the "Great American Novel" was finished and awarded the Nobel Prize, it is time for Archive. In Archive, the novel is moved offline, copied onto storage media. This storage media can be anything you like. In Archive, it is read only! Early space flights were so important, the telemetry data was copied in four different formats, none of which can be read now. So be prepared to make new copies of Archive data every five years, reading it with the creating system and writing it with a newer system. You can make the novel online, however, it is not backedup nor is it modifiable.
Pictures are just the same. The orginial photo is sent to the Archive. Ones you want to display or modify, get copied from the Archive to a file that is Backedup. And, if it an award winner, it gets another entry in the Archive.
And RAID is a backup, more hardware than others. If the choice for the Backup media is one disk or two disks, I'm a two disk man all the way.
I don't know what photography class you took, but the aperture number of a lens has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with how far the lens iris will open relative to the size of the lens (it's a ratio; e.g., 1.8:1 or 1.4:1) and therefore how much light the lens can get to the sensor; the lower the number the closer to 1:1 you get and the more light you get. Aperture also controls the depth of field for a shot with a larger aperture decreasing depth of field and a smaller one increasing it. This affects what will be in focus in a shot as well as the amount of light and by extension how long of an exposure to use. If you want things farther and closer to you to be in focus you narrow the aperture (higher number) and increase exposure time. If you want only a single thing or group of things to be in focus in a shot you open the aperture and decrease exposure time. The "speed" of a camera comes from its shutter, and unless you're going for a slow motion video camera, pretty much all SLR and mirrorless cameras have similar shutter speeds from bulb (open until you close it) to 1/3200 or 1/4000 of a second. The shutter is part of the camera body, not the lens. Matrix metering is for novices and spot metering is for more advanced photographers that are going for a specific look or effect. Then there's ISO settings that will transpose a lot of the aperture and shutter settings based on what that is set to, as ISO controls the sensitivity of the sensor in modern cameras. It used to be a somewhat fixed aspect of the film being used that could be pushed a few notches one way or another depending on the quality or formulation of the film. If you don't know what you're doing, just use the Program (P) mode on the camera until you take a course. Your local YMCA or other continuing ed organization should have one if you can't find good online resources and experiment on your own.
Storage - you just need an external HD - a few TB Backup - find a willing friend/relative and use BitTorrent Sync for your photo/video folders.
I'm 56, nerd, used to love photography, darn near did it for a living. Took tons of pics, tons of videos. Probably 200 8mm carts in the drawers, many gigs of pics. We seldom look at any of it, our memories still work. Kids are grown. Other than taking pics at special events where we were by definition in the audience, we spent more time doing stuff with the kids than taking pics of them. Get a camera small enough to carry, these days odds are it's your cell phone. Back it up with a compact camera with a good range zoom for the special events and vacations. Sure... cell phones are great. Until you are saying "look at the cute little dots in the surf. Wish I had a real zoom that day!" Make folders for your pics, ruthlessly dump the blurred and missed shots, then mirror the entire bunch or bulk copy it to a backup device. Doesn't much matter if you use external USB, a remote storage facility, local NAS. Get as simple or as fancy as you want. Use drag and drop, rsync, or whatever backup software you like. Having it backed up is all that matters, heck I just do a copy of my large folders to NAS and head to bed. I don't care if it takes a couple hours, I'm asleep. Don't overthink it or make every breath some photo event. Just makes the kids self conscious and they will wish you would chill and let things be. Have fun. Kids are only little, cute, and completely lovable for a fairly brief period. They may still be great people as they grow, but the super cute period is sort of brief. Don't miss it. I watch some of our videos and I wish I'd been in the action with the kids, not standing back with a camcorder. We all would have had a lot more fun.
ZFS. ZFS in some form. FreeNAS with ZFS, FreeBSD with ZFS. Don't run anything else. Checksumming, self healing, stable, future proof. Don't risk bitrot or corruption or data loss. Just do it. As far as metadata, thats a bitch. Ive yet to find an open metadata format that is widely supported, and will be around in 50 years. Im hoping someone here chimes in with a good metadata solution! Ive yet to find one I love.
Wow, there are a lot of questions in there that require a lot of detailed and somewhat subjective answers. I've been doing photography since I was seven years old when I got my first real 35mm range finder camera, and have done my own developing and printing, and moved to digital photography very early on in its evolution and still use it today. Let me see if I can give you some quick answers that you can go do more detailed research on yourself.
Your last question about novelty photography will get one comment from me: Stay away! Sure 3D images are cool, but the added expense of a camera capable of doing that sort of thing is not worth it once the novelty wears off. It's like the organizing and labeling stuff, really.
Ok, go forth and buy a new camera if you need to. There are several nice point and shoot cameras in the 16 MP
I am an old retired computer guy with a dozen Rubbermaid tubs of old photos, documents and film/video inherited from my parents that go back generations and are priceless to my family. My goal is to have a method of preserving both physical and digital resources in such a way that they are accessible in 50 years. I have photos that are over 100 years old, so that is a reasonable goal.
After months of research, I have become most impressed by a "museum" approach. That means, cataloging the media resources with a defined vocabulary--I chose the Dublin Core (www.dublincore.org). It means developing a way to link the physical media to any digitized versions, by assigning a numbering system ("accessioning" in museum-speak). And the most important thing I learned was to plan to save a text file with each digitized item, that describes it and contains the stories about it. For example, a photo titled, "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.JPG" would have stored with it a file named "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.TXT". The reason for this is profound! The associated text file is MOST likely to survive 50 years. No matter how software changes, text files are likely to be readable in 50 years.
The plan would be to open and resave all the media, say every 10 years, and update as needed. For example, JPG files might need to be updated to JPG2000, etc, etc, as new software is developed. A slightly sophisticated wrinkle is to actually store the text in XML or HTML format. So instead of having a line in the text file that says, "Title: Grandma kayaking the Missouri River", it might read Grandma kayaking the Missouri River. The advantage of this is that it makes all the text files "machine readable".
If this level of approach is interesting to you, then the best site discussing these issues I have found BY FAR is "http://archivehistory.jeksite.org/index.htm". This amazing site contains basically a 250 book on the subject that is amazing. It isn't immediately apparent how extensive this site is, but it is just wonderful. There is vanishingly little else of this quality out there, I've spent months looking. The Library of Congress has a "Personal Archiving" program, but it basically says just "scan well, organize folders well and backup well". That is good advice, but doesn't touch the bigger issues. For small museums there are cool sites like "www.omeka.org". I adore the "ATOM" project ("https://www.artefactual.com/services/atom-2/", but it is just over my head in sophistication. Here is a website that discusses 29 "free and open source" solutions to digital archiving: "http://www.ethnosproject.org/digital-curation-digital-asset-management-community-archiving-systems/". I have gone through and examined each of them, but they are just a bit over my head. I have found several projects in Australia to be very interesting, but again, not an exact fit for us "family archivists".
I have finally decided to "roll my own" program. I am building a Microsoft Access database that will catalog my media resources, and which will then automatically generate my "text" file for each resource, putting the text file in the proper folder, and containing the correct XML depiction of my Dublin Core description of my photos, videos, documents, etc, including the locations of both the physical and digital media. I have made arrangements with some computer science folks in my family in the next generation (nephews), to "inherit" my "family museum" effort, and to carry it on to the next generation. My whole point with the "museum" approach is that it creates an intelligible system that can be left to the next generation! If my Microsoft Access program gets lost over the years, it won't matter, because all the database information about the digital media will be stored in those amazingly simple TEXT files!!! Good luck in your efforts.
I know everyone hates 3D but that's because there is no good way of viewing it at present. But that's information you should be keeping for when there is a better technology. As other posters have said, you don't need crazy-high reolutions. Get a decent 3d camera.
Alternatively (this is what I still do) just take two photos a few inches apart. When we take photos we often take more than one anyway so just make a point of taking two. Line up on the first, shoot, then just shuffle a few inches to the side and take another with the camera still pointing at same location. Not so good for people shots though :-)
It's amazing how much more you see in 3d photos. Great for posterity shots. Any 3d tv will give you an idea of how much they reveal... for when a good viewing technology comes along.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.co...
When I bought a BlueRay drive it came with a sample CD m@disk that's made to last a 1000 years.
I've never used it, it's more of a conversation piece as they are spendy and lack storage space (4.7Gigs).
Yet tossed out as an option with foreseeable future technological problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It seems that a lot of people in the western world are voluntarily (and involuntarily) spending more and more of their lives under the unforgiving gaze of cameras, each with a keen and heartless memory. People, particularly kids, can now grow up having seen their own birth (and some, their own conception), and every goofy, funny, embarrassing, or horrifying moment from then to the present day, all in HD quality, stored on media that may outlast their own lives. Some of it may haunt them later in life it it falls into the wrong hands.
Keep in mind that some shit your kids will do, because they are immature, will be..immature. Everybody has something that they regret doing from their childhood, and they perhaps don't want it trotted out on the media player every Christmas. They may not even want to know a copy of it exists anywhere. Some things are best left forgotten.
So please, every once in a while or oftener, shut the fucking camera off and form your own memories, vague and emotionally tinted as they may be, and allow certain stupid things to be forgotten. Otherwise, don't be surprised when your teenage kid, fed up with having every awkward growing moment committed to posterity, snaps and decides to hack your media bunker and destroy it, and then burns the house down for good measure.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I use three separate cloud accounts, sync them one-way w/ no deletions (fail in one won't affect others) with Cloud HQ. Keep 2 portable 1TB HD's for local copies. Works fine as long as below 1TB total, too expensive for me if I get beyond that. Looked at Glacier, but fiddle with files too much for that.
You need simplicity, reliability, format independence, and no particular speed or latency. Don't do RAID or NAS for backups.
Sure, NAS and RAID and the like are great for online reliability, and for your current copies, but for backups, you want something that you can plug in 5 years from now, be sure it'll work, and don't care if it's a bit slow. So buy a few individual drives with the most portable formats available (seems to be 2TB with USB2 and eSATA for now), and every couple of years, copy to new media, which will cost you half as much for twice the capacity and maybe use some format that doesn't exist yet.
File formats are anybody's guess - you probably should keep the data in the original format, but also, as new formats come out, consider translating some of the old ones into new formats, e.g. JPEG->PNG, or OlderMovieFormat->NewerMovieFormat, and keep the translation programs on the same disk.
File namingAgain, simplicity's good, but you're also doing this for people in the future, including yourself. I tend to have directories by year, and subdirectories by what category of picture it was (this trip, cats, etc.), and never get around to keeping simple text files of what most of the pictures in the batch are about, but you should totally be doing that. And that's static text files, not some DBMS that won't be supported next decade. (So CSV files or tab-separated text from 1978 still work fine, but Lotus123 spreadsheets or mid-90s Excel binaries or Office365 cloud-stuff may not be readable .)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You should totally be using them, instead of keeping your copies at home, because it's much more reliable, they've got better hardware, geographic redundancy, paid staffs, and nothing can go w(#($!_*$@#RR
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It is very common, at least in North America, and in North American English, to call a lens with a large aperture "fast". Since, as you said, large aperture allows more light in, so it takes less time to expose the sensor/film, therefore the lens is "fast".
Googling "fast lens" will come up with many examples such as this one: http://digital-photography-school.com/what-is-a-fast-lens/
Maybe you're from another part of the world that doesn't use this expression?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Hundreds (if not thousands) of years from now, others will look on us as the "first people". This is the beginning of time that is documented digitally. Be proud, we are the first people.
Truthfully, cellphone cameras wind up the most useful tool simply because you're most likely to be carrying one with you, whenever opportunity strikes to take a worthwhile photo.
IMO though, this is also why the "point and shoot" camera category is dying a slow death. If you care about your photos to the point you demand better quality than you're getting from a cellphone, you may as well invest a bit more and go with a digital SLR with interchangeable lenses. Then you have a camera worthy of investing some real time learning to use and master, and it might really take you to a place where photography becomes a new hobby for you. Whether you go with a nice point and shoot or an SLR, you're still talking about a single purpose device you have to make a special effort to carry with you and maintain (battery kept charged up, memory card ready to use with it, etc.). Why not make it a device that's as flexible as possible for the one task it's designed for?
I've owned several of Canon's Digital Rebel series of cameras over the years. (My most recent one was a T2i which I held onto until just a month or two ago. The later revisions like T3i and T4i just didn't add enough value to be worth an upgrade from it -- so got a lot of life about of that one. Frankly, a T2i is *still* an excellent choice if you're looking for a good used digital SLR on a tight budget. The lenses it uses will work with the latest Rebel cameras OR the mid-range Canon D series SLRs like the 7D or 70D.)
Now, I've stepped up to the 70D myself. The camera has better low light photo capabilities than anything I used previously, and definitely has a heavier, more weather-resistant case design to it. More control dials and buttons for features you'd have to navigate on-screen menus to change on a Rebel camera, too. But in a nutshell? It probably makes the most sense if you already KNOW you're going to stick with photography as a true hobby/pastime. One of the digital Rebels is probably a better starting point into the digital SLR genre if you're coming from only using a cellphone camera and/or other point and shoot.
So happy with my $110 purchase!
Even a single copy on M-DISC in a media-grade fire resistant safe is more likely to survive the next 35 years intact and readable than the alternatives. Cloud, hard disk arrays, tapes, whatever. The total maintenance cost over this time is dramatically lower than the alternatives, too (virtually zero).
And I would not worry about availability of readers in 35 years. I don't see passive physical media completely going away. Passive media carrier that does not include electronics. There will always be a niche for that. The drives you will buy in 30 years are likely accept the same 12cm disc form we have been using for the last 35 years and be backward compatible with CD, DVD, Blu-ray, Violet-ray, UV-ray, Gen1 holographic, Gen2 quantum, Gen4 quarkstore and Gen4 planckstore disks :-)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
1) photosensitive paper, i.e. the same paper that was used to print 1980's analog photos, has proven to be very durable. Don't use inkjets etc, which may fade over time (or they may not -I prefer to not take the risk).
2) a HD full of photos is good for indexing and searching, but I rarely browse these picture. The ones I have printed in a small album lying around are browsed regularly, either by meself or visitors.
I'll raise you a single mustard-colored Polaroid photograph.
Add several hundred process film prints, and a few surviving rolls of negatives.
Add several hundred thousand digital camera shots with shutterbug duplication (ie busy! no time to sort!)
Add a thousand crappy cellphone videos with pixel faces, square teeth and indecipherable audio.
Add some better video from digital cameras, better picture but crappy builtin mic. Finger noise louder than voices.
Now we're talking, an old video camera with bulky accessories like a real rubber mounted windscreen'd mic.
It was a wedding present and we have great wedding videos, but it never was convenient enough to carry around.
Now it's broken and those cartridge tapes are sitting in the closet waiting to be send to some A-D service some day.
So as the kids are growing up, what we mostly have is crappy stuff from aforementioned low end digital devices.
It is nice to know what people looked like in a moment in time.
It's kind of ok to capture lots of video footage, but there is this strained relationship between people and the camera.
The person behind the camera (it usually comes down to one) becomes the 'missing person' in the family archives.
Video gets taken of special moments and trips, but not often enough to provide real continuity.
In order to capture the essence of LIFE and PEOPLE, you need to capture their casual voices. With 'invisible to the subject' continuous recorded high quality sound. Engage them in conversation. Steer the conversation. Document your kids' intellect from their first spoken word, the voices of great-grandparents telling stories of the Depression, capture a day in the life of someone, a family evening at dinner with the clink of silverware, war stories or limericks or the songs adults remember being sung to them as children. Visit Grandma at the old folks' home and have her describe the neighborhood you grew up in, the best times in her marriage, her proudest moments. Let the audio device sit in your daughter's pocket as she plays her instrument in the concert band to capture meaningful sound you can sync over that yucky muddle from your video camera.
It is tragic beyond words that the capability of recording whole hours and even days of high quality just-sound has now been available to us for almost two decades now, due to flash memory, lithium batteries and (if it's a priority to you, it certainly wasn't to the manufacturer) a decent external microphone, the ability to store/replicate incredible amounts of audio onto cheap media... and yet.
People are still dabbling with jittery occasional video, striving for that Hollywood perfection, when with just-audio they could for far less effort and expense allow future generations to 'know' the people of today. And as we reach old age, have the ability to sit back and listen to these voices, real conversations. Someone could even write a book, a real one with lots of words and all.
In the 1950s audiophiles discovered high fidelity sound. They moved magnetic tape across heads at 7-1/2" per second and filled the shelves with 30 minute tapes. Some time around 15 years ago it became possible for a pocket device to store sound with even greater fidelity in the pocket. Now for the price of your average video-enabled digital camera, you can set yourself up with the equivalent of DAT tape audio mastering unit of 20 years ago and a couple of microphones that capture sound with sufficient fidelity that you can not only apply (amazing!) digital noise filters to it... your own child's or grandmother's voice will be clear as day.
Something to listen to as you hold that single mustard-colored Polaroid photo in your hand. Because your audio fit easily on CDs and DVDs you tossed into the closet, but you decided to store all your video in the Cloud and the Cloud went bankrupt rather suddenly one day.
DISCLAIMER: This cautionary rant is as much to myself as to everyone else. If only I
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
As a lot of the previous posters I also use a NAS, and a backup routine that is executed in the background.
I have a NAS in my home, running 4 drives in RAID-6 and EXT4. All of my digital work resides on this server.
Every night the entire server is backed up using rsync with --archive, set up with SSH-keys, to two identical off-site servers with 4 drives in RAID-6, located in two different countries. Once BTRFS is a bit better, I will start using this.
To satisfy my own personal paranoia, I also have an external USB drive located at work that I bring home every first day of the month and run the same rsync command. The problem with such drives is that you have to handle them very carefully.
So far, so good. Running for the fourth year now with the off-site servers, no mishaps, only peace of mind.
And before someone dings me for suggesting cloud services..yadda yadda privacy/NSA/Whatever:
1. Easy Button Easy. No need to maintain your own NAS, and Yahoo/Google/whatever handles the redundancy.
2. You can use them in addition to local backups on USB storage/NAS
2. If you really worried about privacy, tar/zip/stuffit/rar up your folders and gnupg encrypt them.
Start your organization NOW!
YYYY/MM/Event/ - for the directories.
Never trust metadata for this. Over the years you will swap programs at least once every 5 yrs and each will have a different way to organize. ALWAYS USE that directory structure. Nothing is as important as the date a photo was taken. Nothing. It doesn't need to be the exact date unless you are on a trip and moving from place to place daily.
Put the location/subject into the filename. I retain sequence numbers to ensure no files get clobbered accidentally in a directory. Using a sequence also means the timeline is maintained. 001-Three_days_in_Florence.jpg is helpful, but not as good as 001-Florence-Uffizi_Entrance.jpg and 002-Florence-Uffizi_Entrance.jpg
Of course, a rating system included inside the file metadata is a big help. No reason to spend any time with low quality photos. I use a scale of 0-5, where 5 is best. 0=delete. I rarely look at 1-3 rated photos, but if I'm trying to relive an experience, having all of them helps.
Cameras - smartphone cameras suck. A friend and I travel the world together. On our last trip, he only brought a smartphone with a 13mpix camera. His shots were never as nice as mine with a $120 Canon PnS with a 4x optical zoom. He's a better photographer than I am too. I think a nicer camera is just more to lug around and really not needed anymore.
After that, follow normal backup techniques where the more important a file is, the more backup copies you have in diverse locations.
Something I wish we did with our kids was monthly photographs. 12 photos a year, taken on the 1st of the month - always. Wouldn't that be a nice present later? Plus these days it is a safety thing. Most should be taken with the same background as reference.
Very happy that I dropped 1k on a good DSLR (canon 60d) and some good lenses for lowlight indoors (love my sigma 30mm and 50mm) within a month or so of my boy's arrival. The change from my (otherwise decent) lumix camera is striking. Along the way I added a telephoto zoom (now that he's mobile outside). Of the approximately 20K pics I've taken over 4 years about 100 of them are stunning. (Mostly my strategy was take tons of pics and 1 in 5 catches a decent expression etc. Posing a 0-4 year old is not easy to do. So mostly just hold the button down and then weed out the failures). And over the years my understanding of the camera and photography has improved and I can plan more of my shots.
So many pics early on are at home or of "events" (first.....) that carrying a dslr and lenses was not much of a hassle--supplement with a decent cell phone and you're covered.
I might go with mirrorless if I were buying today, though, for easy of carrying, but the lenses would be the same (fast 30-50 mm for indoors and kit zoom). Oh and if you go with flash get one that you can bounce off walls and disable the built in.
On storage my strategy has been redundancy and cloud storage for the best shots (picasa albums each year and each special trip).
You fail it.
For still images, there is no more robust way of preserving them than prints. Anything that requires ongoing maintenance is unlikely to survive even a century.
There are no technologies that can store any digital media for much longer than 10-15 years at best. Most retain data reliably for far shorter. This is the curse of digital. Old school analog photography, when properly stored lasts for 100 years or more.
(I'm intimately involved in HDD and SSD technology reliability)
MDisk is DVD technology that is supposed to last for 100 years. The drives cost the same as a regular DVD drive. The disks are expensive, though.
Becoming a dad usually takes about 9 months.
Once you have a good camera and setup hold onto it because you probably won't be able to afford a new one for the next decade and a half.
If you do have the money, invest it in a professional once in a while. Spend some good time with your kids instead of managing their pictures, technology will come that sorts it out for you, iPhoto is great for that or anything that sorts pictures based on GPS data. Just save it at least twice at home and twice off-site such as at a hard drive at your job and an online site or so. Sync everything once in a while.
Specifically, get a mobile phone with a decent camera system (iPhone is great) that syncs because you're not going to want to take the camera bag with two kids, a stroller, snacks, breast milk, a pack-n-play and the dog.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Isn't this a textbook example of pissing into the wind?
Posterity is a nosy bastard. Don't tell me you haven't noticed.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The best introduction to storing and labeling photos that I can find is at http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/.
format and quality: Keep the original. Any common format will be convertible, if necessary, for decades. For this reason, I don't see prints as necessary.
storage type: Redundant. I'm using multiple backup external hard disks, plus multiple DVDs, plus Google Drive when all culling, naming and captioning are done. (Google Drive is easier to organize than Google Photos, and you can put videos, photos and notes in one place. Don't be fooled by the apparent ability to make or change captions -- that all gets lost if you download the photo.)
For backups, I use Grsync on Windows and rsync scripts on Linux (Grsync also available).
organizing: Name by date (2015.08.23-name). I've organized by decade, with subfolders for major events and culled photos.
labeling: XnView (http://www.xnview.com/) is best and easiest, plus free, plus runs on Windows, Linux and Macs. XnView can do almost anything. Breezebrowser (paid) and Irfanview (free) are also good and have specific strong points.
In XnView's settings, choose to write to XMP; that way, you'll get captions in both IPTC-IIM and XMP formats, the two major systems now in use (AP and some other wire services also use both). Windows and Mac file browsers can also show these (and possibly something in Linux that I don't use.) You can also make batch captions for photos from one event, then fill in photo-specific details individually. You can make keywords too, though I haven't bothered.
I wanted images of photos with the captions underneath for family viewing on a TV. Nothing can do this. I ended up using Breezebrowser with slideshows set to display captions under the photos in white text on a black background, in the custom form @IPTC_caption@\n[@file@]\n . . . This shows the caption, the file name on a separate line, and a meaningless last line of dots because my TV kept cutting off the bottom line. For each slideshow image, I took a screenshot, pasted that into another program and saved it to another folder, naming each originalname-scr. Now we have a set of the originals and a duplicate screenshot set with the captions visible.
Breezebrowser can also export all captions to a text file. I use the custom format @file@\n @IPTC_caption@\n
...late to the party. But here's what I'd do today: Keep the S110. There's not much out there that does what it does as well while being tough and fast (to power on and shoot). Get a compact inexpensive SD-card based video camera with a reputation for reliability and durability (Canon R300 etc). Carry the pocket camera. Use the videocam when conveniently accessible or when you know to take it along. Storage, I still haven't figured out. I have a lot of analog Hi8 tapes which I'm slowly getting on DVD. I'm doing this for backup and convenient viewing. Although the tapes will deteriorate, they'll very likely outlast DVDs burned today and will deteriorate mostly gracefully (except for flaking, which so far occurs on only the lower quality blanks I used), so I will be keeping them. Copy the media on hard drives to an external every once in a while and store it in someone else's house that's kept at reasonably temperature and humidity.