Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Storing Family Videos and Pictures For Posterity?

Posted by Soulskill on from the intall-gopro-in-forehead dept.

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.

23 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Geographic redundancy by Rinisari · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Geographic redundancy by the_skywise · · Score: 2

      I've got about a terabyte of photos and video and and was also looking at glacier which seemed reasonable for .01 per gigabyte per month (basically $10/month for me) which I thought was reasonable until halfway through uploading everything a friend pointed out that Amazon had *unlimited* storage for $60/year on their Amazon Cloud Drive. So I'm now about halfway through uploading everything to that.

      The cloud drive has some nicer features in that all the data is private and I can share files are folders as I want.

      I'm a little more skittish of uploading my mp3s from ripped CDs and other videos I've captured off of my DVR though. Amazon's license agreement seems to say it's OK so long as I don't share it but we know how that goes.

    2. Re:Geographic redundancy by Harlequin80 · · Score: 2

      Add into this mix a cheap tape drive. I have an old LTO-3 drive which I picked a pair up off ebay for $100. New media is still easy to find. Every 3 months or so I make a new tape and take it to my parents.

      I am assuming in this case though that you aren't actually backing up 9TB of photos and family vids.

  2. Storage: NAS by WoodburyMan · · Score: 2

    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.

  3. Don't overthink it by schnell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 .sig quotes are incorrect or completely fabricated." -Benjamin Franklin
    1. Re:Don't overthink it by fermion · · Score: 2

      My oldest and be preserved photos are slides. They are kept in a plastic viewing apparatus. For important videos I have a 3CCD DV camera. The mini DV tape should last at least 20 years. Printed photos, especially color, will degrade quickly unless they are professionally printed and store adequately. This can be done at home using archival ink and paper. I have a DSLR. I wish I would have just kept the memory cards instead of downloading them to a two hard disks. As luck would have it, the portable hard disk got stolen and the computer with the hard disk crashed shortly after. I have most of the photos, but the memory cards would have been nice. Memory cards are only rated for a few years, though. In any case I don't erase my memory cards. A 64 GB card is cheap, and I just shoot raw until it is full. But really cell phone cameras are to the point where the photos and video match or exceed what we had in point and shoot cameras. All the photos are uploaded to the cloud, and given the low cost of storage I suspect that this will be a solution that will result in long term storage solution for me. This is because I have tried to keep hard disk backup, even tape backups, and it, over the past decade or so, been less reliable that uploading to off site storage.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
    2. Re:Don't overthink it by Incadenza · · Score: 2

      I guess you more or less summarized my first reaction to the question. A technical question is asked here (how to preserve my pictures), but the the real question is is psychological/sociological one: which pictures should be reserved for the future generations?

      The technical question is really easily solved: use a well catered file format, use back-ups, also off-site. Really nothing new here, that is what you do with all your important data.

      And the answer to the ‘soft’ question is not that hard either. Man is a social animal, so in the end we like to see pictures of people. My kids are old enough to be grounded now, and the pictures they love are the picture that show ‘how cute they were’. They don't give a **** (their words, not mine) about the compression type, white balance, focal distance, graininess or any other technical issue, as long as there's people they know in the picture.

      And don't overdo it, people like to browse through photos, not swim in them. Trying to preserve each and every moment is as silly as making a 1:1 map. And have fun!

    3. Re:Don't overthink it by CptJeanLuc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This. Do not overinvest. I purchased USD 4k worth of equipment, which a year later sat mostly in its bag. Rarely bothering to bring it anywhere because who wants an extra bag in addition to all the other baby stuff you are bringing along. I would still have gotten some less expensive but still decent gear, for taking the occasional "extra nice" photo. Not being a pro, the idea of having a great camera around when there is that opportunity for a great show which comes along - in my experience, if you need a minute to get it and set it up, that opportunity is gone - the child is now focused on something completely different. Get a phone with a good camera, and keep it around.

      Don't take tons and tons of pictures, try to take a few good ones, immediately after taking shots delete the ones which do not cut it on the camera, and do some additional filtering afterwards. As I read in an interview with a well known photographer, he thought normal family pictures were on average better with the pre-digital technology, because pictures were expensive, film was limited, and so you had to make more of an effort to compose and time a shot. Now people seem to instead want to take 15 pictures and hope that one of them is good, perhaps without thinking too much about composition. Which generates loads of mediocre pictures. By filling up the harddrive with stuff, the value of the individual pictures are diminished. After the 1 year birthday party, a relative gave us 500 pictures they took with their camera. Seriously, there is nothing going on in a 1 year birthday party which takes 500 pictures to document, unless the parents last names are Kardashian and West.

      Storage on the other hand ... make sure you have multiple copies in different physical locations, and not only that cloud stuff which can go belly up completely outside your control. And make sure there is some incremental technology involved so that some older copies cannot be messed up by some kind of failure, virus or whatever. It does no good to rsync with deletion over your previous backup, just to discover the source folder has been emptied by mistake.

      So don't overinvest in gear, take only a limited set of pictures of actual value, and overinvest in keeping those safe.

      And even more important - make sure to store copies in your analog computer. Yes, experience the moment and save a picture in your brain, which will still be there when you lose all your harddrives. Seriously - I was in the Louvre watching a Japanese tourist enter the room, going up to the painting of Mona Lisa, and leaving again - never once raising his eyes above the display of his video camera. He went to France perhaps the only time in his lifetime, and did not bother to actually look at the world's most famous painting. If things get hectic, forget the camera and use the two lenses next to your nose.

    4. Re:Don't overthink it by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 2

      i'll go one step further. i faced the same situation a few months ago when my 2nd child was about to be born. I searched and searched and bought a panasonic lx100 camera for one single reason - 4K video. i have nothing to easily play it on (at full resolution) BUT by the time my child is a teenager, 1080p will be a laughable resolution. the camera is "coat/handbag pocketable" and produces OK photos + excellent videos at a reasonable price.

      when i look at VHS videos of my childhood, they suck donkey balls (qualitywise). my dad's childhood 8mm videos look better. that's why i decided to make 4K videos as soon as I could afford it.

    5. Re:Don't overthink it by GerryHattrick · · Score: 2

      Agree - keep all the gigabytes you like, nobody will ever browse them (and they'll be unbrowsable by the Standards 50 years hence). Now and then, or after family etc occasions, curate an 'album' of say 50 printed pages. Plenty of services to bind them nicely, much cheaper than hardware. In 100 years, that's all anyone will remember of you. Just possibly by then an AI system will have your virtual ghost communicating with questioners, but don't bank on it - they might not ask.

  4. Redundant, verified backups by trawg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. Go lower tech by mjensen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Offsite M-Disc archive by Erioll · · Score: 2

    I'll endorse the M-Disc thing. I have one myself, and like it for exactly this type of thing, like my wedding photos. I need to be more paranoid, and get more of my stuff on it, but the really REALLY important stuff is. Link: http://www.mdisc.com/

  7. Be there for the kid! by trout007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Be there for the kid! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Also, when people look at the photos years later, they will value most the pictures of people going about their routine life. They will have less interest in "posed" photos, and no interest in photos of the parade at Disneyland. About once a month, I will grab a camera and walk around taking pictures of the family preparing dinner, or the kids playing with their friends.

  8. Asking about capture or storage? by larwe · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Asking about capture or storage? by larwe · · Score: 2

      You know, I'd fucking love to. I have no fucking idea how the fucking fuck to fucking insert them on fucking slashdot. Carriage returns aren't fucking honored. Fucking HTML tags appear verbatim without any fucking parsing. If this fucking posting system wasn't fucked up/undocumented/whatever, my posts would be divided into fucking paragraphs. Fuck? Fuck. Fuck!

  9. Metadata by ka9dgx · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. RAID is not backup. by ZorkZero · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:RAID is not backup. by thogard · · Score: 2

      Alos remember that the RAID controller in the NAS might be the only thing that will ever be able to read the drives so if lightning takes out the NAS, so long all the data even if the drives don't get zapped.

      RAID also doesn't quite ccope with the problem that on large sotrage systems, the MTBF means that something is always broken and undetected and it is only going to get worse.

  11. A Lot Of Questions by multimediavt · · Score: 2

    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.

    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.

    1. Cameras with interchangeable lenses are the best buy if this is something you're going to get serious about. If not, stick to what you have or get some simple point-and-shoot with a good sensor and a decent zoom lens (with its optical zoom properties taking priority over digital zoom). I'd recommend something with at least 16 MP or higher so anything can be blown up to an 11"x17" size and not look too grainy. B&H Photo is a good place to get gear and get reviews by photographers and not just the average Joe.
    2. Store the photos on a hard drive, preferably an array of at least RAID 1 so if one drive fails you don't lose everything. Others have pretty much answered this above. Long term you need to look at either redundancy of the array or tape. Yep tape. Costly, but if it's that important tape is still the best medium for long term storage integrity.
    3. ALWAYS shoot at the highest quality setting (image size) for the camera you are using. Again, if quality is important file size is not an issue with today's storage costs.
    4. Format will depend on the camera, but most will be at least JPEG format. Again, ALWAYS use the highest quality setting! Buy a bigger card for the camera. I can shoot all day with a 32 GB card with my 24 megapixel DSLR. I've taken well over 1000 pictures in a day and had no problem storing them util I got back to my laptop.
    5. If the camera supports RAW, USE IT! You can use it in conjunction with JPEG (the RAW+JPEG setting). Why? It's a lot easier to adjust image color, saturation, exposure, etc. after the fact in an image editing app (that also supports RAW, very important) with a RAW format image. Again, this gets important if you want to print the images or ever want to do any pro photography.
    6. Organizing and labeling? I can tell you from experience that if you're not doing photography for money that whole business gets tedious very quickly, and you'll not do it for long nor consistently. I use well labelled file folders and then label the best photos with tags or keywords in the file properties. I use a Mac so that stuff is there, Windows also supports file attributes you can use to add keywords, etc. Yes, I still do this for my very large projects with thousands of raw photos. I'll just mark the ones I've enhanced or otherwise like and just sort based on the tag or keyword and they float to the top. Modern OSes and filesystems are pretty good for this anymore without the need for some sort of specific software like Apple's Photos.

    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

  12. N individual hard drives, copy every 2-3 years by billstewart · · Score: 2

    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
  13. Trusted Cloud Back Services, like MegaUpload by billstewart · · Score: 2

    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