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.

Comments

Geographic redundancy

[Rinisari]

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.

Don't overthink it

[schnell]

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...

Re:Don't overthink it

[CptJeanLuc]

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.

Redundant, verified backups

[trawg]

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.

Go lower tech

[mjensen]

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.

Be there for the kid!

[trout007]

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.

Re:Be there for the kid!

[ShanghaiBill]

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.