Digital Pic storage, advice needed.
- Thread starter DaveD912
- Start date
HaleYes
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Clay County, IL
I burn mine to DVD's.
Hale
Hale
Last edited:
Both.DaveD912 said:
Hard drives are cheap, about $70ish for a 250gb (assuming internal).
DVDs are also cheap (at least the non-fancy 4.7gb versions).
I keep mine on a separate drive on my desktop computer as well as burn them to DVDs (only 2 at this moment, I don't take to many photos). The hard drive makes it for quick and easy access. The DVDs are there in case the hard drive fails or some other event makes it unusable.
RTicUL8
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Rocky Mountain High... Colorado!
Get an external hard drive as a backup.
===
* Several years ago I had two internal hard drives - one main, and one backup.
* I went on vacation and came back two weeks later and my computer would not boot.
* I saw from the blinking clock on the oven and microwave that the power has gone out while I was gone.
* Long story short. There must of have been a big power hit, because it toasted BOTH hard drives.
And it did not matter that I had a UPS!
===
I now backup to an EXTERNAL hard drive and then I disconnect the external hard drive when the backup is done.
===
* Note: I was able to restore all of my pictures and documents, because I had also backed up the home computer's MyDocuments folder to my notebook pc's hard drive - over the wireless network.
===
Backing up to CDs and DVDs will work, but are not convenient when you have a lot of pictures. I had 45+ GB of pictures alone.
.
===
* Several years ago I had two internal hard drives - one main, and one backup.
* I went on vacation and came back two weeks later and my computer would not boot.
* I saw from the blinking clock on the oven and microwave that the power has gone out while I was gone.
* Long story short. There must of have been a big power hit, because it toasted BOTH hard drives.
And it did not matter that I had a UPS!
===
I now backup to an EXTERNAL hard drive and then I disconnect the external hard drive when the backup is done.
===
* Note: I was able to restore all of my pictures and documents, because I had also backed up the home computer's MyDocuments folder to my notebook pc's hard drive - over the wireless network.
===
Backing up to CDs and DVDs will work, but are not convenient when you have a lot of pictures. I had 45+ GB of pictures alone.
.
IntrepidXJ
NAXJA Member #647
- Location
- Grand Junction, CO
I keep an external hard drive and DVD backups. That external hard drive will eventually go bad (just like any other hard drive), but makes retrieval of images quicker.
Lowrange2
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Abbeville, SC
The purchase of my 250gig exteranal harddrives were the best thing I've ever bought for my computers... I have 3 250GB hard drives and one Terrabyte - TB, hard Harddrive. Unless you have thousands and thousands and thousands of songs and movies then you should only need 1 250 GB harddrive. Theres no way you'd fill up half of that with pictures. The small 250 GB harddrives go for about 120 bucks at any office supply store but I may suggest www.tigerdirect.com since they usually have great deals. The main reason I love my external hard drives so much is that you can easily unplug it from one computer and move it to another computer for mass file transfer when needed.
As far as harddrives corrupting, all of my harddrivesm came with a 2 or 3 year warranty.
As far as harddrives corrupting, all of my harddrivesm came with a 2 or 3 year warranty.
Root Moose
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- ON, Canada
I keep mine on my system's hard drive. I do a nightly sync to an external hard drive. In addition I rotate this hard drive with an exact duplicate that I keep in a fire safe in the cellar. I swap the external drives every few weeks or so. This keeps the digital gold safe in case of fire/flood/whatever and keeps a copy in case I do something stupid at the keyboard as well or if the PC IDE controller goes stupid or something.
As for what size, go as big as you can. I made the mistake of going from 120 GB to 300GB. Within 6-9 months I was up to 1TB drives. Getting a "real" camera and starting to shoot raw format eats up disk space like crazy if you keep copies of your stuff. And then there is new point and shoot that does video...
Remember that CD/DVD burnable media has a shelf life of ~10 years - if you are lucky.
HTH
As for what size, go as big as you can. I made the mistake of going from 120 GB to 300GB. Within 6-9 months I was up to 1TB drives. Getting a "real" camera and starting to shoot raw format eats up disk space like crazy if you keep copies of your stuff. And then there is new point and shoot that does video...
Remember that CD/DVD burnable media has a shelf life of ~10 years - if you are lucky.
HTH
IntrepidXJ
NAXJA Member #647
- Location
- Grand Junction, CO
lowrange2 said:
that won't get your data back if it is not backed up elsewhere.....
Lowrange2
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Abbeville, SC
Thats why I recently bought the terrabyte harddrive... I use the 3 250GB harddrives for my back up (everything on the C drive and everything on the terrabyte drive) and the terrabyte for daily use. The terrabyte was quite pricey but well worth not having 3 drives to sort thru all the time. Lol Soon I'll have to buy another 500GB harddrive as my 3 250s are almost full.
I wasn't thinking about data losage as much as equipment losage.
112,500 High Resolution Pictures - $89.99
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2460737&CatId=136
You know you have too much music when you can let it play for 265days around the clock without running out of Jams...
I wasn't thinking about data losage as much as equipment losage.
112,500 High Resolution Pictures - $89.99
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2460737&CatId=136
You know you have too much music when you can let it play for 265days around the clock without running out of Jams...
Last edited:
TheAlmightySam
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Portland, OR
I use external drives on my machines. Certain folders (music, photos, documents, etc.) are set to backup automatically each night, and the really important stuff is redundant across multiple computers.
FitchVA
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Roanoke, VA
for the folks that use cd/dvd's - you're dancing with the devil. a vast majority of photographers don't use cds/dvd's anymore. even the archival quality disks go bad over time. a guy i work with that does wedding photography used to keep a separate copy of all his in a safety deposit box and after he lost a drive, he tried to recover them via the disks. well 15% of the data on the disks were bad. after he did some research, he found that he wasn't alone. more and more people were having the same problems.
what i do:
1 hdd at home
1 hdd at work
1 hdd in external.
i use the external to sync to my home drive. then bring it into work and sync that hdd from the external. i now have off site storage. i never have all of my disks in 1 spot. so unless my town gets hit by a nuke, i'll be fine.
seeing how you can easily get a 500 gig hdd for under $100 and external cases are cheap, it's the easy way to go.
what i do:
1 hdd at home
1 hdd at work
1 hdd in external.
i use the external to sync to my home drive. then bring it into work and sync that hdd from the external. i now have off site storage. i never have all of my disks in 1 spot. so unless my town gets hit by a nuke, i'll be fine.
seeing how you can easily get a 500 gig hdd for under $100 and external cases are cheap, it's the easy way to go.
Depending on how much you have, large solid state devices.
You can get 4GB flash drives for about $25 nowadays, and SSD don't go bad. I dropped one a few years back in a snow drift, it was recovered 2 weeks later when the snow melted, dried it out, recoved my data and then used that drive for another 2 years before I lost it.
Otherwise, multiple HDD's and DVDs, and make sure that you don't trust the optical media completly.
You can get 4GB flash drives for about $25 nowadays, and SSD don't go bad. I dropped one a few years back in a snow drift, it was recovered 2 weeks later when the snow melted, dried it out, recoved my data and then used that drive for another 2 years before I lost it.
Otherwise, multiple HDD's and DVDs, and make sure that you don't trust the optical media completly.
Root Moose
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- ON, Canada
While 4GB won't hold a single image, these small flash drives are temporary. Solid state stuff in large capacities is just around the corner. Not TB sized yet but 100s GBs. Might be a good alternative to the CD/DVD crowd as a secondary backup.
5-90
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Hammerspace
I find having an external hard drive for near-line/on-line storage to be handy, but if you want to back them up and hang onto them, burning them onto optical media is probably your best bet. Burn two copies - one goes in your "safe place" for backups, and one goes somewhere near your desk in case you need to access them.
I don't trust removable electronic media - anything designed for "temporary storage" is usually just that - temporary.
I don't trust removable electronic media - anything designed for "temporary storage" is usually just that - temporary.
beakie
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
another reason for ext HDD is I find it keeps my computer moving faster than having all that crap slowing down my internal HDD.
my laptop hasn't slowed down much since I first got it since I put everything on one of my ext HDD. I can tell when I have too much on the int HDD when I notice things slowing down.
my laptop hasn't slowed down much since I first got it since I put everything on one of my ext HDD. I can tell when I have too much on the int HDD when I notice things slowing down.
98XJSport
Destiny is the rising sun
- Location
- Western Maine
The quest for vast amounts of porn storage continues...
Lowrange2
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Abbeville, SC
lol I have 0 porn on my terrabyte hard drive.
5-90
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Hammerspace
FitchVA said:
Hm - intriguing. Do we know what the usual mode of failure happens to be? Or are you going to keep me in suspense and make me have to dig for myself?:read:
Lowrange2
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Abbeville, SC
I have never had a problem with losing data from dvds. Before I had all these hard drives I backed up on DVDs. I keep the dvds in cases in a temp controlled room of course. As long as they're no scratchs I don't see why you would lose data. All 50 or so DVDs still contain all my data.
