Q: I already have countless thousands of digital photos and video clips of my 2-1/2 year old son stored on our home laptop. Our hard drive is almost full!! I would like to know how other families back-up, store and organize their precious family digital photos. It doesn't seem so bad right now, but as the photos add up year after year I want to make sure I have a way to keep up with them, and store them safely for the future.
Sent by Lisa
Editor: Great question Lisa. At the moment I periodically move any photos or videos of my son onto an external hard drive and so far I haven't run out of room, but I do wonder about the future as this visual data mounts. Readers, what do you do?
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I once heard a photojournalist talking about his processes and whilst travelling he always makes sure to keep his photos in three places.
That's in war zones though, but ever since I heard that I've been trying to keep important photos/documents in two places - in my case at the moment laptop and an external hard drive, but once the laptop fills up I'll buy an extra hard drive so stuff stays genuinely backed up.
(I also once dropped my external hard drive, which made me realise the folly of considering dumping it on there a safe place)
We have always been very serious about backing up our photos, putting them on external hard drives as well as burning DVD's in case the hard drive died. However, after having our laptop bag and camera case stolen that held all of this we have also started storing our photos on flikr where our family can look at them as well. My husband has even suggested making an extra back up hard drive to keep at his father's house in case of a fire or such. Like I said, he is very serious about backing up the photos!
Having an off-site storage solution is a good idea. Whether it's off-site as in online storage or at gradpa's house - either way. You can also consider getting a small fire safe if you don't have one and keeping a back-up hard drive in it.
We use an external hard drive and have also started using dropbox.com. There is a monthly fee, but it's really easy to use and you can buy different levels of storage depending on your data needs.
Besides keeping my photos on my computer, I also have an external harddrive that I try to back up once a month. I also upload all of my photos to Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) so that I can easily print them, create photobooks or share them with others. This is my "third" back up as I could always order CDs with my photos on them.
We use Mozy.com. For $5 / month, the application automatically backs up all new files within whatever folders you designate. It is stored on their servers, so I never worry. I love the automation. I don' t even have to think about it!
I second Mozy. Just started using it. Paying for two years at once gets you three months for free and it is nice to have the peace of mind in knowing it is backed up automatically.
Mozy is brilliant. Once a year, we make an annual album through blurb.com for us and the grandparents with the years' highlights. My husband stores all our photos on his desktop computer which automatically is backed up through Mozy.
My husband, a comp scientist/programmer advises AGAINST backing up on DVDs because they will degrade. External hard drives also become corrupted, stolen, damaged.
One of the best deals is the Flickr Pro account which offers unlimited upload and storage of full res images -- that's what we use as our online back up Photos! for in home backups, we have a Windows Home Server (the HP model) - which stores the images across two hard drives (to protect against one of them crashing). As we need more space, I add an add'l hard drive inside the box -- it's actually pretty easy! And it backups up our PCs too!
Another IMPORTANT tip -- DVDs and CDs are NOT permanent storage! they degrade and will eventually not be readable. They are good as a back up to a back up -- but not for your only storage!
I highly recommend THREE complete copies of everything: one on your computer (or an external hard drive if there's not enough room on your computer), one on a separate external hard drive, and one off-site (online or physically transported somewhere). This may seem like a pain, but when my former employer had a massive data loss following a fire, this became very important to me!
I use a Mac, so whenever I plug in either of my two external HD's, everything backs up automatically with Time Machine. But there's plenty of other software out there. The last PC backup software I used was Retrospect, and was very happy with it.
When you factor in the cost of periodically replacing external hard drives, which do go bad, the cost of online backup isn't unreasonable.
External hard drive at home and uploaded on a schedule to a server-in-the-sky. No DVDs, nothing on the laptops.
I second an off-site solution. I am paranoid about my house burning down or electronics being stolen. I use CrashPlan (like dropbox or Mozy)--I found that to be a better option for the Mac. It auto backs up to their server for a yearly fee and to my external harddrive (that part is free). I get weekly email updates and I am very happy and feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. You should still have an external HD for quicker access but those should be changed out every 3-5 years.
Thank you for opening this discussion. We had a house fire a month ago. My husband, our three children, our daughter's friend, the family dog and an abandoned baby bird all made it out safely and the house was a total loss.
It started in the garage. In the house there was only a light haze; I've had more smoke from a single pepperoni falling off a baking pizza. We didn't believe that the house was on fire until we we running out the front door and saw the flames in the garage. I was the last out, urging our sleepy son forward, and I wondered "What if our house really is burning? What should I take?" I grabbed my laptop but didn't bother looking for my shoes.
Everything digital was saved because my external hard drive was in a bag that was close at hand. We lost everything on film as well as sister's sweet digital video camera which was in my study. She stored all their...can't think of the word...recordings in it. Gone.
Going forward I'm going to use mosy; I will purchase a fire safe box for important documents and I won't store all our digital recordings in the camera bag.
We were well insured but there are some things that can't be replaced: journals, books that I had underlined and tabbed, a life time of letters, photographs, videos and the precious art and cards from and by my children. But the children, themselves, remain and I can live without the rest.
We store our photos on an external hard drive and then back them up on Archival Gold DVDs that supposedly have a 300 year lifetime. (http://www.lightimpressionsdirect.com/archival-gold-dvd-r-25-pk/archival-dvd-cd/)
I also make a yearly photo book through MyPublisher.com and could reprint those if needed.
olderthanjesus, thanks for posting your story. How heartbreaking. But it's inspired me to get my butt in gear to back up the thousands and thousands of photos we have of the children.
I back up our pictures onto an external hard drive (western digital passport - pretty nifty and easy to use) as well as on Flickr. That being said, both only work as long as we remember to upload/back up those files. We should probably look into something that also does it all automatically...