Backup for Photos

ricepudding · Sep 28, 2008

What is the best way to backup digital photos? I've heard recently that CD's degrade photos over time. Upload to a paid storage website? Buy a zip drive? How do you do it?

THANKS!

Montana · Sep 28, 2008

I burn to CD. Not sure why it would degrade over time.

Derrick

Chris Stegner · Sep 28, 2008

I've backed up for years to HDs. For the price of drives today you can store tons of images on a 500 GB drives (I just bought 2 500 GB drives at WalMart for $99 each). Early on I have stored images on CDs, and yes I've gone back and not been able to retrieve some of the images from those 5-7 year old CDs. recently I've been backing up to DVDs and that works great, but let's see in 10 years. Now I'm on Blue Rays. But my backups in general are on Drives until I get to the edits, then I save the RAW files only to Blue Ray.

davebmck · Sep 28, 2008

There have been several threads on that here. You can probably find them with a search. As for myself, I use an external hard drive. Probably a combination of external HD and CD's or DVD's is the best option.

manaheim · Sep 28, 2008

CDs and DVDs can delaminate... they actually fall apart, making them useless. There may be other means of destruction as well, but you have to either be very careful, or assume you are going to lose SOME photos, or both.

I buy the more "expensive" archival-grade media, but that could well be snake-oil and I may get boned in the end anyway.

I can say that a friend of mine did his own test of the various kinds of media, subjecting them to these horrible and unimaginable torture tests... leaving them in the shower for a month, leaving them on the dashboard of his car through all of August, etc. It was pretty crazy. In the end, the stuff I have won hands-down. I believe the ones I have currently are the MAM-A. Back a few years back I was doing Kodak Gold, but they stopped being available for some reason.

My current plan is to every 6-7 years copy all of my existing archives off to much larger capacity "archive" media, and still keep the old stuff. I figure if I do this, odds are reasonable that I will minimize the loss over time.

Here's AN article on the topic... there are many.

http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media

And yes, this topic comes up a lot so do the search thing.