Taking a lot of photos lately and running out of room!

[ghache]

Don't ever burn all those pictures on DVD's or Blu-Ray Discs or anything like that. These guys are right, a big external hard drive is the way to go.

LOL, are you serious?

wait untill your external drive fail and then you got 1tb of data to recover.
you failed

Discs can fail as well. It's best to have multiple copies or else you're not truly making a back up and just creating storage.

Yeah, but keeping a copy on you hard drive + 1 copy on dvd/cd is a good idea. ive been keeping a copy on dvd/cd of my backups for years and i never had a dvd/cd not working. even after 10 year.

 

[JackAlexander]

Don't put them on external hard drive or portable devices, it's not secure. As external life is less than CD or DVDs. I think you can upload them to network albums or burn them.

 

[pbelarge]

CDs/DVDs are 'old hat' style for fuddy duddys. :mrgreen:


Online storage is nice, but you also need online access to retrieve them, which works 98% of the time. Where I live, due to storms we loose power, this past winter for a week at one point.


I use external hard drives. One is plugged into my computer so I can access the drive when I need to. If I loose power, a small generator has me back in action...but no internet. This is much faster than DVDs and all of my photos are in folders that are easy to locate.
Divide 750 gigs into the number of DVDs...too many for my taste. But if DVDs work for you have a go at it. (I do have about 25,000 photos on disk - from before external drives :mrgreen

 

[Boomn4x4]

The large external hard drives are the second best way to go. The best way to go is to lease server space from a reputable Internet hosting company. Leasing plans run as long as $4 a month (maybe lower) and you get unlimited storage. The major benefit, as long as you go with a reputable service provider all of your data will be hosted on severs with RAID controllers as well as offsite Disaster Recover centers. Your data is saved on 3 or 4 maybe more different drives all at the same time, so as long as at least one of those drives is opeartional, all of your data will be secured. And even if the facility where those drives are burns up and they are all destryoed, the company will have another image of your data saved at another facilty.

What do you think companies do with their data??? as any decent sized business owner what they do with their data, I gurantee they don't have dozens of hard drives locked up in a fire safe.

The side benefit of this, especially if you are getting into photography, is that you will also have the ability to have your own domain name and website.

The down side (which is why more people don't recommend this) is that there is a learning curve. It isn't as simple as plugging in a drive and copying data... at a minimum you have to learn how to FTP to a server... which if you use the right program is fairly straigth forward and simple to do. If you want to get into creating a website, its a little more difficult, but with the multitude of website creators out there, there is a pretty short learning curve there also.

Personally, I have an 80GB internal secondary hard drive that I use for temporary storage for my photos... that has about 3 years worth of pictures on it. I also have an external 100GB drive that I back up that entire 80GB drive on. Every few weeks, or when I think about it, I'll ftp everything to my web server. My web server archives about 11 years of photos on it. If there is anything I want to review that is older than the 3 years I have locally, I can simply download it from my webserver.

If at any given point I lose either of my two at home drives, I'm assured that the data is recoverable. And in the event a disaters hits and I lose both drives, I'll still have everything saved online. Depending on how good I am at backing up, I'll probably lose a few days...a month at most. I'm still looking for a relyable real-time automatic offsite backup utility.

 

[Dao]

LOL, are you serious?

wait untill your external drive fail and then you got 1tb of data to recover.
you failed

Discs can fail as well. It's best to have multiple copies or else you're not truly making a back up and just creating storage.

Yeah, but keeping a copy on you hard drive + 1 copy on dvd/cd is a good idea. ive been keeping a copy on dvd/cd of my backups for years and i never had a dvd/cd not working. even after 10 year.

Both CD and DVD disc have shelf life. Good DVD is about 30 years (from what I read, CD is longer). But not so good DVD has a shorter shelf life.

 

[Judd]

I have a CD with pictures on it that wont work. It was created about 5 years ago. So it does happen

The OP asked about more storage. External HD's are great. I bought a Western Digital 1TB a few months ago for about $100. Fast, easy access, dont have to insert CD's/DVD's, easy to organize and re organize.

At the moment its not shared, but it was shared across the home network prior to my moving.

For backup, I guess a second unit would work but its not fool proof in case of fire, etc. So an off site solution would be needed

 

[myfotoguy]

The major benefit, as long as you go with a reputable service provider all of your data will be hosted on severs with RAID controllers as well as offsite Disaster Recover centers. Your data is saved on 3 or 4 maybe more different drives all at the same time....

I think your idea is pretty good. The key being reputable provider as you stated. Some don't backup as part of their service, some charge a fee if you want redundancy (at least, when I had a site that was the case, maybe things are different now, I'm 2 or 3 years away from having my own hosted space).

Also, you might check the agreements if going this route. Some providers may have a clause that it's not for backing up your data, I thought I read that once, BUT, I could be way wrong. The bottom line is, as Boom said, use someone reliable. I would check the details and make sure you know what you can/cannot do and what procedures and details are.

I'm still looking for a relyable real-time automatic offsite backup utility.

I think you're talking about a utility to send it to your server. However, for folks looking for real time automatic without their own server online, try Carbonite. It's automatic, and I have all my data backed up with redundancy. It's pretty cheap too.

 

[Danksalot]

As we say in the music biz "If you don't have it in more than one place, you don't have it at all."