Photo Storage

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2011/09/where-do-you-store-your-photos.html

This Canadian news agency is reporting that 4% of all photos ever taken are stored on Facebook. Pretty impressive.

I bet a higher percentage are stored in shoe boxes .

Mine are stored on my computer and it's back up. I'm not a member of FB so I cant post photos there and I certainly wouldn't store them there.

I'm not a fan of online storage. If a company goes bust sometimes very little time is allowed to reclaim any images. You might not be able to get any of them because of the huge number of other users also wanting the same thing.

Better I think to make our own arrangments.

I agree with John, I don't trust online storage. The Cloud is an apt name for online storage. Eventually it rains, and the cloud disappears.

No storage is 100% safe, but having a third (or fourth) backup online seems pretty sensible!

Another vote for not having on line storage.

No one, I don’t know to upload images to web sites.

No two, I assume your images are available to everyone.

No three, what if the site where your images are stored, closes down.

I have my images stored on the computers inboard hard drive.

Plus copies on three external hard drives, I hope, as I don’t know how to check, but know a man that does.


Take care.

Oookay, so you're going to trust "important" photos to a disk which is likely to break down at any moment? You don't want / need to share them?

Not having at least three copies (preferably in RAW) of *anything* you value is pointless.

Not storing at least one copy offsite is even sillier.

Not checking that the backups still work occasionally is asking for trouble.

Not trusting a company - hmm, I can give some credit on that one, but that's the way things go.

I personally have at least two copies of everything with minimal exceptions. Of course most of my stuff's online - I share with my parents and others whom I trust and then publish what I feel is appropriate. Yes, I can get to private photos *if* I have the URL, but there's a line between "I'm paranoid" and "I want others to see what I've done".

None of the online backup sites really work for 'togs apart from the real photographer ones and they cost a fortune. Which is why something like 23hq - which doesn't overly compress or charge the earth - is worth treasuring.

Bret

I pay £40 a year for LiveDrive. That's about 11p a day for peace of mind. I currently have about 140GB of files on there.

I'm not saying 100% that my files cannot be hacked, but they are not generally accessible and the copyright is very definitely mine.

Most of my important images are backed up & then backed up online on Flickr. I mark them private so are not viewable & if I am away from home & a client needs an image as has happened in the past I can download it & email it to them...

I've only recently started to use online photo sharing using flickr and only a small number on facebook. None of those online images is in hi-res and all have a copyright watermark because if it can be displayed on a web page, it can be stolen.

I would not trust my original image files with anyone other than myself. That way, if any gets lost I only have my own a*s to kick. Who's a*s would I kick if an online service lost them, as facebook did a short time ago for some users.

I keep my originals on my PC's hard drive and back up to a NAS system. This in turn is backud up onto 2 separate 2Tb external HDD's. The PC is backed up to a separate external 1Tb HDD, and to two 3.5" drives which are then confined to my fire safe.

I think that should be enough resilience to the most disastrous of disasters.

I used to use my NAS system, a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4 x 1Tb (2.7Tb usable) HDD's, to store the originals and to work from, but it was way too slow for me.

How far do you go down the backup route before paranoia sets in.

For example how many scan their important documents into PDF and store these off site or are they stuffed into a "shoebox" with everything else.

I suspect very few - so are photographs more important that eg insurance documents, birth/marriage certificates, medical cards, driving license etc etc etc?

Bernard

In a word, yes. Everything you mention above can be replaced. Photographs cannot.

Online storage:

I dont trust myself let alone anyone else

I lost quite a lot of images taken with my istD (about 75%) when a hard drive failed, I had them backed up on an external drive when I decided to wipe my PC and re-instal windows, all went well and I then copied my images back onto the PC, of course the back up drive threw a wobbly before I'd completed the transfer

Now I copy to a second drive in the PC and also to an external drive, any images I take on holiday are usually on my laptop too.

I have mine on two external drives both backed up to a WD worldbook 1TB drive and that backed up online too.

Getting back to the OP, a friend of my daughter had all her pictures of a school trip to China on facebook; her PC was stolen and, through no fault of hers, facebook closed her account. All pictures lost.

Putting all one's eggs in one basket is dangerous whatever strategy one uses. I'm not sure it really matters what mixture of hard drives/DVDs/on-line storage etc. one uses as long as there are multiple copies in several locations which are regularly updated.

The one advantage of online storage as one of those places is the ability to access them from various locations. If you move about quite a bit (as I often do) having an online filestore can be a great help.

K.