Storage & Back-up

How do you store your pictures?
I have been thinking of an external HDD. Then I start to wonder what happens if that goes belly-up? Do I burn a dvd? Which dvd lasts longest? How long will it last?
Cue Jimmy Cliff
Nick

All my shots are on the computer internal hard drive.
This is constantly backed up onto an external hard drive.
Shots I particularly like are then uploaded to Flickr.
Shots I realy realy like are then uploaded to the gallery here.
Guess I am pretty well covered.

Davex.

I back up a copy of all,
Software Updates, Photos, and Lightroom photos to a 250GB external hard drive.
Then monthly from that drive, I back up to a External 750GB hard drive.


edit Added word.

A large hard drive in my computer holds all my pictures, and I have it backed up twice to two large external hard drives. These are quite affordable these days.

I used to backup to DVD, but as well as concerns about longetivity, they've become too inconvenient to use as image files have become larger.

All above and a DVD for latest when they get to 4 gig

I've a blu-ray burner here, still waiting till the prices of the discs comes down a bit further

A external harddisk is the best option I believe the prices arent that high and if stored probable last a life time.

There are also some sites where you can store your photos online.

Hard drives are so cheap that we just put 4x 1TB drives into the Mac.

1. System drive
2. My Drive
3. Fiona's Drive
4. Time machine

I copy my photos onto 'my' drive, then import them into Aperture, which stores them in it's own library on the System Drive. Time machine automatically backs everything up, so we always have 3 copies on 3 internal hard drives.

With internal 1TB drives at around £70 now, this was the most convenient way for us. Saves having external drives around too.

We do also have a 1TB drive on the network as well, but since all the internal drives have been fitted, it's hardly been used. Chose a NAS when we bought it as it can just plug anywhere into the home network to be hidden away whilst being accessible to any device on the network, so for us, a more convenient alternative to an external drive.

But with backing up everything at one place it isn't that great way of a back up.
What if you have a fire at home or I don't know maybe ligthing striking your PC, an EMP experiment goes wrong near your place, you still will lose everything.

If you once a month use a external drive and store the drive at another place, you're quite sure that you still have most of your photos if anything happen. Except of course if the law of murphy comes along but no one can protect themself against that

About how long DVD will last, it depends on the sealing method, reflective layer, organic dye makeup, where it was manufactured, and your storage practices. if you keep all media out of direct sunlight, in a nice cool dry dark place, in acid-free plastic containers; this will triple the lifetime of any media.
Normall DVD's will last from 30 to 100 years and rewritable up to 30 years. Also DVD+R will last longer then DVD-R because of technical reasons, error correction, ‘wobble’ tracking and the data writing method is inferior compared to DVD+R

The Taiyo Yuden ‘Super Cyanine’ DVDs are considered the best for long storage because of there chemical stability. THey sell them under another brand and these are the brands link
I've verbatim and they still look very pretty if compared to some very cheap DVDs I've.

As well as external hard drives I also use an online backup which is quite inexpensive and seems to do the job: link

I use a western digital external hard drive as my primary drive on my pc i changed the folder location in windows which is really easy to do so when you click on my pictures from the start menu it takes you to the external haed drive.Also most modern computers come with the C drive partioned to make C and D so my photos are backed up on the D half of the drive.i dont really like to backup onto dvd because after a certain period of time ive had a couple of discs that wouldnt read so i lost the photos

Got a RAID0 (striped) Firewire800 drive for fast access (sooo fast) for day to day working files and a RAID1 (mirrored) USB2 box for backups. Peridoidically I send to a NAS box over gigabit, but the drives are so slow in that box you'd think you were using dial-up modems to send and receive files. Will eventually get another bigger/faster server for storage, but would like to perhaps go offsite.

Been looking at Carbonite, hopefully they will get a Mac version soon. Yet still,a lot of my storage is on a networked server. Carbonite and similar do not backup networked or shared drives. (well, until you sign up for enterprise level services).

Thanks for the link for the Taiyo Yuden DVDs. I know I have some CDs from ten years ago that work well, but I don't know if I'd trust anything made currently (CD or DVD) to last more than a few months. I just hear so many horror stories of the short lives of DVD for storage. I'll have to check out the Taiyo Yuden. Although it may still be cheaper to just cycle hard drives every few years.

I use NAS with mirror RAID on it, keep backup on a PC harddrive and copy the backup onto an external drive (WD) from time to time.

Internal drive.

External drive.

CD/DVD.

I back up to all three, belt and braces sort of thing, after loosing three months work when a drive died.

there is no worse feeling

Stored on HDD "C", and backed up onto HDD "F", which is mounted into an ICY Box removable caddy.

I work on the theory that both HDD's won't fail at the same time?


Peter