Storage

I have an account with both Photobucket and Flickr. When I joined them, they gave you 2G of storage for free. I soon filled those up and being tight fisted did not pay to have extra storage.
By chance I went on PB the other day and found thay had increased the free amount to 8G, so I filled it up with some more. Out of curiosity I went F and found they have 1 Terrabyte of free.

Hope this is of news to some of you out there.

Happy New Year to you all.

Flickr changed its policy earlier in the year, its now 1TB of storage free
I still have the paid account.
I'm not a fan of Photobucket

I find images from Flickr slow to download and often get fed up before the image arrives sometimes have the same problem with PPG too. I like foliopic but only have the standard account and if I ever fill that I'll just delete old pics and upload new.

Just loaded 117 photos to Flickr and it took 2 hrs. Not bad.

You need a faster connection! Depending on image size, it take me just a few seconds per image.

Send me the required £20 a month and I'll upgrade

Why do you guys use such a slow method to store images? Why pay a monthly fee and take hours uploading when an external hard drive will do the job quicker and at lower cost? :

I agree. I think it boils down to discipline and organisation, and the somewhat unproved notion that Flickr or Photobucket or any of that lot is a reliable long term storage location.

The thing is, one external hard drive is no good - you need two, so that you can alternate with the one that's offsite. And you need discipline, since unless you actually take the backups, and switch the drive every week or two with the other one, it's pointless.

Whereas with one of cloud storage companies, at least you can more or less set it up and forget it. I wouldn't do it myself, but I can see why people do.

All that aside, currently I have a little over 600 GB of images. Every time I scan one of my old negs that's another 70MB TIFF.

How is it practical to keep that lot backed up in the cloud?

The only images I store online are on foliopic and PPG and of course the gallery on here otherwise no one would ever see them and in that case I may as well get rid of the camera etc. I used photobucket as it was convenient for putting images in the forum before it became possible to upload direct. What else do you do with the photos you take? I have loads of holiday snaps and slides mouldering away in boxes and I think the next people to see them, if they bother to look will be the house clearance people after I snuff it

When we only had prints and negs, backup wasn't even possible (well, not without enormous duplication effort), so we just had to assume that there'd never be a fire/flood/burglary etc.

Now it's different - backing up is relatively easy. But there's always the question of whether stuff is important enough to backup at all. If you wouldn't mind losing it, backing it up is pointless.

I have 10,000 negs from 1984 when I got a Super A, to 2007 when I got the K10D, and I'm gradually scanning the lot (I don't have the prints).

Most of them, and indeed most of my digital photos, have no artistic merit whatsoever, but I'd still be sad if I lost the lot, since they're a photographic record of almost my whole adult life.

I started with the cd/dvd backup method, then the external hard drive method, I'm currently using a 6tb Nas along with the other 2. The Nas is proving to be pretty reliable and my plan is to just swap out one of the hard drives when its full. The point of it all, well I'm trying preserve my stuff as long as I can, and instil in my boys the need to back things up!

If buying a NAS it's worth looking for one that supports RAID arrays. I won't bother explaining the jargon but basically the data is spread across all the disks in the NAS array and if one disk fails no data is lost. You lose some overall storage capacity with this technology but gain hardware resilience. When the faulty disk is replaced the array rebuilds itself. RAID is used extensively on servers in data centres.

Best to check on which type of RAID Array suits as there are quite a few gotcha's involved

RAID Types

There is a slight confusion in this thread between secure storage and means of public display.

K.

Good point!