Comments on: How to Backup Your Photos

By: paul

paul — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:51:18 +0000

i make daily backups of all this stuff. i would highly recommend folks do an automated backup scheme. it’s just too easy to forget about backing stuff up. and it’s kind of like insurance - you can’t get it when you need it. you can’t get a backup if your hard drive has already crashed. and that is a giant bummer. i hate talking to folks who are in that position - whether it’s personal photos or client information. all the same, it’s loss.

By: Mike Morrison

Mike Morrison — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:23:03 +0000

Great ideas here BUT
I have lost a lot of old photos storde on CD because I thought the storage was permanant - IT IS NOT. The average CD appears to last 5 years, DVD’s 3 (RW versions a LOT less!!!) - do a web search for ‘lost cd data’

I now keep my photos on 3 HDD’s - 2 kept on site one kept off site

I am now looking for a more robust storage approach, I have too much data for online to be cost effective, & tape backup is too expensive (if you use this how often do you change the tapes - again they are not write once & store devices!!!

By: jeff wilkinson

jeff wilkinson — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 20:02:04 +0000

I do the USB external harddrive approach to keeping a mostly-current backup of my whole machine, including photos. One important thing with that is to keep it off/offline/disconnected in a safe place except when updating the backup. Mine lives in a small fireproof box. If my whole PC suffers some major damage (electrical, fire, coffee), I still have that separate.

By: shimonkey

shimonkey — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:25:23 +0000

I just bought an 120GB internal hard drive + external enclosure for a grand total of about $50 to backup. Internal drives are a good deal cheaper and the enclosure has a little power supply, fan and IDE to USB connector.

I was a little nervous about the whole thing not working at all but it works great, no hitches, and if I ever need to update I’ll just buy a bigger internal drive, put the 120 gig one in my pc and put the new one in the enclosure.

I’m wondering though, do you know of any software that tracks where each picture went, maybe with a little thumbnail or something? That would be cool.

By: don

don — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 04:21:33 +0000

I have about 50 gigs - I shoot in RAW… I bought a Sony 200gb tape drive on ebay. It backs up the 2 200gb HDs that mirror each other.

By: john

john — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:50:58 +0000

Thanks, mrscrumley. For anyone else who is curious, I mainly use a Nikon D70 and sometimes a Canon S50.

By: mrscrumley

mrscrumley — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:09:13 +0000

Oh, uh, nevermind. Just found that bit of info on the flickr site. Duh.

By: mrscrumley

mrscrumley — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:08:07 +0000

What kind of camera do you use? Your pictures are beautiful.

By: pete

pete — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 06:40:30 +0000

trying to burn 50+ DVDs could take quite a while…if you sat down and tried to do it all at once. but if you burn a DVD or two here and there, it wouldn’t be that bad. otherwise your collection of pictures just keeps growing and the number of DVDs you need to burn keeps going up. :)

By: Peter Norby

Peter Norby — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 02:30:12 +0000

See, I have a problem at that first step “organize your photos” part … that one sort of hangs up everything after that. But, I am trying to keep them all in duplicate at least on separate hard drives in the mean time. The problem with burning pictures to DVDs is the sheer amount of time it takes to burn 50+ DVDs. I think I did this once a year or two ago when it was only 20 DVDs. The next hurdle is to make sure I still have a hard drive big enough to hold a copy of all pictures (and then a second one for the backup). Technology is barely keeping pace :)

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