Photo storeage - how do you do it?

[Stoker1]

How do you store your pictures?

I've got 150 - 190GB's worth of pictures taken over the years on my old desktop. Its tired and about ready for the recycle bin. We now mainly use the laptop but I don't want to transfere all the pictures over to it.

Was thinking about an external disk drive like this:

http://www.shopping.com/xPO-IOMEGA-250GB-TRIPLE-INTERFACE-DESKTOP-EXTERNAL-HARD-DRIVE

Longevity is a must for keeping these pic's as we don't have them all printed out. You know, baby pic's, Christening's, etc. Stuff that you want to look at 10+ years later.

I trust Greg's opinion after all the years but like to hear others as well.
Jamie

[Scream And Fly]

Jamie,

The most important thing when it comes to storage is redundancy. Since disk storage is so cheap, there are so many options. My home storage is as follows:
Desktop PC with RAID 1 (two-drive mirror) array. This is very important.
Two external Firewire 800 drives, both mirrored. These are manually written to.
DVD backup of my most critical files.
Home storage server for archived files that are not regularly updated (and are backed up off-site as well). This does not need to be a fast PC - just a fast network connection and lots of storage is needed.
Off-site storage on Scream And Fly's data server - in case of house fire, or...?So, with 500GB external drives becoming the norm, I suggest you get two and mirror the data on them, or get a single RAID 1 external storage unit. I've never been a fan of automatic backup software, so I just perform my backups manually. I do not use any tagging or organizing software for photos either - just organize a logical directory structure. Keep an off-site backup. Buy an inexpensive external drive, fill it, and keep it at a relative's house or something.

[Stoker1]

See, I knew I'd catch you up:D

Sounds like a winner Greg. I'll get a couple of 500+ hard drives and back up on DVD.

[NicePackage]

Not that I don't agree with Greg, I'll tell you what I've got as well.

My GF and I mainly use our laptops as well, but there is a PC upstairs with a large HD, and using a Batch file all new or modified files are placed on the PC upstairs each night. Although I don't have RAID or external drives, it would take my PC and my laptop's hard drives becoming corrupt or dead at the exact same time. I don't use backup software either because I don't to backup everything every night and incremental backups are a pain to recover from. The way I backup as well if I delete something useless and months later realize I needed it I can get it upstairs.

You have more pics than would fit in a laptop leaving space for other things as well, so for that you may just want to copy over main stuff and use redundancy for the storage. As Greg said, redundancy is very important which VERY few people have or appreciate.

As for getting files between, you can share a folder (or a drive) on the older computer and from your laptop you can browse the computers HD, as if you were sitting on that computer and copy over the files that way.

[Scream And Fly]

I would suggest an off-site backup too, especially if all of your computers are networked together. One nasty worm can work its way through an entire network very quickly, although I have not had this happen. Be very careful when using shared network permissions in Windows. Very careful.

[LakeRacer99]

I have my pics organized by folders and use the thumbnail view to find what i need. I store on an 80g external drive and need to back it up. I organize my boat pics by boat brand then model...hehe I have almost 10g of boat pics alone in jpg format.

[NicePackage]

I would suggest an off-site backup too, especially if all of your computers are networked together. One nasty worm can work its way through an entire network very quickly, although I have not had this happen. Be very careful when using shared network permissions in Windows. Very careful.

as a minimum after formatting a computer (or setting up a new one)

1) put on a password 2) remove simple file sharing 3) then start using it....

I agree about offsite backups, I ghost my backup partition to another HD every now and then. It takes 2 mins to install but it's cheap (even 3 yrs ago)and fast. Now if I could just get my Parents off Win98.