davidls911

What is the best source to store images? Currently I am using my computer to store all my images. I also back up my computer each week with a 3 TB hard drive.
Is there a better place to store images, the cloud or just an external hard drive???

dirtpusher Loc: tulsa oklahoma

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

For the truly paranoid, like me, you need a robust cloud service. Get a Dropbox Pro account, 1 Tb of storage for $99/year.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

MDisc for archive, Amazon S3 (cloud) for DR. There will be MANY other opinions😻

dirtpusher Loc: tulsa oklahoma

Basil Loc: New Mexico

I do routine backups onto a dual drive (8TB RAID) "Western Digital "My Cloud Mirror" but then do periodic (maybe once a month) backups of the backups onto a fire proof iOSafe Solo. Might be overkill but I have many many family photos scanned and would not want to loose them forever.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

When you say "store", do you mean store for use or store for backup?
Mine are on the main computer for use, external pocket drive and Carbonite for backup.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

If you rent a safety deposit box at your bank, you can store a backup drive there. Unlike domestic homes, very rarely do banks burn down. Banks do get robbed, but because of time constraints the safety deposit boxes are generally not touched in the robberies.

frjack Loc: Boston, MA

"because of time constraints . . . " Great line. Been chuckling about that for the past few minutes.

CO

I burn images to M-Disc DVDs. They're different than standard CDs or DVDs. Standard CDs and DVDs use a dye based layer the can fade and degrade over time. The M-Disc DVD uses a rock-like layer. The data is permanently etched into the layer. It has been determined that the M-Disc will keep data stable for 1000 years. They're superior to even archival gold discs. You have to check that your DVD burner is M-Disc compatible.

billnikon Loc: Pennsylvania/Ohio/Florida/Maui/Oregon/Vermont

I use my compact flash as I never get rid of an image I have taken, I guess I am a left over from film, never get rid of the negative. That said, I take my best shot off the compact flash and put them on thumb drives and I also have back up in an external hard drive.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I use external drives to store my images internal HD are for programs etc. and I also use BackBlaze storage $/yr unlimited storage

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

1000 years? Hype. That's a very large extrapolation. And irrelevant, anyway, even if true.

Technology changes. Things become obsolete. Storage media are no exception. How long were CDs state-of-the-art? Probably no more than 5% of that 1000 years will pass before the M-Disk is obsolete. Something better will come along.

For one thing, they're too small. 100 GBytes? Not enough. I have 1.2 TBytes of image data. After about 10 years of digital photography. I'm taking more photos than I was at the beginning of my digital photography period, and the images are getting larger so the files are also. I expect that in another 10 years I'll need more than 5 TBytes storage. Are you getting into video? Large files on steroids. You'll probably want 10-100 TBytes storage before too long.

If you're going to back up your files (and not just the image files, but everything else on your computer also) you shouldn't depend on any one technology. Change is the only thing that's permanent. At this point you have to distinguish between backup and archiving. Archiving is saving stuff for posterity that you probably won't be using much (but someone else will). Backup is for current stuff that you might want to use again within a few years.

Archiving requires more than backup. It requires some rosetta stone to be included so that the future data users can identify what's in the archive. And how to find it, and how to interpret it. It's not enough to have an image file. The image has to have associated keywords, ID of people and locations in the image, some explanation of what's going on. You've got all that stuff in your head, but you have to make your head available to the people that will follow you.

At any rate, both backup and archiving require maintenance. When technology changes you have to transcribe all your stuff onto the new technology (maybe after a couple years so they can work the bugs out). Otherwise you will have a closet full of wire recordings with no player.

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

I use several methods, as my PC has only a 120gb SSD I only keep my latest photos on there and after editing they are transferred to three external HDD's and an NAS. Also when the SD card is full, I keep in a secure place and replace it with a new one.
That's rather over the top you may think but I have had a couple of hard drive failures in the past, I now also use Google Photos cloud storage which is free and very easy to use.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Suppose your hard drive fails, and you go to your backup, only to find that the backup has failed. It's unlikely, but "unlikely" happens. I backup to two externals and a NAS. I also have some old drives where I put folders of images or whatever that I want to keep. I should have a backup stored outside of my house, but I don't. No interest in the Cloud at this point.