This is my life.
Have decades of photos/videos in digital form stored in multiple hard drives, Duplicate in one seperate hard drive. Would like to tidy up and get some photos printed.
Would like some suggestions as the best way you use to store personal photos/videos and backup?
Thanks in advance.
always think it is more private, safer and no continuous cost when storing in local hard drives. any reason why cloud storage?
I agree. Don't store photos online.
any reason why cloud storage?
Theft, fire, flood, ease of sharing, access anywhere, etc etc….
I think it is important to have an offsite backup. If your house/office burns down you photos burn with it. That is why having an additional cloud backup can be important.
If you don't like the idea of a cloud, setup another NAS or backup to an external drive from time to time and keep it somewhere else. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket.
I have lost photos from corrupted hard drives. They somehow get corrupted and rendered unreadable. Using different brand hdd may minimise risk but no guarantees. But make sure u keep one off site or on cloud for extra special memories.
I would like to know as well. I've got 3 portable drives at the moment.
I store a copy offsite at parents' house.
google photos?
You get a certain amount of space on picasa web albums and then you have to pay.
so use google photos…..
Choose a storage size
You can choose between 2 storage sizes to back up your photos and videos to your Google Photos library.
High qualityUnlimited free storage
Regular cameras: Recommended for phones or point-and-shoot cameras that are 16 megapixels (MP) or less.
Uses: Good for typical printing and sharing.
Size: Save high-quality photos and videos while reducing size.Original
Limited free storage: Uses your Google Account's 15 GB of free storage, regardless of photo or video size.
DSLR cameras: Recommended if you take photos with a DSLR camera and want to maintain the exact original quality.
Uses: Recommended for printing large banners or to store original files.
Size: Stores your photos and videos exactly as you captured them.
I can vouch for Google Photos. Just finished uploading my partners 15,000+ photos/videos onto it.
Not only is it great for the free unlimited storage, but the search functionality (based on face, place, and type of photo) is quite brilliant, as is the collages it creates.
Every time there's a paid service, there's also a free one. What I would do is search for 'free file storage'. See what's available, sign up to a few, and upload the same pics to each one.
Then find a free program that will print multiple photos in a folder onto A4 pages as thumbnails, also listing the filename under the photo. (Surely there must be one.)
Keep your own copy on a HDD. But if that drive starts to fail, you copy all the files you can over to a new drive (because it's quicker than downloading) - and then download only the few that were corrupted from the online storage.
If you're concerned about privacy, you can zip files and add a password. There must be software that can do that automatically, in batches. I'm using an old version of Winzip - and I know I can zip as many files as I like into ONE huge zip file. But ideally you want to zip each one individually, and add a password, so you don't have to download a huge file just to get a few corrupted photos.
You could also store a HDD at someone else's house - and they store theirs with you. One has a house fire for example, and you both still have (most of) your photos.
Pretty sure there's software that compares the contents of HDDs too. So if some sectors start to fail… time for a new drive, copy those few files over again.
You could also sign up to a bunch of free email accounts until you have enough storage - send the photos there from another email address - they just sit in the inbox until you want them. (How many GB is gmail up to now?)
I don't know how much storage it is, but I believe Harvey Norman has storage for photos. Artscow too. So any online business that prints photos should have storage too.
Lots of different ways to do it. Depends on how you want to do it. I think swapping HDD with someone is easiest. Copy all the files over while you sleep and it's done.
Not sure but I had to start deleting emails after about 3000 emails inbox.
Thanks for the tips.
My issue with multiple iCloud accounts/emails is that I have many media as is, sometimes may forget where things are and lost forever. Don't even know how many photos we have, backup from phones, laptops, computers, not only from myself but family. Not yet been edited and indexed.
Look at friend's Facebook - like the timeline for photos.
Remember attending an elderly' funeral, we may all work hard in life, but Life will be summarised to just merely few minutes of photos/videos after all.
Don't know who and how will have the time and passwords to find and go through the hard drives and email accounts if something happens.
Good ideas re spare HDDs in a seperate location.
last time for a recommendation…… ahem….. google photos
get the auto uploader https://photos.google.com/apps
set it to a folder or a whole drive…. it will search out and backup all photos/videos. It will then make them searchable by name, time, face, content (dogs, ships, etc). It will place them in collections or albums based on time or location or content. It will enhance pics automatically, that you can then either keep or discard. You can then share with whoever you want or make them all public for generations to enjoy……
It's an easy solution
print your photos, setup a copy stand, copy the photos with a film camera, develop the negatives/slides store negatives. Take more than 1 roll so that you have a backup set of negatives.
For video, I cant say. Maybe record them to VHS?
Print them all and put them into photo albums?
Great question - and one I've been researching heavily of late..
For all the sorting through and flagging of all photos over the past 12 years (some 80,000), I'm using the trial version of Adobe Lightroom (awesome workflow for importing, flagging, keywording, filing, duplicate analysis) and it's important to us OzBargainers to know that the trial version actually stays functional (for what I need) even after it expires!
http://www.adobe.com/au/products/photoshop-lightroom.html
I was then planning to import into Google Photos, but am concerned about the security of cloud storage.. But the collage, automatic gifs made of burst photos, facial recognition and search functionality might convince me to jump on board! Time will tell.
So for now, my local backup plan is:
[Clones created and maintained with Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) weekly and all encrypted]
Photos Master 2.5" 1TB - use with laptop to manage photos day-to-day
Photos Backup 2.5" 1TB - onsite locked away
Photos Offsite 3.5" 1TB - offsite
and for extra measure, a 3TB encrypted Apple Time Capsule which backs up Photos Master (when plugged in and working on via laptop) as well as other their additional HDD's (Media, Videos etc.) when in use.
Pretty solid backup IMO, but just the physical cleansing of 80,000 photos and small videos (smartphone, digital camera vids) is a right PITA but has to be done. As I'm progressing I am getting less emotional about keeping "every" shot (even if blurry) of the kids as babies and more methodical about keeping the real "keepers" so I can print as photo books, or publish to social media or Google Photos or equivalent in the near future.
You don't want to spend forever cleaning it up, but you do need to leave an easy to figure out legacy should anything happen. Hence my preference to print finally for something tangible for the family to cherish.
Hope this helps and look forward to others ideas to help me on my journey too.
I got a HP MicroServer in the last eBay 20% off and 2 * 4TB Western Digital Red hard drives to go in it. Then install FreeNas http://www.freenas.org/ as the OS on the MicroServer. The hard drives run as a mirror (ie one hard drive is a copy of the other). For offsite backup (to protect against fire/flood/theft etc but also in case a virus (eg cryptolocker) gets on my network), I have a Western Digital 5TB external hard drive I sync and keep at work - got it from this deal https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/214565 Freenas can do so much more than what I'm using it for (ie run all kinds of different RAID configurations) but my primary concern is keeping my data safe so I've planned with that primary objective (ie not speed or redundancy for hard drive failure)
To get the data from the PCs on the network, I either use SyncBack http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/ or write a bit of powershell code to do the copy for me (intending to modify it to use robocopy when I have time…)
I use google photos to backup up my phones photos - higher chance of loosing/dropping that and hence need more frequent backups in my opinion (but I also copy them to Hard drive every few months in full resolution).
Check out Smugmug, when I was last looking at all the "free" services I found they almost never gave you back your photos in the quality you uploaded them.
It's also the best service I've seen for sharing photos and videos with family and has proper security options.
It's unlimited storage for photos and videos, cheaper than the cost of a backup drive a year. PM me if you want a referral code that will make it a bit cheaper.
I take a photo on my camera, the eyeFi card sends it via my wifi to my server and smugmug, all automatic.
Yes, I use smugmug as well, definitely recommend them.
How do you do your uploading? Do you just create a new gallery for each folder/event?
I've just told the eye-fi to send them to "<Year> <Month>", sometimes I move them in to event folders as well, but normally don't bother. I've got a single password across all folders so relatives can view all photos we take.
How much do you have? Flickr gives you 1T for photos. Don't know whether they accept videos. I think onedrive offers a far bit of free storage.
I keep mine on a external drive backed up to flickr.
I disagree with the arguments for not trusting the cloud. I lost 4T of data when a NAS failed. (I still have the disks, but I'd have to spend money getting the data off them.) Cloud solutions look after backups, hardware failures etc, and better security than your home network too.
And how interesting are your photos to hi-tech thieves anyway?
You'd have to be really disciplined to do your own backups. Incidents don't happen just after you get your backups off site - they happen when you haven't got around to doing a backup for a while.
One drive is reducing their free storage options so probably not a good option anymore.
https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/
http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-downgrades-free-oned…
There are quite a articles around the last few days on some of the websites that focus on Microsoft products such as windows central, thurrott etc that give suggestions for other cloud storage providers in light of Microsoft's onedrive decision so you may want to do some googling and something might pop out at you.
I have backed up all my photos (in raw) to Amazon S3, and I'm doing a second backup to Google Cloud Storage(not Google drive). They're actually very friendly to average user, cheaper than common cloud drive, and more reliable especially when you have double backups.
Keep a thumbnail in your local hard drive is enough.
For cloud backup, how do you guys manage to transfer data ? I don't have that much <500gb but that would take forever on ADSL2+(max 600kbps upload speed).
This is the main problem, and the only answer is slowly. Also makes it hard to change providers, although there are a few cloud migration app around now.
Step number 1.
Work out what you REALLY need to keep.
If you look at a photo and say, "Where the hell was that?" then maybe you need to sever the emotional ties and let it go.
Do you really need 278 photos of your dog chasing a stick, or countless pics of what you had to eat on that fantastic holiday in..errr…
Technology is moving at a remarkable pace and what is good today won't be in five years, so accept that whatever you do now you may have to do over and over again. (Who remembers Betamax).
I would try and predict what will be available in 5 years time, but I don't have 2020 vision, (Boom boom!)
??
I agree with your point that we could probably rationalise our photos rather than keep every one, but your point re technology is irrelevant. That photo I took on film and scanned isn't likely to be replaceable just because I could now have done it in ultra HD.
I still have a VCR player for my VCR videos, and if I am ever concerned that I couldn't keep a VCR player maintained, I'd have to convert those tapes to another format. I need a backup now in the old format, in the future I'll need them backed up in whatever new format.
Depending on your budget you could start by just backing it all up to Amazon Cloud Drive for US$11.99/year - https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home
If you have a bit more to spend I would suggest a Synology NAS that also backs up to a cloud.