From the article: Back Up Your Digital Photos
Share your digital photo backup story and help others looking for an efficient photo backup solution for their own photo collection. Describe the strategy you use to back up your digital photos. How often do you back up and what media do you use for photo backups? Have you ever lost digital photos that were not backed up? How and why has your photo backup strategy changed over the years? Share a Backup Story
Backups
- Using CDs or DVDs for backups is inexpensive, but remember that for permanent archiving of data, DVDs and CDs must be replaced about every 5 years because they will deteriorate. (I have some 3-year old DVD's which are already unreadable). At home I use a shared server as well as replicate the entire data set across different computers. Attached to my server is a removable drive port, and every week I rotate one of those removable hard drives to my office as "off-site" storage. (If you don't work outside the home, use a neighbor or friend, just get it out of your home!) It's not perfect strategy, but if all our computer were totally destroyed, the most I would lose is 1 week worth of data. If the data is more important, get it away from your home every day - either copied to "cloud" storage or onto some media you can transport.
- —Oldmancolorado
NAS + DropBox
- My photos are organized on a network attached storage drive. But, the NAS is in the basement and if the house were on fire, it wouldn't be the first thing I would think about saving. So, like Jenn, I use Dropbox, a cloud backup solution, for photos and to automatically backup important data from any of my computers.
- —Guest Shelley
Multiple backups the only way to go
- Luckily, I haven't had any major losses of my digital photos, but I have had a few scares. The main reason I've been lucky is that my DH and I have had backup copies of our photos for years. First we burned CDs, then we moved to an external networked drive, and now I use Time Machine to an external drive. My biggest problem now is that my backup drive is full and so Time Machine is over writing the oldest backups. But I don't just rely on Time Machine. I have all my photos on Dropbox which puts them on two other computers in my house. So ultimately, my photos are in 5 locations. If one machine crashes, the other 4 are there to restore from. And this has made me feel much safer about my digital photo repository of 13 years.
- —Guest Jenn
