Digital Photo Storage?

[Guest]

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[charity]

I hate to put completely non-Kiva related questions on here, but I have been trying to figure out what to do with my digital photos, and I know many of you may have similar experience or advice. 

I am concerned about this recently because my boyfriends computer, which was ~1 year older than mine, just completely died.  He had no chance to recover anything from it.  And I have hundreds of pictures and the only videos of my cat of almost 16 years, who died in 2007, on my computer, without backups.  I do not want to lose those pictures or videos! 

When I originally got my first digital camera, my idea was to create backup 'albums' on CD.  But of course I never did that, and now my thousands of photos take up quite a large portion of my harddrive.  I was trying to decide the best way to back these up; my ideas for backup have included CDs, a second internal hardrive, an external harddrive, and DVD.  I started to make some CDs recently, but it looked like it would take at least 10-15 CDs, which made me put off making the CDs until I decided that it was my method of choice. 

Does anyone have any experience or advice or recommendations they could share about any of these methods, or other methods?  Thank you so much! 

[RichardF]

I use Photobucket.   

http://www.photobucket.com

Sorry, I had a typo! 

[s_shewan]

DVD recordables  (DVD-R) can store more pictures than a  CD-R so that might be worth a try.
My parents have an external hard drive that they store  stuff on that they want to back up. and they seem quite satisfied with that.

Susan

[Tatiana]

Store them on a USB stick? They can contain thousends of pictures.

[charity]

Thank you guys for the ideas!  After posting on here, I also thought to send this to my Dad, who just sent this back:

"My preference here is DVD. They now also offer a DVD +RDL disk which stores 8.5 to 9GB on a single disk. About twice the standard DVD and about 14 times a CD. The problem with the +RDL is the need of a more advanced DVDwriter capable of writing those disks. But if your buying a DVD writer... Just buy that drive instead of the standard one. As a guarantee, burn two copies of any images stored. Store them in different places. If the data/pictures are valuable to you. A fire proof safe or a safe deposit box is good insurance against calamity. But I don't go to that extent.
   An external hard drive is a good option and easier to do backups to it... If the computer dies... the disk is separate. But it to has spinning moving parts. If it dies... the data is just as lost as your boyfriends potentially. With these options... I generally don't recommend backing up to an internal disk... I have seen Windows take a dump.. and both disks be to corrupted to do anything with..."

I had also thought about a USB stick, as that would be simplest solution.  But I have had personal bad experience with one of those.  In graduate school I used a USB drive to store all my work because it was the easiest way to hold documents for me to work on both at school and at home.  About two weeks before I graduated the USB drive just didn't work.  I couldn't access anything on it; it looked like it was empty.           Months later, I was finally able to recover some (but not all) of the documents with a recovery software.  So now I only use USB drives to transport documents, not to store them. 

[Jan & John]

I use Photobucket.   

http://www.photobucket.com

Sorry, I had a typo! 

good question Charity - I am sure lots of us in the same boat here.

Along with all the recent digital stuff in my computer, we still have a storage room full of slides that need sorting and scanning to ? what ?

What would be the long-term results with something like Photobucket ?

Will they/it still be around holding my photos when I want to look at them from my retirement home ?

Right now we have a second hard drive because 'something else' broke on our old system so I back up to that (thanks for the reminder

I started to burn CDs then switched to DVD's so we are going to end up with quite a mess soon...

jan who doesn't plan on moving to that home quite yet, but it's coming faster than I would like

[TheTatiana]

I also use Photobucket.  The trick is to have multiple copies.  I have an external hard drive that I also use for backup.  But if, say, my house were destroyed in a fire, I would have access from photobucket of the most important pictures.  I need to scan in all the historical ones as well.  I'm sure future family historians would thank me for that. 

[P, B and J]

I agree with Tatiana, the best thing is to have multiple copies.  I use Photobucket as well.  I keep copies of images on my hard-drive as well as saving them on CDs.

[RichardF]

Turtle uses Picasa!

http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,2775.msg52161.html#msg52161

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/michelle.steffens/TheKittens?feat=directlink#