Currently i'm just backing up the photos/vids onto Verbatim 3.5" External Hard Drive USB 3.0 1TB ( from https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/42670)
after 6months. But again there is risk of this drive to fail and loosing all data. What do you guys do to store the data for years / long time?
How do ozbargainers preserve/store the photos/vids for years?
anonymoususer on 31/12/2016 - 11:30
Last edited 31/12/2016 - 11:31
Last edited 31/12/2016 - 11:31
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Google photos and some cloud storage services
Photos/vids from the phone sync direct to my OneDrive.
Photos from SLR go into Aperture on the Mac (now defunct app unfortunately) and from there I sync the the photo directories to my CrashPlan backup account that I pay about $7 a month for. I also have time machine backup locally as well as a vault backup (Aperture) onto a portable HDD.
Would like to somehow get CrashPlan to backup my OneDrive account.
Floppy Disks
Pfft. Commodore64 cassette tapes.
Punch cards.
For videos I flip a stack of cards to animate drawings in the corners.
Old guy i use to work with in his previous job use to slot in a crunched up punch card in someones stack of punch cards when they where trying to run some code off punch cards. The machine will get stuck and said guy would have to find out why his code stopped working. When he finds out why he it got stuck. He would have to reload the punch cards and start over again.
Google photos ftw.
3 hard drives. 1 off site copy (relatives place), 2 at home copies. So technically 2 extra external hard drives you would buy including your computers own hard drive. Back up once a month. I'm looking to create some back up DVDs as well because family photos/videos are really important. The more copies in various places the better.
My backup locations are:
Seagate 5TB backup drive
Google Drive
Dropbox
Desktop-PC internal drive.This gives me enough redundancy for my fairly small photo collection.
I also have another HTPC which also could be used as a NAS
USB 3.0 HDD external, and 50gb Blu-ray discs (my fav) stored in sleeves in a storage case (heaps on ebay of differing sizes).
Are burnt blu-rays better than CDs and DVDs? Many of mine gave up after about 10 years dark storage. I think only pressed media is reliable.
It depends on what brand you bought.
QUOTE
A French study (PDF) in which several Blu-ray recordable discs were tested reveals that it makes a lot of difference on which discs you store your valuable data. The archives of France, who conducted the research, tested discs from Sony, Verbatim, Maxell (made by Ritek), JVC and Panasonic.
The discs were burned with Nero and filled for 99%. The researchers used burners from Lite-On, Plextor, Buffalo, LG, Pioneer and Sony, burned them at several speeds and the burned discs were analyzed with a Blu-ray Analyzer from Expert Magnetics which uses a Pioneer drive to read the discs.
An interesting detail is that the researchers make a difference between LTH (low to high) and HTL (high to low) Blu-ray discs. The first are manufactured in a cheaper way and are therefor less expensive. While cheaper, manufacturers claim that the discs are of the same quality as normal HTL discs.
In this test they tested LTH Blu-ray discs from Verbatim and JVC and it seems the claims from the manufacturers are not valid. The tests revealed that the overall quality of Blu-ray LTH discs is worse than normal Blu-ray (HTL) discs. It seems that if you want to store your data for a long time, these should be avoided. The researchers recommend to use normal HTL Blu-ray discs and rated those of Sony and Panasonic as most reliable.
Depends on the media, but things like DVD ram discs or DVDRW discs and standard bluray discs are all written to a metallic layer, which will last a damn long time when kept indoors. I have a suitcase full of disc sleeves, designed for that purpose, which I bought from ebay.
I have faith in the discs holding up to the task for many decades.
Some have hit on it here - redundancy!. To start with, keep your original files on the sd/cf cards from the camera ..they are often so cheap, unlike in the past. Level two, the prime Pc hard drive, 3- external drive of some sort, I use a number SSD & USB drives. I also suggest photo printing on high quality paper at a lab of some sort depending on your budget for a selection of PRIME images. Unlike past times the suggested lifespan of the better photo papers is circa 100 years Fuji / Kodak. As for the "Cloud" it is an option for some, but as a retired pro photographer I like things that I have direct control of. Still the golden rule is redundancy, the more the better, and in different places owing to unforseen events like house fires.
My subjective rankings, from worst to best:
Cheap usb thumb drives left in a laptop going in and out of sleep mode.
Burnt Optical Media
Physical hard drivesdaylight
SSD
High quality SD/USB that is always ejected cleanly and stored unattached.Encrypted internet storage is the other safe-ish option.
OneDrive. 200gb free with Telstra, 100gb free with Samsung device. Becomes read only in 2 years.
Google Photos (Free) for compressed photos that are uploaded directly from phone/tablet and then Amazon Cloud Drive Unlimited ($100 per year) for original quality backups every so often.
Turn them into memes, they'll never disappear off the internet :p.
Seriously though some sort of cloud storage might be easiest or some high grade metal USB drives kept in a safe place.
Two hard drives - one is kept at home that is my master version. The other I back up to weekly (I also back up my documents and music to this) and I keep it at work.
I am looking into a good cloud backup as well but I haven't done this yet.
UniFi SD sends photos to my server and Smugmug, server writes backup daily to 2nd disk.
I'm a big fan of smugmug, it costs less than an external hard drive a year, unlimited storage and easiest way to share with family etc.
I used to use mozy online storage, but switched to crashplan as it worked out cheaper when I last looked (backing up multiple computers with unlimited storage).
It has saved me a bunch of times! I've had a bunch of hard drive failures over the years and both of these services have meant I haven't lost a thing.
I use SyncMe on my android phone to automatically sync to my pc every night as well as Google photos.
I have a RAID NAS unit (4 drives inside with mirroring and redundancy) running FreeNAS as primary storage. I have 4 USB external hard drives attached for backups, one switched out weekly to a relative's house, another switched out weekly to my work in case of fire or theft. Backups are automatically scheduled daily.
I also backup the NAS unit to Microsoft One Drive (any reputable on-line cloud storage will do). I have over 1TB of photos.The NAS unit automatically does regular scrubs and SMART checks and then emails me the results or any other warnings. I can then swap out a hard drive if it starts to fail before I lose anything.
Works well, never had an issue in all the years I have been running it. I keep the FreeNAS software up to date. I know the hardware will fail at some point, all computer hardware does, but I have enough redundancy for it to be ok.
Google drive and external and on a home server