Digital Photo Storage Methods Questions

[CoriSCapnSkip]

Technical Question inviting input from all who may know:

If hard drives eventually die, some Photo Library Apps apparently indiscriminately eat entire blocks of images, CDs degrade over time, and it would cost zillions to make good quality prints of tens of thousands of pictures, in what exact format SHOULD one save pictures? I am talking about digital pictures or digitized versions of old pictures, and some media or device on which to place them for archival storage. Eventually I'd like to see many of my pictures at the Depot or other places and don't want to have to continually change format. As for digital storage, I have heard tell of the Cloud, and don't fully trust it either. Anyone? Thanks.

 

[ghost19]

It's always good to have more than one type of independent storage media to store important files on. It's a bit more of a pain to keep up with but at least you know if you lose one you have a back up.

Cloud storage is a good option but all the cloud consists of is more hard drives at a server farm somewhere. The good thing about the cloud is those server farms usually are backed up daily onto backup servers so your files are safe but it will cost you for that type of backup protection.

For home storage a good quality external hard drive is a cheap option with large amounts of storage available, 250gb up to 2tb and even larger models but again it's a hard drive and is subject to failure. Flash drives are also cheap and they don't have any moving parts but they're small and cheaply made, easily misplaced, or broken. Recordable DVDs are another good option for longevity and they don't degrade in quality especially if you keep them in a jewel case but you're usually limited to around 4-5 gigs of storage per DVD. If you have thousands of pics you're going to have to use quite a few dvds and you have to label them so you know which is which.

There's lots of storage options nowadays but it depends on how much you trust any one type of media as far as choosing what's best for you. If the files are very important it's probably worth shelling out a few extra bucks to keep them safe and secure.

 

[Bev Vincent]

The cloud is just someone else's computers.

 

[Grandpa]

I have a couple backup drives, a Tuoro and a Seagate (I think). They are small and just plug into my laptop. One of them is 1 TB, the other is 2 TB. I'm amazed at how cheap space is these days.

The Nikon takes pictures in JPG (I don't use RAW, unless it's a special project), and that format has been around for a while. I don't know of anything that lasts forever, but it seems like a format that's going to stay or be convertible for a long time to come.