Guys

All my photos from the last few years are stored on an increasingly unmanageable pile of CDs and DVDs, and I fear that one day my earlier discs will start to degrade and become unreadable.

So, I'm looking for a storage solution that wil be more reliable over the long term - but I wondered what you were all using? Piles of CDs? Hard discs? RAID arrays? Tapes? Colour prints and a good, old fashioned album?

Ta
Andy

My own photographs are stored on firewire hard-drives (Lacie 250GB) with important stuff also backed up on DVD

archival quality DVDs, stored individually in a jewel case / cd holder that keeps the surface away from contact with the case or sleeve. These should be stored vertically to prevent sag in dark conditions. A seperate set stored away (eg your parents house) ?

Personally I'm going for raid arrays. DVD's aren't big enough (most of my folders are 6 - 10gb)

Blu-ray recordable discs? 25Gb single layer?

How long do you plan to archive things - do you keep spare unboxed hardware & copies of software to enable retrival?

Andy, there's a very good article here. (Sorry my PC won't copy/paste for some damn reason.)

Digital Camera Reviews and News: Digital Photography Review: Forums, Glossary, FAQ (http://www.dpreview.com) then Learn and General articles.

Basically it says you need to save on both DVD/CD (optical) and hard disc (magnetic) then be prepared to migrate/update everything as technology evolves, eg it would be tricky reading a 7in floppy these days :lol1:

Richard.

I have been doing this very thing the last few days.

I got a new desktop before Christmas so have taken the opportunity to tidy up all my rally pics etc.

I now have all photo's backed up onto 2 external drives, i.e same photo's stored twice.
Both drives are from different manufacturers just in case :D
Although knowing my luck they'll both fail on me at the same time.

I am now about to start the painful DVD backup as well.
I "refresh / re-copy" my older DVD backups every 2 years to hopefully reduce the risk of any DVD's going bad.

I then store the DVD's at my in-laws house, yes I do get on with them OK :D

PS
Copies of photo's of our daughter from birth to present (3) are stored on 3 different hard drives, the two mentioned above and the desktops main drive, as well as DVD backups.
If I lost these I'd be in the poopy stuff for sure :D I don't want to loose my rally pics but these are far more important.

Hm... sounds like there's no simple right answer, then. Maybe the good old photo album wasn't so bad after all :)

I'll keep looking in to NAS drives; I've seen some that advertise the ability to automatically back themselves up to external drives, so two of those could be a good medium term solution: one to use, and the other to just sit there on the network and be a backup.

...Maybe the good old photo album wasn't so bad after all :) ...


Yeah, my old stuff is all in the loft, and every image is as crap as the day it was taken :lol1:

Just thinking about those USB flash-drive dongle things. Not a price/capacity option now, but when they hit 20Gb for £20? That's a lot of JPGs. I believe they use the same technology as aircraft blackboxes - saw a TV prog where they tried to destroy all kinds of memory devices and this USB thing survived fire, water, and being fired from a cannon :eek:

Richard.

I store 2 copies of everything on 2 different PC's at home - one in the house, the other in the garage.

I also keep a firewire drive at work which is my off site backup.

Just to be completely paranoid, the firewire drive never comes home. I use my laptop to transfer incremental changes.

There is only one medium which has been proven to last 100 yrs.
Is backward compatable with earlier versions, unlike a lot of computer based files.
It's called FILM :) .
DVDs and Cds degrade over time and hard drives fail.

Very true; if you feel like paying for enough film to archive about 50GB of RAW and JPEG files then I'll give you my address to send a cheque :) I'd wager that a few blank DVDs or hard drives would be cheaper, mind...