Photo Storage - Advice please.

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ffarquhar

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Hi,
I am wondering what is the general opinion about the best form of photo storage.
My current hard-disk is almost full & I will soon need to upgrade it but as photo back up I tend to leave all my photos on the SD cards & just buy new cards as & when they fill up. I currently have about 20 cards, a mix of 1GB & 2GB which are fairly cheap, about £5 for a 2GB Transcend one, so I don't consider it too expensive to do this.
Is this a good way of storing photos or is a big external hard-disk better,
I am a bit nervous about this as I had a hard disk fail once & lost everything.

Also are SD to CF adapters readily available as I have a chance of a D70 as a second body & wanted to take advantage of cheaper SD cards.
Thanks. :)
 
20 X £5 = £100 for a max of 40GB

1 X 1TB Seagate External Hard Drive = £79.99

It's a no brainer.

Personally I never keep photos on a card, as soon as I get home from shooting they are copied to my HD and then backed up to an 500GB external drive.
 
I store my images on a second drive on my PC and have two backup drives on my network. I no longer trust CD/DVD's as have had trouble with both and cards can fail just like any other storage system.
 
Buy yourself 2 external hard drives and a spool of archival DVD's, copy the card off onto both drives, one is storage/working, the other back up. Then write to dvd as well, second back up. Archival dvd's are good for over 50 years (so it's claimed) you'll save money in the long run, and it's worth remembering that the memory cards can and do fail, and at the moment you have no back up.
 
Definatly woth investing in a external HD you may have 20 cards now but that number will only grow and grow. the other advantage is you will be able to brows your folders much quicker that sifting through a load of sd cards. if you stick with SD then will then need a storage device to store your sd storage devices.
 
I'm up to three 1Tb drives, two 500Gb drives, a 400Gb drive and two 250 Gb drives...It never ends...
 
I always back up my cards to both the PC hard drive and to an external hard drive as soon as I can after a shoot. After checking the pics I do delete the non keepers so there isnt too much space wasted.

However, as an added safety backup, I use Mozy:
http://mozy.com/home
This is an automatic system that backs up all my files, or whatever I have specified, and as many times a day as I require without any intervention by me. The files are stored in a secure site in America and can be recovered when ever needed. This costs $4.95 a month, thats about £3.05 for unlimited use. Currently I have 45GB backed up this way, but that includes all my data, music, pictures etc.
Having suffered a total loss from fire many years ago, this is a cheap form of backup thats totaly secure and immune from fire, theft, breakdown, or any other thing that can cause you to lose data.
Trev
 
Arkady said:
I'm up to three 1Tb drives, two 500Gb drives, a 400Gb drive and two 250 Gb drives...It never ends...
Click to expand...

LOL I know what you mean. There's 3.2 Tb of storage on my PC, 2 x 500Gb backup USB disks and I've recently purchased a 4Tb raided nas system as well!
 
Thanks for all the responces & advice peoples. :thumbs:
I think I will have to invest in a couple of 500GB drives to back-up to & some of those archival DVDs mentioned.
 
ffarquhar said:
Thanks for all the responces & advice peoples. :thumbs:
I think I will have to invest in a couple of 500GB drives to back-up to & some of those archival DVDs mentioned.
Click to expand...

I would get 1Tb drives though, there is not a lot of difference in price now and you would have twice the capacity and larger drives TEND to be quicker due to increased aerial density......
 
I know we shouldn't believe everything in the Daily Mail but...today Maplin have an offer on of 1TB Seagate External Hard Drive at £79.99 with free delivery, don't know if thats good or not.
 
I remember when we all thought 250Gb was large!!
 
Chappers said:
I remember when we all thought 250Gb was large!!
Click to expand...

My first HDD was 4MB, which at the time I remember thinking - at least I'll never fill that :eek:
 
Caledonia said:
My first HDD was 4MB, which at the time I remember thinking - at least I'll never fill that :eek:
Click to expand...

That really is small.

I remember that when they got over 640 Mb they had to be partitioned didn't they?
 
Caledonia said:
My first HDD was 4MB, which at the time I remember thinking - at least I'll never fill that :eek:
Click to expand...

Mine was 20Mb but when I bought it there was still a 10Mb option I just bought the deluxe model :) but my floppy disc was floppy and only held 100Kb :)
 
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