Back Up Your Digital Photos

[stu_in_fl]

sorry to hear you lost your pics - i know i wuold be devastated to loose mine.

as everyone says backups are essetial...and make several copies. DVD/CDs are a bit of a pain and can fail (and you need to be able to effortlessly do backups or you will forget/delay and that is bad). I used to do that and just got so far behind that I realized it wasn't working. Recently those little 2.5" external drives have become very cheap - you can get a 160GB one for about $99 (I have a couple of the iomega ones) - no external power, just plug into the USB port on your laptop copy the files.
So I now have my pics stored in 3 places: on my hard drive and copied onto 2 external drives (stored in different locations) in case of fire/theft/hurricane etc.

 

[Charlie99]

As another poster noted, there is value to keeping a backup offsite.

The other thing easily done with a bus-powered USB HDD is to transfer them to another computer (such as the one in your office) in addition to the one at home.

Since I have desktop computers in three different residences that I synchronize by carrying just a tiny USB HDD, I have inadvertently created 3 geographically dispersed backup in Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts.

No only if I had some photos that were worth backing up. :disappoin

 

[ScubaMarc]

I use a online web hosting for my pictures, since I rent 350gigs of space for $40 a year, I also store all my photos online. There are pro/cons,
pro is
offsite!
cheap.
my pictures, my resolution.

cons are:
1 every file is public in some sort of manner, I have the files protected from public use, but they are on the web.
2. no file revisions. I use zip files to maintain the revision history.

 

[DesertEagle]

While we are on this subject does anyone have advice on this?

My computer from a few years ago suffered an "unmountable boot disk." At the time I had mostly music on it, so I had to re-rip my CD's. Recently I bought an external enclosure for the 20GB drive. It shows 11 GB of data, but when I go to "my computer" I can't find any of it.

 

[Paco II]

In my own backup procedure, I always maintain my photos on both my laptop, an external backup drive, as well as periodic DVD burns that get put in the safety deposit box.

Regarding online backup - too slow. With the file size of modern cameras, the severly limited upload speed of most ISPs would make net backups painful. That being said, I believe Picasaweb allows full size image uploads and downloads.

 

[cardog]

I upload all of my photos onto Picasaweb and , even at full resolution, it's a very fast process.