How do you backup photos?

[vishzilla]

I have a lot of photos and I usually backed it up in DVDs. But now one of the DVDs I'd lot of photos in it failed to read. :( I am looking for another solution, as optical discs seem to be unreliable sometimes. How do you guys backup your photos?

[tacticalbread]

External hard drive, or a flash drive?

[richg]

I have a external Firewire 80gb Maxtor hard drive. Very fast. I put a PCI Firewire card in my two desktops a few years ago. Linux has good support for Firewire, IEEE 1394.
I power it up only when I have to back up my files.

Rich

[vishzilla]

external firewire is a good option. considering it. thanks

[jespdj]

Copy them onto an external harddrive. I use an external harddrive with USB 2.0 interface. In practice, there's not much speed difference between USB 2.0 and Firewire. In my opinion, it isn't worth it to invest in Firewire hardware, especially if you are only using it only occasionally to backup photos. Optical discs don't stay good forever, as you have discovered...

Also, if you do write an optical disc, always use the verification option of the burning program (if you're using a burning program that has such an option) to check if the disc was written without errors. Occasionally, discs contain errors.

[ad_267]

I've had this problem before too. I burnt a backup CD and all other files were fine but the images were unreadable. Maybe it's a problem with Brasero? I tried the CD about a day after burning it, so it's not a problem with leaving the disc for too long.

[t0p]

I find that CD-RWs tend to be okay so long as they're put in cases and left in storage - problems arise if I need to read off them a few times, they give up the ghost quite quickly with repeated handling. It's strange, because I'm sure CDs used to be able to stand being used. And pre-recorded music CDs can take repeated playing without screwing up so fast. Maybe it's CD-RWs in particular... maybe CD-Rs aren't so flimsy...

[tylerspaska]

rsync script in crontab to a headless server or another hard drive (external or another internal)

[laurielegit]

I use everything you mentioned and then some more. As photos are probably the most important thing to me I have them on cd, dvd, external hard drive and several flash drives. It really depends what format you want to use though I have never had a problem with cd and thus it remains my favorite.

[pp.]

As photos are probably the most important thing to me I

You might consider renting disk space in facilities which are built for that very purpose.

[Dixon Bainbridge]

I find that CD-RWs tend to be okay so long as they're put in cases and left in storage - problems arise if I need to read off them a few times, they give up the ghost quite quickly with repeated handling. It's strange, because I'm sure CDs used to be able to stand being used. And pre-recorded music CDs can take repeated playing without screwing up so fast. Maybe it's CD-RWs in particular... maybe CD-Rs aren't so flimsy...

Never us RW for anything, ever.


Backup to an external HDD every week, if possible use two for critical work. I have a copy of all my pictures backed up to my parents computer as well. CD/DVD's are not a reliable medium for long term storage and optical drives are becoming increasingly redundant with each year.

[kellemes]

I have a lot of photos and I usually backed it up in DVDs. But now one of the DVDs I'd lot of photos in it failed to read. :( I am looking for another solution, as optical discs seem to be unreliable sometimes. How do you guys backup your photos?

I have a ds207+ 2x1Tb in Raid 1, great solution for backing up.
synology ds207+ (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS207+/index.php)
There one bay product (ds107+ (http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS107+/index.php)) is nice also.

Anyway, some external disk (with or without lan) seems the way to go.

[handy]

Make at least two backups on separate drives, or a drive & optical media. I have mine on two different machines, & multiple DVD's.

I have hundreds of DVD's that I have burned myself over the years since the burners became available, I have never had a successfully burnt disk fail on me. So I don't know what is causing the problem for others, is it the media burner combination, or the software being used to do the burning?

The general info' when googling is that all but the cheapest optical media will last longer than you need it too.

I only use Pioneer drives, apart from the thing in the iMac, which I had replaced under warranty due to it sounding like an angle grinder. They put an Optiarc drive in, which occasionally won't read disks that were burned on the other drive, though the Pioneer in my other machine will.

I expect that the Optiarc AD-5630A was the cheapest drive that Apple could currently source, at least in my country. Obviously I have little faith in that drive.

[billgoldberg]

I have a lot of photos and I usually backed it up in DVDs. But now one of the DVDs I'd lot of photos in it failed to read. :( I am looking for another solution, as optical discs seem to be unreliable sometimes. How do you guys backup your photos?

External HDD, what else?

But flash memory might be safer.

[joninkrakow]

Three external hard drives. I have one connected to my ancient desktop Mac, my wife's computer, and my main computer. All photos get backed up to all three. The only downside is that they are all in the same house, so if there were some disaster, I'd still be out--but then again, all my negatives, slides and prints are in the house too...

-Jon

[vishzilla]

Whoa! so many options. I have to consider some of the options. Depending on my budget. Coz I'll be buying a bike in December. I have been looking forward for this moment :popcorn:

PS: I'll have to shoot gazillion photographs of my new bike then! ;)

[jdrodrig]

What much space are we talking about? GBs or TBs? I would expect that cloud storage becomes cheaper soon, specially with the looming recession....

[noremac]

I back mine up to an external hard drive and also a smaller copy to my PicasaWeb albums, using of course, Picasa.

[rudihawk]

External HDD - use Grsync whenever I feel the need to do backups (usually weekly).

[richg]

I forgot to mention before that I bought the Firewire stuff at least three years ago. MY two desktops do not have USB 2.0 and Firewire was easily available. Today I would go with USB 2.0 external and get a PCI USB 2.0 plugin card.
My stepson recently bought a USB 2.0 My Book 500gb USB 2.0 Western Digital external drive and bought a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card for his six year old Toshiba laptop. He downloads a lot of music and photos. I plugged his drive into my PC with Ubuntu 8.04 and it works just fine. The drive box is maybe twice the size of a paper back book. The smaller case sizes are more expensive.
It may not be your method but I copy and paste since I only have 4gb of data.

Rich

[init1]

Storage is extremely cheap. I bought a 250 GB external hard drive today for $120. If it's only pictures, you probably won't need more than a USB drive. Depends on how many you have, though.

[handy]

I trust my backups to optical disk far more than I do the data that is spinning around on a HDD.

I have never lost any data from optical media (CD's & DVD's), I have had many customers in the past who have lost data from their HDD's, as well as my own personal loss of data from my own machines.

Whenever I have lost data due to corruption or hardware failure I have always been able to recover my user data from my CD & these days DVD backups.

Anything that is important needs to be off your computer & any form of storage media that can have its bits changed or destroyed.

[pp.]

"Real" photographers print their photographs and store the prints. Some of them, anyway.

[regomodo]

#

[oldsoundguy]

Or quit using media purchased at your local drug store! (no one has mentioned media quality as a factor!) Not ALL media is created equal!
Check their ratings with Google .. you may be surprised!

[cariboo]

I consider my photos to important to loose, so they are backuped on my server plus on two different external drives plus high quality dvd+r disks

Jim

[vishzilla]

I do print some of the photos which are really good.

[handy]

Or quit using media purchased at your local drug store! (no one has mentioned media quality as a factor!) Not ALL media is created equal!
Check their ratings with Google .. you may be surprised!

Did you read Post_13 (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6129640&postcount=13) in this thread?

[Grant A.]

I back mine up via 3 ways:

I make a separate FAT32/VFAT partition for them, so that they aren't deleted when Windows/Linux collapses on my computer from an error and I use this particular partition type so that it is able to be mounted by both Windows and and Linux distribution with FAT32/VFAT drivers installed.

Then I zip that partition's data into a single archive (again, for Windows + Linux readability) and then I copy it onto a reformatted USB Flash Drive with a FAT32/VFAT partition on it (same reasons), and I will copy data from that Flash Drive to both partitions just in case one of them becomes unreadable (the flash drive, the Windows partition, Linux partition, etc). After that I load the data onto a file hosting service if all else fails. Sometimes I even load it to many different hosts or e-mail it to myself as an attachment.

I am prepared. :)

[handy]

i just use a flash drive..
sometimes diskettes.

I've had flash drives fail.

I don't trust them after that, not with anything important. It's great to get photo's backed up off the camera for the same reason.

[Zack McCool]

I have a lot of photos and I usually backed it up in DVDs. But now one of the DVDs I'd lot of photos in it failed to read. :( I am looking for another solution, as optical discs seem to be unreliable sometimes. How do you guys backup your photos?

I keep a NAS drive right near my front door. Backups of all important files go to that drive a few times per day (rsync). If there is ever an emergency (fire, flood, whatever), I can just grab the drive on my way out the door. Equipment is replaceable (and insured), but data is not...