Or reworded, 'how many pics do you have, and how do you back them up?'

Just burned my 31st CD of pics, and I was curious how other people back up their pics. I am using high quality CDs (Taido Yuden), make two backups on CD, and plan on verifying the CD quality every now and then. (Used to be once a year, but the CDs have stayed totally clean) If I get any soft/error correctable errors, I'll reburn them.

I should probably switch over to DVDs, but I got a spindle I need to finish off first.

Do you guys just burn onto CD? DVD? Just leave them on your hard disk? I suppose it depends on how many pictures you have, but some of you guys must have massive amounts too.

(I'm totally paranoid about backups after I hit a virus that deleted every picture on my hard drive).

 

you don't want to leave them on your hard drive because they take up so much space. The only thing i don't like about using the dvd discs is that it takes so much to fill em, I've ended up wasting quite a few because i didn't fill em. Just a thought

 

Harddrive and webshots.

 

I keep them on my HD. I probably should back them up. I have 2.3gigs worth of pics. It would suck if I lost them

 

bet your pc would work a whole lot sweeter if you moved all those pics to disc & got them out of your hard drive. 2.3 gigs thats huge amount of space dude

 

I have an external HD that is bigger than the some of the drives I use on a daily basis. I backup to that. it's so much better than tape/cd/dvd/etc.

 

Yeah, I know...I am gonna take care of that.

 

except if that unit takes a dump, best to also get them to disc IMO

 

Count me as another vote for the external HD route.
Where do you draw the line? You could play "what if..." until the cows come home. The point with backing up is to have them in two locations regardless of the media. If you want a level of protection beyond that, then you should be looking at off site storage.

 

i too think thats a great way to store them. Its just if that baby was to fry, get stolen ect. Then what, how do you get your pics back? i dont know, to each his own.

 

DVD Burner > CD Burner

20 CD MP3 backup took only a few DVD-Rs

 

i don't have pictures, but I want to know how often or how your HD's crash? I've never had a hard drive crash on me (knock on wood) but I just dont see how people have it happen to them. I can see the concern about losing your pictures and all, but I would think an external HD or a seperate HD would keep your pictures virus free.

 

There's a difference between backing up to a hard drive and using that hard drive as primary storage. If you move data to an external disk and have no other copy of it, then yes there is a risk.

The same risk is involved in using tape/cd/dvd. Tapes in general can develop read errors and cd/dvds can get easily scratched or broken.

None of this stuff will survive a fire unless its in a fire proof safe that is rated to protect computer media (many are only rated to protect paper)

So what it breaks down to is that you should have two copies of your data, and one copy should be preferably offsite.

 

ok i'll butt out, we all have our own opinions i guess. What ever works right. guess i'm just paronoid, i had a crash & lost everything & the kitchen sink.

 

removeable hard drive with cd/dvd backups.

I decided to ditch the CF card idea.

 

Oh and well over 10gb...havent checked for sure.

 

whatever you are smoking - you better share, must be some good shit!

That's nothing! I have almost 6 gigs of pictures now, and that really isn't much at all. My OS is on a 74gb HD along with all my programs, etc. Everything else including pictures is on a 160gb drive. I have plenty of space. Many people have tons more than me.

I use rewritable DVDs for backup although I'm thinking about just doing a second, possibly external, HD that ghosts the first.

 

DVD's, CD's, keep a lot of em on HD too, webspace, there's only so much you can do. Store your backups well.

 

I have an 80gb in my powerbook, a 120gb external and a 250gb external.
my externals are quite full...pictures, music and video files of projects I've shot...for editing for my reel.

And I'm still looking to get a 4-500gb at some point.

 

To catalog them I use Google's Picasa.

 

I keep them on my HD and back-up the data every year (along with all my other important files). I used ACDSee Classic to manage the pics.

 

I use imageevent for a lot of my picture backup. I should put the entire collection on a dvd though

 

I think I have had only one or two drives crash on me, ever.

Your bigger risk is directory corruption which could render files unreadable.
Let's way windows is updating the directory structure and chooses to hang when it's jerking around. There's a reason windows demands a scandisk whenever it crashes - there's a risk it fubared part of your hard disk.

It's a small risk, but hey - it's windows. It'll happen one of these days.

There are many reasons for backups, today I went braindead and deleted the wrong directory. Luckily I had a backup.

 

where da fuck did you come from........ god damn long time...

 

flickr

 

I keep them on my HD which gets backed up to my fileserver via Ghost's network backup.
To organize/view/tag I use Bridge, which comes with Photoshop. When I got CS2 I figured I'd never use bridge, but now that I know how to use it, it's excellent. I wish it was more itunes-ish in regards to adding metadata where it autocompletes certain fields, but oh well.

 

Ditto. Im lazy.

 

If you're really paranoid, buy a flickr account or something similar so you're covered if there is a fire in your house. IMO, hard drive space is so cheap these days, there is no reason not to buy an external 250GB HD and back up your crap on there.

 

Using RAID is a possibility these days too.

 

My photos are in 5 places:
1) my computer
2) external hard drive
3) DVDs
4) flickr
5) on my wall

The first 3 should give me pretty good redundancy. I upload my original size shots to flickr so I can recover them in a pinch, unfortunately they don't yet support RAW files (which I shoot exclusively), so this would be a last resort in a catastrophic failure.

 

I have gotten lazy and haven't backed up my pictures in over a year. I should get around to doing that soon.

 

External HD and DVD is all I use to back them up.

 

I have an external HD to backup anything on my primary drive. I make 2 DVD backups every 6 months. 1 set goes into a fireproof safe in my house and the other set I store at my parents house. The external HD is also good because if i needed to evacuate or leave the house in an emergency I can easily disconnect it and take off.

 

I have about 70 GIGS of photos backed up on DVD-R and External HD.

 

I know everyone has their own strategy, I'll just share mine and you can take from it whatever you want.

1.) Currently have 9.1 GB of photos taken over the last 3 months (and another 6.6GB worth of older pictures) for 15.7GB total.
2.) Photos are stored as live and usable files on my C:\
3.) Photos are backed up to samba server (cheap dell SC420) across my network using an automated too called Cobian Backup. They are also backed up to another internal drive. Several months down the road, I will archive them to DVD, but keep them on my Samba server.
4.) Images are indexed and managed using Picasa
5.) Images are processed with Digital Photo Professional

I'm at a surplus for storage at the moment, so the redundant copies are well worth it.