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Why not Blu-ray?

One interesting long-lasting CD solution: http://www.writeexpr...m/m-writer.html

Besides using multiple media, CD and DVD, a system backup that includes data is always the first step. Keeping those old photos will age at about the same speed as a disk media. Photo negatives, like the actual photos hold far more resolution than any digital format can hope to achieve. Space considerations and ease of transport has awakened the digital media but once transposed, the resolution becomes limited to the original method of transposition and resolutions used. Scanning photos and negatives at high resolutions can be very time consuming and can eat up precious memory space but offer the best beginning point for enlargements and reductions to meet e-mail and file transfer parameters. Scanning in at 75 DPI might be fine for web pages and other image storage sites but will sadly fail to reach any expandable resolutions without pixelation.

tomazk, on 03 May 2012 - 06:53 AM, said:

This looks interesting. Thanks for the heads-up.

Of course, there's still the basic problem: The only way to be sure that a medium will last a century is to wait a century.

Lincoln

This article doesn't mention my photo back-up problem: file size.

Last year I upgraded from a 5MP UltraZoom to a 12MP consumer DSLR. Suddenly, instead of needing to back-up around 5GB of photos, I have 65GB.

Obviously, DVD back-ups aren't practical at that point. Blu-Ray seems too speculative (and rather expensive). Cloud services would cost a fortune.

I'm left with an external drive as pretty much my only option, while waiting for a newer indelible choice to come along.

The size of your photo files has many approaches. The resolution with which you take the photo dictates the first digital stage file size. Different file formats can further reduce the size of that initial file to almost one tenth original size and some will reduce it even more. The digital I use has 12 MP and the resolution is set for 3,300 by 2,400. This results in a picture file size of around 12 MB using the .JPG format. This is often too big to e-mail but for Photoshop or other desktop/laptop photo programs, can take a few seconds to load. Rendering(manipulating) the image and resaving the modified image gives you the first chance to change file format and thus change the file size. Reimaging the original and reducing the resolution will have a better effect and make for much more smaller files. The higher resolution image can be the master and you decide how to use it and adjust file sizes accordingly. Real keepsakes (oldphotos, over thirty years old) need those high resolutions as many are within ten years of their lifetimes and this may become your only copy of the image. CD/DVD disks are reported to have a twenty year retention life but saving to a secondary hard disk that is lovingly cared for can last fifty years. I use them all, copys on CD/DVD, in a system backup (more DVDs) besides retaining the original media (photos, slides, negatives, VHS, VHS-C, and 8MM) in a firesafe. Many 8MM media have just around 50 years before the media (cellulose) begins to get two brittle to survive another trip through a projector. Slides and negatives will last up to seventy years before colors begin to change. Magnetic tape will keep for thirty years or so but suffers from aging of the polyester tape and the magnetic ferrite on the tape begins to loose its magnetic orientation. This is detectable in audio by a muffled output, videotapes just loose focus and color saturation. I hope this helps.I have used an empty USB hard drive bay ro recover data from crashed systems and it serves as an external drive to store or archive important images. Other media (thumb drives, memory sicks ETC.) are subject to getting blanked or otherwise not viewable with different hardware (USB on TVs, other PCs and disk players) can cause incompatiblity.

This post has been edited by mjd420nova: 03 May 2012 - 09:45 AM

I use a mirrored NAS. It does not protect against user stupidity or disaster such as fire or flood but it works for me.

An external USB hard disk. You should be able to find USB3 terabyte drives for $100. That should handle millions of digital photos in JPEG format.

Incrementally back up the photos, unmount it, and put it away somewhere safe.

May as well backup your other documents, too. After all, there's space for it. You might be glad you backed up your 'iTunes' library after a disk crash, for instance.

Backup is not optional. External hard disk backup is the quickest, most convenient way to do it, next to NAS.

NAS for sure, if you have multiple computers.

I'm not in a flood-prone area, but I do have an offline backup in a fireproof 'safe'. These can be had from Target, or an 'office' store for under $100, too. The backup-backup, actually.

Of course, you can buy two $100 terabyte USB drives, and swap them every time you visit your mom (or trusted friend/relative that you frequently visit).

Another way to back up your photos is to exchange them with your relatives, whenever possible. You get theirs, they get yours. Everybody is happy. You still need convenient, portable storage for this.

Or if you pay $300 or so for a Synology DS4xx NAS, and stuff one or more drives into it, and spring $20 for a dynamic DNS subscription, you can back up to that drive, and make it a 'cloud' storage to exchange with all the family. Make them accounts, grant them access, tell them how to connect (or make 'shortcuts' for them). You can setup webDAV, FTP, VPN, 'cloud sync' thingy, mail, whatever you like. As well as all kinds of other servers. Pretty sweet little toy.

From the days of the older tape drive backup systems, I always advised users to use two different tapes as the write process would over write anything already there and when complete, would go back and do a verify. That's when the hardware usually failed, verifying the tape matches what's on the drive. If you only had one tape, you've now overwritten it with bad data and your current backup no longer exists and your tape drive is faulty. Alternating tapes will insure you never overwrite your current backup. It would work the same way with USB drives.

LincolnSpector, on 03 May 2012 - 07:33 AM, said:

I can always pull a floppy drive out of the closet and install it in my desktop if I need to recover those old files, right? (I did that once for some old files my parents had.) Seriously though, a good option is probably a hard drive or thumb drive - I don't see USB disappearing any time soon. Personally, I backup everything to an external hard drive every week or so, and also backup my photos to CDs and DVDs (so they're on 3 drives, everything else is on 2). My email and school docs are also in 4 places (cloud storage, like dropbox or hotmail, desktop hard drive, laptop's hard drive, and external hard drive). And a lot of my music is also in 3 places (desktop hard drive, laptop hard drive, external).

This post has been edited by LiveBrianD: 07 June 2012 - 01:57 PM

I think this article is referring to long term storage of things such as family photographs thatyou want to pull out once every few years to show the new grandchildren and to refresh your own memory etc. I cannot speak for DVDs, but CDs unless special expensive archival quality CDs will not last that long without losing their information. I have had inexpensive, consumer grade CDs become unreadable in less than 5 years stashed in a dark closet indoors (less than 3 years in certain environments of regular use and moderate "abuse" such as recorded music played on your car player). It has been my assumption that DVDs would exhibit the same failure rate and I have not taken the chance. Don't trust your photos of your newborn to consumer grade CDs or DVDs!!!! I have some old harddrives that are now in the range of 15 to 20 years old that are still holding pictures that were put on them 6 and 8 years ago. I can insert the archival harddrive in an adapter and all the photos are readable. These are 4 to 10 GB harddrives which someone will point out here will fail at some point, but it may be 50 years before that happens and it may be tomorrow.