Securing pictures

[Broomiebar]

Hi,

Not sure if anyone brought this up before, but I'm trying to know the best ways
that some of you use, to safely secure your valuable family pictures not just from theft or fire
but also from time deterioration than can occur to some floppy disks,
or to old paper photos.

Also, please take a minute to participate in the poll
and if you have any better ideas that you would like to share,
then please do.

Cheers,
B.B

[nebulus200]

Best thing you can do is keep it in multiple places. HDDs die with age, CDROMS/DVDs oxidize and scratch over time, floppies demagnetize, things get lost, etc.

[Tiger Shark]

None of the above....

I just read an article that studied different archive media and it placed magnetic tape as the safest and longest lasting.

I can vouch for CD-ROM being utterly disappointing.... I already have cheap CD-ROM's that are unreadable after 2 1/2+ years... No biggie... The data is archived log files... If I need the data I can recover it - but I don't think I'll ever need it nor have to provide it that far back to anyone.

As a result I will start recopying my photos etc. every year or so to CD-ROM and throwing the old ones away....

[HTRegz]

Hey Hey,

I'm going to have to support Tiger on this one.... Magnetic Tape.... is great.... I keep hearing people say that tape is dead and I have to ask them which rock they live under.... With a life of 30+ years and storage capacities of over 200GB/tape (208 I think is the largest I've seen for single tape.. but then there's always autoloaders and cartridges of tapes)...

As for CDs... again I can support Tiger... while in college we had MSDNAA access... I basically have a legal copy of every MS product as long as I don't use them to make money or run a business (testing and playing basically which is perfect)... I burned the ISO's to CDs I had (a cheap spindle.. $20 for I think 100 CDs... anyways.. most of them are already dead (some are less than a year old)... and I deleted the ISOs... while I still have all my legit keys... I now have to download the media from torrent/warez sites in order to make use of it... and sometimes it's hard to find the same version you had..

Then again when you think about it... Paper Photo's have held up better over the years than any comparable digital media... I know people that have photographs in
albums from the early 1900s and even back into the 1800s... no digital media is rated for that kind of performance..

Peace,
HT

[cabby80]

Haven't used magnetic tape so I can't comment on that but I generally have a couple of copies.

1. USB hard drive
2. Backup on DVD

Plus I print the best ones out for albums anyway (But I forgot to put that in when I voted )

[ech0]

DLT tapes. Ive got a small locable firebox with 4 40/80gig tapes. Im not worried. =)

[FanacooL]

I have been putting few in my emails, also uses hard disk (the one i only plugin when i had to take backup), also have multiple copies on CD's but as you all have mentioned CDs are not reliable can get suck when you uses them lot.

[alleyCat]

Depends how many files you have, and how important they are to you!

As long as you always have a credible backup, it doesn't really matter what medium you use.

If you don't want to worry about reviewing your CDs/DVD's every so often, then you should backup to tape as recommended above...

If you only have a few photos, it might be worth having family members copy those photos onto their computers. They can enjoy them and if anything happens to your copies, you can always get them off their machine (and vice versa if necessary).

If you have serious Gigage which are all highly important (professional photographers and the like...), you should seriously consider buying hosted space that obviously has backups/redundancy (and of course a credible contract to boot).

Otherwise another option is to print them, put them in a shoe box like everyone else! I prefer this method... there is nothing like a real photo! (or discovering them again 10 years later!!!)

[Raion]

How about simply storing it on a free website for pictures. For example photobucket.com, free photo storage, easy access and editing and can be set to be viewed public (by any user without the password, only the URL of the album, but cannot edit/delete anything) or privately (can only be seen if given direct link to the picture or has password.)

[Relyt]

In the days before digital photography, we would prefer to use slide film over any other. The slides would take up less space. And if kept in a cool dark place, they would last a very long time. I believe that is still a viable option. I remember my parents hauling out the box and we'd watch slides from many previous years.

cheers