[Snydly]

I built a decent computer a couple years ago, and always backed up my photos to DVD. Since I bought the K1 I have my photos on two hard drives, but I'm out of touch as to the best way to store a hard copy of my images. Any suggestions? I can buy a blu ray writer and get those discs if that's how people are saving their images now, but wanted to get an idea from here before I proceed.

Thanks,

Bill

[Adam]

I built a decent computer a couple years ago, and always backed up my photos to DVD. Since I bought the K1 I have my photos on two hard drives, but I'm out of touch as to the best way to store a hard copy of my images. Any suggestions? I can buy a blu ray writer and get those discs if that's how people are saving their images now, but wanted to get an idea from here before I proceed.

Thanks,

Bill

Optical disks are probably the least volatile form of storage, but they're slow and small compared to hard drives or even flash memory these days.

I'd recommend getting multiple portable hard drives and creating a handful of copies of your data. You could also use SD or CF cards for the same purpose, since they're getting rather cheap.

You can also store files in the cloud if you're comfortable with that.

[Tas]

I built a decent computer a couple years ago, and always backed up my photos to DVD. Since I bought the K1 I have my photos on two hard drives, but I'm out of touch as to the best way to store a hard copy of my images. Any suggestions? I can buy a blu ray writer and get those discs if that's how people are saving their images now, but wanted to get an idea from here before I proceed.

Thanks,

Bill

G'day Bill,

Another alternative is to consider network attached storage (NAS). I went down this route and it provides local or networked back up, so for example you could have the NAS in your home via a network router or located elswhere (house of a family member or friend) and use the web to do your back up. This is like having your own cloud. The system I use is Synology and it also has compatibiity with cloud storage so anything I have in Dropbox for example can be seen via the NAS Management system.

If this approach sounds interesting, you can see what Synology suggest is the model that suits you best here: NAS Selector - Support | Synology Inc.

Of course Synology is only one option, another one is QNAP and these two companies still seem to have an edge in their systems. There are more alternatives of course like Western Digital and Drobo among others. If you go down the NAS path look at HDD drives compatible for NAS use like Western Digital Reds.

If you go down the path of optical discs ensure you look for those made for long term storage/archiving, there's some details on this here: 4. How Long Can You Store CDs and DVDs and Use Them Again? ? Council on Library and Information Resources

Good luck.

Tas

[Snydly]

Thanks guys. I'm trying to join the 21st century and use the cloud, but like email, I have old accounts I can't even access any more, so I was waiting for the cloud to settle into something I would be able to keep, like gmail. I'm more comfortable using optical, but all I have right now is the ability burn 4.7 gb at a time. I'm guessing most have upgraded to blue ray by now, right? Would I be able to keep that system (blue ray) for say the next 10 years? If so, what is a good drive to get, and will it work with Win10, and what type of discs do I use?

[foto guy]

I don't have a good answer for you about what type of storage to use, though I'm rather leery of the cloud.
One thing to consider, though, is long-term compatibility.
Anything stored on 3.5" floppy drives is essentially useless as there are no drives being produced.
Will the same happen with DVDs? Blu-ray?
It seems like hard drives have the best chance of long-term compatibility, but I'm certainly no expert on the subject.
What I do is back up to two hard drives for redundancy, in case one goes bad. When they're full, I'll have to consider other options depending on what technology is available.
Tas provided some good ideas worth considering.
That's my two cents worth.

[lithedreamer]

You're asking for the best way to store your images for backup. Given that, I'm going to recommend Backblaze.

It's an online solution, yeah, but it's very reliable in both backup and restoration.

• They even backup external drives connected to your computer.

• I pay about $5/month, and have had a couple of occasions where my Lightroom catalog has become corrupted, and I was able to restore a much newer copy from their backup, than from Lightroom's weekly backup.

• I've also had my entire Lightroom drive fail (bad luck, I know), and they overnighted me my data. You pay a fee for them to ship you your data vs you downloading it yourself, but you get a full refund back if you mail them back the drive within 30 days.

No fiddling with discs, no switching to Blu-Ray 2: Electric Boogaloo, if we don't all switch to flash memory and wireless by then, just backup.


Err, sorry if that sounds like an ad, I'm kinda thankful to them after saving my catalog so many times (a few catalog file corruptions + 2 drive failures).

[joergens.mi]

I have two copies of the pictures on two different external usb-drives.

[JeffB]

If you are concerned only with backup storage than optical is still the best bet. DVD is a bit more finicky than CD and could arguably be more risky for long term storage. If you want something to work from (i.e. do editing, read/write) than take a serious look at NAS. I'm very happy with Synology boxes. HD's are cheap and you can configure the NAS for RAID to give you redundancy.

[leekil]

Thanks guys. I'm trying to join the 21st century and use the cloud, but like email, I have old accounts I can't even access any more, so I was waiting for the cloud to settle into something I would be able to keep, like gmail. I'm more comfortable using optical, but all I have right now is the ability burn 4.7 gb at a time. I'm guessing most have upgraded to blue ray by now, right? Would I be able to keep that system (blue ray) for say the next 10 years? If so, what is a good drive to get, and will it work with Win10, and what type of discs do I use?

I upgraded to Blu-Rays, 50GB, but I am currently somewhat behind in my backup to optical. And with the K-1 it will greatly increase the speed at which I would fill Blu-rays, possibly making it infeasible when I get around to evaluating it. I also have an off-site photo backup on hard drives, which is more up to date.

[Bengan]

Another alternative is to consider network attached storage (NAS). I went down this route and it provides local or networked back up, so for example you could have the NAS in your home via a network router or located elswhere (house of a family member or friend) and use the web to do your back up. This is like having your own cloud. The system I use is Synology and it also has compatibiity with cloud storage so anything I have in Dropbox for example can be seen via the NAS Management system. If this approach sounds interesting, you can see what Synology suggest is the model that suits you best here: NAS Selector - Support | Synology Inc. Of course Synology is only one option, another one is QNAP and these two companies still seem to have an edge in their systems. There are more alternatives of course like Western Digital and Drobo among others. If you go down the NAS path look at HDD drives compatible for NAS use like Western Digital Reds.

+1 for a NAS solution with WD Red Hard Drives. It can (and should) be set up with disc redundancy (RAID), witch means that your data will survive one HD crashing. I use a Netgear four HD NAS, but would probably buy Synology today.
This is my main storage (I don't store anything on a PC). I also regularly back up the NAS to removable HD's

[photoptimist]

Hard drives are cheap, spacious, and easy to use as full-time incremental backup devices -- much easier than keeping track of optical media and what's been backed-up where.

I'd buy an empty drive enclosure with whatever fast interface you prefer (e-SATA, USB-C, etc.) and then two or three large harddrives. Make back-ups on to all the drives and take all but 1 to off-site locations (e.g., bank safe deposit box). Keep one drive in the enclosure to use for automated hourly/daily back-ups, then swap that drive out for one of the off-site drives every month or so. If your PC has an open drive slot and is easy to open/swap drives, you could use that instead of an enclosure.

I'm on a Mac and use Apple Time Capsules (with the internal drives upgraded to 6TB WD Red drives) for hourly back-ups and then a Firewire-800 enclosure with 4 TB drives for off-sites.

If you have more than 4-6 TB of data, you'll want to look into a multi-drive NAS box, RAID, and all that. NAS will provide a nice local backup but it won't provide off-site backup unless you and a friend have a fat internet connection and your friend lets you put your NAS on his network.

[rawr]

USB disk docks or enclosures are good if you don't need to network your storage. Buy bare hard disks, plug them in, easily remove them. All via USB too.

They are cheaper to run and more flexible than the regular USB expansion drives that I used to use for external storage. And since they use bare drives they run a lot cooler too. Plus they let you run two drives from one USB 3 port, and some do disk cloning:


Dual Bay USB 3.0 SATA HDD Docking Station

I also know a guy who shoots many thousands of images a week, and highly recommends 4 slot USB 3 hard drive enclosures similar to these:

5 Bay USB 3.0 SATA Hard Drive Enclosure

[slip]

for me it all depends on how many photos you have. I tried dvds once and the issue for me is if I ever want to access them, I could never find the photos I want. Of course if you are very organized and lots of money you could label each dvd according to different occasions etc but its not for me.
the other thing, for whatever reason some of my old dvds don't work anymore or are really slow to read. these are not cheap dvds but high quality ones
I back my collection up on a big hard drive and then store it when it is full and then replace it with a new one. I have never tried it but I think you can catalog different hard drives with photoshop elements or equivalent so you will know what is on them for next time.

good luck

randy

[reeftool]

All of us are going to face this situation eventually. Unless you're planning to just toss all your shots away in a few years, even the average Joe with a P&S of phone is going to end up with terabytes of photos. I'm in the process of setting up a NAS system. I already have 2 filled up WD My Books from the past few years.

[ChrisPlatt]

I lost a lifetime of photos, slides and negatives when my home flooded in Sandy in 2012.
Suggest you keep backups on portable media, and don't forget to take them with you in the event you must evacuate.

Chris