Protecting Our Treasured Pictures and Videos

in photography •  7 years ago 

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My wife and I have backed up our electronic pictures and videos on an external hard drive for a number of years. We have been a little nervous that the technology would no longer work with newer computer systems or that something could physically happen to the hard drive (such as it dropping).

Well, after researching for a little bit, we decided to subscribe to IDrive Online – a cloud based storage system. It costs about $70 per year (although there is a lower introductory rate for the first couple of years). One of the big benefits to a cloud-based storage system is that you can access the items saved any time, from any computer. So our plan is to continue to use our external hard drive, and also use IDrive to protect these.

We have so many great pictures and videos – from digitalizing pictures from our youth, to our wedding, to our kids – that losing these things would be a great heartache. So we have finally taken the steps to ensure we will have these for the foreseeable future, and hopefully forever!

What is your system for protecting your precious pictures and videos?

Brian

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I don't know why I resist the cloud so much. My work has gone full cloud for document management and data-basing and I kind of hate it. For something like photo storage where you aren't trying to update it every hour, it would probably work well.

We just do a two prong hardware backup. I have a first level backup that gets dumped into every 9 months or so. It wasn't large enough to keep full backups from different dates, so it would only hold the most recent. Then I have a 2TB hard drive that acts as a secondary backup. We have not had to delete anything off of that drive yet.

Now, the real flaw in my plan is that they are both stored in my house. They are in different rooms, so I very isolated incident wouldn't get both. But a fire or other major disaster would probably destroy both. Maybe I'll take the plunge to cloud backup.

My wife also loves to regularly print the pictures. We'll go through and pick our favorite hundred or so from the past 9-12 months and make a photobook or collage or just regular prints. Digital is great, but there is something nice about having physical copies.

Well done sir
U secure ur memorable and lovley pictures
Bt don't worry sir drive won't get any harm .. take care of ur drive
Definitely when ur son will becom young and if he saw these photos then ur son become very happy and u also.. sry r whole family members😗😗😗😍☺☺🙂

Hi Brian, it is true nowadays due to easy access to cameras that built up everywhere such as in phones, tablets, laptop we tend many pictures to capture the precious moments so that we can enjoy even many years later. I heard about idea of a cloud based storage system makes me a bit cautious. There are and will always be people who would like to intrude in the life of other people, hackers who can view your pictures and of course it is not difficult to find out what such people are looking for. I would say it is not for me, may be I am a conspiracy theorist but I would rather to save like yourself on separate hard drive but also the best moment I let to print as memory books from professional photo shops, of course you are not able to access it from other places but it is all right with me.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect way of preserving this type of things as no place is 100% secure. Cloud drive companies can go out of business, servers might fail, external HDDs and SDDs migth malfunctiona and so on and so on. So there is no perfect way to securely store everything. Of course, a mixture of more than one options give a higher chance of success, but that loss is always a possibility.

We started doing the same thing several years back. We had all our pictures on our Macbook Pro and one day the damn thing just died. We did everything we could and had it looked at by several people but in the end we lost soooo many important pictures and memories. If you think that it can't happen to you then you better think again. This was a heartbreaking moment and we had pictures of our kids and videos that can never be replaced. Great post and one that people really should pay attention to. Don't let this happen to you.

well you think about making a backup, especially the photos that are the best memories of your children, it happened to me and I lost about 20 gb of photos and videos, it was very sad and trajico for me, but I learned from that moment backups, look for several ways to make a backup, in the email have is a section where you can make backups and it is safe( in the part onedrive), I really recommend it, because you can also save documents, actually it is my salvation

This is super important. Now your images will be there for your great great grand kids. We usw apple photo library. Soooo many pictures there and it took about 1 month but all our devices are linked. Ipad, macbook, apple tv all have the same images. Every time I plug in the camera to the computer it syncs and every time my wife shoots a photo in syncs. We love it.

I like to save them to my mail draft

That is something that is a problem because sometimes our SD cards get damaged and we lose all information and photos

70 $ ?? and the MSN is good? have you ever used it ??

Apparently it is a good investment, it happens to me that my phones are damaged and I always lose everything or sometimes we want to save something important but it is a bit difficult to do it

today is sophisticated. But i still saves on an external hard drive.. Hahahaaaa

This is very useful, hopefully it can work forever

damaged my ds card many times nd lost all data ...so this is very important

I love to save them in my hard drive or pen drive !

I suppose it depends on how much you want to store. There are a number of places out there like google drive that offer 10-15 gigs for free.

My brother just recently converter everything we had on 8mm on to DVD disks. Sometimes having a physical set can be very pliable

Yeah that is also somethings I always be affraid of.
I´ve saved them on a USB stick but I need to do it somewhere else too.

I´ve heard some people put it on dropbox but I´m not sure if that´s so safe.

IDrive sounds a good solution

Hadn't heard of that service. I've mainly been using my external hard drive. The downside of that is like when my computer died. There may have been some photos I didn't have backed up. Having a cloud-based service that does it automatically could be nice. Let us know how it goes.

It wud be easy and free if you use google drive.....i guess it provide enough space to save them ..besides this it wud ha e been in yoir same gmail account...it wud have been easy peasy for you.....hard disk is also a good option....

verryy niicce !! [email protected] .good work

Good sharing information @brian.rrr

Interesting that this post is on Blockchain social media.

There is another option and doesn't cost the user anything per yer. That is to set up an IPFS drive and store all of your files on the blockchain. Then no matter what your files are out there forever until the blockchain itself vanishes. Which is not very likely for IPFS, for that to vanish, computers and and inter-connectivity between individuals would have to vanish. That said if that actually vanished, data would also be moot.

So, yeah, ipfs for the win.

But iDrive is a good choice, I've pushed for clients to get it in the past.

I've never used a cloud based storage system before. I only use an external hard drive and CD. I've a painful experience before when I lost my external hard drive, I guest its about time to use the cloud as a secondary backup.

Good post! I hope you can take a look at mine and see what you think and vote it. Regards!

https://steemit.com/photography/@josegrojasl/captured-capturing-the-sunset-fd86f5c433296