Where do you store your photos?

[John_SD]

For some time, I have been concerned about proper long-term storage of my photos -- the ones that mean something to me. If you beleve like me, that photos capture a time and place in our lives and that you'd like future generations of your family to have access to them, then you begin thinking in terms of storage options.

I myself don't have any faith that any of these companies will be around 40 or 50 years from now, or that today's hardware solutions will be viable. CDs and such? They are on their way out already. Flickr (or any other Yahoo offshoot)? Don't make me laugh. Dropbox? Let's talk about it 25 years from now. SmugMug? Get real. Google Drive? Please. 

All of them are fine, for now. I stash mine on Google Photos, also a temporary solution at best. But my photos that really mean something to me, I print.

Thus, I am using the only tried and true storage and retrtieval "device" that has stood the test of time. That is the photo album. Don't laugh. I have family photo albums chock full of black-and-whites from the early 1930s onward. And I am **bleep** glad I have them. There is no hardware to fail. No company to pull the plug. No technology that will fall by the wayside. For many, photo albums may be a thing of the past. For me, they contain generations of my family.

What about for you? Where do you store the photos that mean the most to you?

[cicopo · Accepted solution]

The fact of the matter is there are several great ways to do it but none are guaranteed to stand the test of time all of the time. Printed photos burn in house fires every single day of the year.

[John_SD]

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@Waddizzle wrote:

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@John_SD wrote:
You guys who are relying on disk drives and SD cards for long-term storage are looking at disaster in one fell swoop when those devices fail.

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I shoot hundreds of photos every week.  What is your suggestion?

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My approach and view of the matter may be different from yours, Waddizzle, as I am certain that based on your years of experience, you are a much better photographer than I am. Thus, you may want to save all of your shots. 

I am a serial deleter, and have no problem removing inferior shots, or simply not caring about them. Other guys are at the opposite extreme and fall in love with every junk shot they take. I don't know which end of the spectrum you fall on, but for me, if I take 300 shots, I have no problem deleting 295 of them and keeping the 5 good ones -- or at least the few that would mean the most to me. One or two of those, I will send off for printing. I suggest that every photographer who has a childlike faith in the eternal perfection of hard drives and backups do the same, as they will eventually lose their images one day due to mechanical failure or a company failing and going out of business.

Print the good ones or the ones that mean the most to you and keep them in photo albums. A hundred years from now your ancestors will be thankful for your foresight. And it will give them a glimpse into a world that will mean a great deal to them. At least that is the way I feel about the photo albums passed down in our family. 

[John_SD]

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@cicopo wrote:

The fact of the matter is there are several great ways to do it but none are guaranteed to stand the test of time all of the time. Printed photos burn in house fires every single day of the year.

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You are correct, cicopo. There are no guarantees in life. House fires do happen. But hardware failures happen a lot more. Print. 

[Mr_Fusion]

As I understand, even those records carved into stone have, for the most part, not passed the test of time all that well. Sure, some have, but only a fraction of what were created. (Look up the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.) Even since the dawn of photography, the vast majority of photos (and negatives) have been lost for a variety of reasons. My grandfather was an avid photographer in the early 20th century. No one knows what happened to all his photos and negatives. 

As others point out, they often take hundreds of pictures per week. With today's large form size, that adds up to a lot of storage. Suggesting that we delete those sub-par is fine if you have very set standards. Most of us prefer to keep most of our shots. In my personal case, I only delete those obviously out of focus or where only my feet are in the frame. So instead of keeping five, I delete five.

I'm not worried that my storage devices will ultimately fail or their system be replaced. We have done that repeatedly throughout the ages. We managed to survive. If my HDD storage fails, it won't be the end of the world. If my heirs want to keep my collection, they will update the storage.

[TCampbell]

The drawback with "printing" is that the image goes from digital form with (if it's  a RAW file) 14-bits of color depth... to a non-digital sheet of paper.  So you do lose quite a bit of ability to work with that image in the future and any scan of it wont be as good as the original.

Paper and Ink are also "expensive" compared to the cost of a backup hard drive.  Simple mechanical drive (no enclosure) is less than $50 per 1TB.  That's pretty cheap compared to the price of ink (a full set of ink cartridges will cost more than $50 and wont produce nearly as many prints as can be stored on a hard drive.

So buy a drive and make sure you have a 2nd copy of each image.  Problem solved.  If you're worried about floods, store the drives in a water-tight Pelican case.  If you're worried about fire, you can get a fire safe.  You can also store the backup drives off-site (a family member, a friend, etc.)  

A lot of software that handles digital asset management has the ability to manage "offline" storage.  It'll store a small JPEG thumbnail preview of each image, but it knows which physical drive has the full-size RAW.  That means even if your offline storage isn't with you, at least you know which hard drive spindle has your data and can quickly retrieve it.

I use a 4-disk storage array with a RAID-5 type filesystem.  RAID-5 (RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a way of storing blocks of data spread across all but one of the spindles... the final spindle has a XOR'd value of the contents of the other spindles.  The algorithm is such that ANY sinlge drive in the array can fail completely and when you replace that spindle the array has the ability to completely rebuild the integrity of the data ... guaranteeing that you will not have lost any data.  it's quite clever.  One risk to keep in mind is that since all drives are the same make, model, and age... they all wear at roughly the same rate.  So when one drive fails... odds are high that the remaining spindles will not be long for this world.  But the solution is to just proactively replace all the spindles.  Replace the failed spindle, let the array rebuild it, then replace the next one and let the array rebuild that, etc... and as long as you do it one-at-a-time you will lose nothing.

I had a 4-drive array with 1TB drives and I wanted to grow the array to use 2TB drives... and it let me replace each drive one-at-a-time ... but once the final drive was swapped, it prompted me to reboot the array so it could "grow" the filesystem to double my space ... it didn't take long.

There are only two types of hard drives in the world:

1)  Those that HAVE failed

2)  Those that are GOING to fail.

There is no third category.  Everything WILL fail... it's just a matter of time.  Each time you drive your cars, you put wear on your tires.  You may not notice much wear from a single ride... but add up the wear of all the drives you take and eventually those tires will go bald and... eventually blow.  Hard drives are exactly the same.  They aren't supposed to last forever.  Even Solild State fails after enough writes (although I'd never buy an expensive high performance drive for backups.)

[Mitsubishiman]

Interesting comments, although 100 years from now storage devices will be beyond any technology we can even imagine at this point in time, I am more concerned about cyclical redundancy, you can only loose your data if you have single source, single location...
I have a 24 TB NAS server (8 - 3 TB Drives) configured to Raid 6 (16 TB usable), which allows for the simultaneous failure of 2 hard drives, the odds of which are slim, that being said my free space iz currently at 10 TB, I purchased 3 - 4 TB Western Digital portable hard drives (about $120.00 each), I can easily fit all of my photography collection on a 4 TB drive, so I have my server, and an a extra backup on site and off-site, I update the portables each month by copying to the on-site, then switching with the off-site and copying to that one.
Every few years I upgrade my primary server, every few years the technology in portable drives improves, even recently the best advance was the elimination of the external power source, which was the primary cause of failure.
Keep your storage technology current and your practices logical and redundant and your data will be preserved, and one more tidbit, do not get rid of your older storage devices, it is rarely the actual disc that fails, it is the other mechanism parts that do, I have had to perform a surgical removal of the Winchester Disks from a failed hard drive and put them into another drive case to extract the data, the Disks themselves rarely fail unless of actual heat from fire or corrosive elements or the dreaded intense magnetic field exposure.

[John_SD]

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@Mitsubishiman wrote:
Interesting comments, although 100 years from now storage devices will be beyond any technology we can even imagine at this point in time...

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I agree, which is why I print.

Don't get me wrong, RAID and other technologies are fine for now, and as long as we are alive, we can transition from one hardware-based technology to another. But after we pass on, then what? Unborn or young family members are going to magically know your IDs and passwords to the clouds and RAID devices? They're going to maintain subscriptions that they may know nothing about?  Not likely.

True, some guys don't care about passing their photos on to succeeding generations of the family, so the photos will basically die with them. But myself, having access to a suitcase full of family photos and numerous albums that go back to the early 1930s -- the vast majority of which are in excellent condiition, save a few creases here and there -- I appreciated the forethought that earlier family members employed so that we could receive this treasure trove of photography from a different world. As I always say in such cases, YMMV. 

[inkjunkie]

I have suffered more than my fair share of data loss. Any type of online storage simply is not going to happen, on a good day we have a .2mbps upload speed from 4a.m. to 8a.m. Our ISP network is severely outdated and overloaded. They claim, for the last 18 months, to be "working on it". Years back I relied on tape drives. Nightly back ups using 5 different tapes. My EX often worked from home. One night she picked up a virus of some sort, took out the machine.. This machine was a complete SCSI machine. As luck would have it the SCSI card went belly up at the same time. The replacement SCSI card dould not "see" the tape drive.

Used dvd for back ups. Complete pain in the butt. 

Now we each have an external hard drive. I actually have 3 that I use. They are all on the aging side, will be replacing them shortly. 

Even these are far frrom great. I recently was looking for some info. Checked all 3 drives, nothing. Still have my 2 previous lap tops, not there either. Digging thru the storage room in our garage I found another externall hard drive, wiith a label dating 12/08. Bought it in the house. None of my lap tops had drivers for it. Shipped it to a buddy in AZ that was a hacker. He has a machine with several different versions of windows on seperate partitions. No drivers found. Contacted the company that made the drive. They wanted close to $100 for the software that they "thought" would allow Windows 10 to read this drive. I gave up...

[TCampbell]

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@inkjunkie wrote:

Years back I relied on tape drives. Nightly back ups using 5 different tapes. My EX often worked from home. One night she picked up a virus of some sort, took out the machine.. This machine was a complete SCSI machine. As luck would have it the SCSI card went belly up at the same time. The replacement SCSI card dould not "see" the tape drive.

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I have a similar story about tape backups.  I had a SCSI tape drive and made regular backups (this is years ago).  I had a drive failure and wasn't worried since I regularly made tape backups.

Once I replaced the drive, I couldn't get the tape drive to do a restore (it could backup... just not restore).  So I phoned support.

This is where you learn about "testing" your restore process...

Turns out (and I couldn't belive this was real) they told me their software supports the tape drive for purposes of making BACKUPS... but they do NOT support the drive for purposes of doing a RESTORE.

This is so stupid that I was sure I was misunderstanding something (when something does not make sense... it usually means you are missing information)... we went round and round before it was absolutely confirmed to me that their software could NOT do a restore of their own backup... period. This wasn't a problem with a defective tape, a defective tape drive, or even a software bug... it was that they literally never bothered to implement a restore process for that particular drive (their documentation claimed it was a "supported" drive which is why I went with that solution).  

I also asked if they used any industry standard format such that I mgiht be able to use something else to do the restore... nope!

So I lost all that data and NOW I verify that backup software can both backup AND restore.  

[cicopo]

I gave up using "back up" software for a similar reason. I plain & simply make copies on my USB drives, & when a desktop drive fills up I print a screen grab of it's contents which goes into the box that drive ends up in on my shelf. The box comes from the new drive I replaced it with. Too many copies is better than no file.