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?

[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. 

[Fernando2]

On lots of hard drives. 

[wq9nsc]

For the really long-term storage that a lot of people are talking about you had better also keep converting the image files themselves to something that is compatible in that period of time.  50 years from now your heirs definitely aren't going to be able to use current generation RAW files or jpg format.  This is where "data" that is already suitable for human viewing becomes important-the printed image being a prime example of that human compatible data.

I have no issue restoring and keeping in operating condition vintage complex communications (i.e. shortwave) receivers from the early 1930s and you could try to extrapolate that to leaving your heirs one of the "electronic photo frames" but especially with the removal of lead to comply with European RoHS standards custom integrated circuits from the modern era aren't going to have anywhere near the life of a 1930s era vacuum tube and there won't be any practical workarounds for your hobbyist great great grandson to repair the old family digital picture frame.  The old engineering adage of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is a strong consideration when preserving something for extended periods of time and the more complex the "solution" the more potential points of failure that exist.

Today if your great uncle's safe yielded a copy of your complete faimily history on 8" hard sector floppy disks you could find someone who could extract the information but 50 years or more into the future a lot of our current file formats will likely be useless and that old cloud data will present you with the future version of the  current "I don't recognize that file, what app would you like to use" message.

Rodger

[John_SD]

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@wq9nsc wrote:

Today if your great uncle's safe yielded a copy of your complete faimily history on 8" hard sector floppy disks you could find someone who could extract the information but 50 years or more into the future a lot of our current file formats will likely be useless and that old cloud data will present you with the future version of the  current "I don't recognize that file, what app would you like to use" message.

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You are one of the very few in this thread who has it right. Relying on hard drives for photo storage is courting disaster -- perhaps not in the current owner's lifetime, but 50 or 100 years from now, all of those photos will be lost. And the future family members of the deceased will wonder why the familty photographer was so careless and shortsighted. 

No, printing is the way to go. As I have stated in this thread, I remain grateful to my long-gone grandmother for leaving behind a suitcase full of photos from the early 1930s onward, revealing in detail a world that doesn't exist anymore. Nearly all remain in great condition.