Backing Up Photographs

phog

Not sure which forum to post this request - photography or computers - mod feel free to move it if you so wish.

At this stage I have a couple of thousand photographs stored across about 50 folders. Nothing special mostly family and holidays but still wouldn't like to lose them.

What is the best way to back these up? I suppose what I really need is best advise on what's the fastest/best way of saving to a storage disc (CD or DVD)?

All stored on the hard drive.

Softwear Available: Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Media Centre & Record Now.

Using Win XP.

Cabaal

Personally I find the fastest is a external harddrive, depending on the actually size of all your photos it can also be the most cost affective in the long term.

External harddrives are pretty cheap now a days, have a look at the likes of komplett.ie

elven

How much actual space do they take up? How often are you adding to the collection? how much protection do you want?

There are 3 possibilities, possibly more:

Online: flickr or the likes, for the price of a pro account you've got access to them anywhere - unfortunately it would take you approximately forever to upload them all. Speak to iampixie about a possible dvd upload to pix.ie though...?

DVD's: good storage for the price, at 4gb a pop. But be wary of that being your only backup, as they can become corrupt over time. This is what you're after as a second backup I'd say.

HD: there's a thread not too long ago (I think the title is something misleading about jpg size/quality) about storage options and there are some excellent references to portable, external hard drives. You get a lot of gb for your money. You can also keep this plugged in and use a sync app to make sure it's always keeping up to date with the stuff on your local drive.

Calina

What version of Photoshop Elements? 5.0 has a handy organisr which allegedly makes the backing up onto DVD/CD nice and easy.

but that being said, I dump them out onto external HDD myself.

TJM

Elven speaks sense. But an external HD is still vulnerable to fire / being stolen along with the rest of your computer equipment. It would ideally have to be kept elsewhere - or perhaps two external HDs, one kept elsewhere, swapped over every month or so?

Disk mode on an ipod would also make a useful rough and ready backup, provided you don't mind the risk of the ipod being stolen / lost and some stranger looking through all your photos.

Fajitas!

External harddrives tbh.

Safe's are handy too, espec the fireproof jobs.

Cameraman

I use the free Microsoft SyncToy with mode set to 'Contribute' to add files to an external HD. I then sync this to one or more other external HDs.

I keep one of these in my offsite storage facility (my Aunt's house ) and swap the offsite drive regularly.

Online backup would seem to be ideal, if it wasn't for the slow upload speeds. I use Mozy for all my documents etc. The free account covers pretty much everything (other than pictures) for now.

Fenster

cp -Rnv ~/Pictures/Imports /Volumes/PHOTOS/Imports

Easy as that. Then again, most of you wouldn't know a command line if it hit you on the head. I use a NAS connected to my network, and eh, a shell script to make backups painless.

Spyral

I have them on my d drive then I backup to my external every so often (3 months or there abouts) but Im planning on dvds..

I wonder if pix.ie could PUT your pics on DVDs for a price ?

Marcus

phog wrote:

Not sure which forum to post this request - photography or computers - mod feel free to move it if you so wish.

At this stage I have a couple of thousand photographs stored across about 50 folders. Nothing special mostly family and holidays but still wouldn't like to lose them.

Please feel free to create a pix.ie account to upload all your photos. Since we are just getting started here in Ireland we are being fairly lax about quotas etc... If you run out of quota, just email us and we'll sort you out.

If your upload speed is an issue, as I mentioned in another thread, maybe we could help you out by uploading the photos for you (send us a DVD)... We have a direct connection into the datacentre so our pipe is quite fast...

FreeAnd..

How lax would your quota be? If i was to send you 100G on a hard drive would we be still talking lax or would we be onto somthing completely different?

davmigil

The free edition of syncback is an excellent backup/syncronising tool. Can use to backup over FTP as well as regular.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware

A belt and braces approach is best when it comes to backup. So back up to external hard drive, DVD and web (maybe your favourites to flickr etc.)

Marcus

FreeAnd.. wrote:

How lax would your quota be? If i was to send you 100G on a hard drive would we be still talking lax or would we be onto somthing completely different?

LOL! yes I think a hard drive full of photos might be pushing the boat out We can certainly do it, but we might need to charge something! PM me if you are serious!

FreeAnd..

Na dont worry, that would be asking alot still its good to know that if one was inclined it could be possible..hope it all goes well for you, will you be undertaking some mass marketing campaign at some stage?

Marcus

FreeAnd.. wrote:

Na dont worry, that would be asking alot still its good to know that if one was inclined it could be possible..hope it all goes well for you, will you be undertaking some mass marketing campaign at some stage?

We certainly need to get the message out that we exists... and have been working on a cool "launch" idea that might involve all our members... This is probably not the thread to go into any details though, so I'll leave it at that for now!

feileacan

dual external hard drive back up

dvds get unworkable once you get past a certain size of images (dont trust them either - very bad experience once with my music backup dvds)

used this program when i use pcs to sync data between multiple drives

http://allwaysync.com/

and this one for my mac

http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html

but be careful in the settings as deletions are sync'd as well

Trogdor

I have been keeping all my pictures on dvd's since i go my D50 around a year and a few months ago. One of the dvds recently screwed up though, doesn't come up on my vista laptop and says access denied when i try to move files or create folders etc. on my xp desktop. Are external hard drives more reliable? Do they become corrupt easily?

phog

All - thanks for your replies, I really have a lot to go through to decide the best option.

Can one of the external drive users clarify - does this have to powered up all the time or do I just need to power it up when I need to copy new pictures onto it? If I go with the external hard drive can I just select and copy each of my folders then paste to the new drive?

Thanks again.

feileacan

i can only speak from a mac point of view but only needs to be powered up when you want to copy to it - but easier just to have it connected.

re copying - recommend you use syncing software (like allway sync but theres lots out there) rather than manually going back and forth - you'll get yourself in a mess and move the wrong folders into different folders etc (been there...)

trogdor - been there, you stick the dvd in and xp doesnt say "theres a disc..." it kinda just sits there blankly going duh...

but !

ehd can and will fail just as randomly as optical storage - so again recommend dual ehd backup (do one all the time then back up to the second one once a week) - doesnt prevent the 'f**k - you have got to be joking' moment but does reduce the risk.

hope it helps - everyone has different ways of doing it but at least we do it - backing up that is

devildriver

phog wrote:

Not sure which forum to post this request - photography or computers - mod feel free to move it if you so wish.

At this stage I have a couple of thousand photographs stored across about 50 folders. Nothing special mostly family and holidays but still wouldn't like to lose them.

What is the best way to back these up? I suppose what I really need is best advise on what's the fastest/best way of saving to a storage disc (CD or DVD)?

All stored on the hard drive.

Softwear Available: Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Media Centre & Record Now.

Using Win XP.

I was in a similar situation with a heap of old "snaps" of friends and family from my old P&S camera. I have them saved onto about 12 CD's but as almost every prop photographer will tell you NOT to trust discs I was looking for another option.

Flickr is the most well known online photo storage/hosting site but there are some far superior alternatives. The two I think are the best are SmugMug and Zenfolio, both are paid services. They both allow unlimited uploads, custom galleries, photo printing etc etc AND you can order DVD backups of your shots. At this stage I've uploaded over 6.5gb to SmugMug so they really do mean unlimited!:)

I'm on Eircom broadband and the upload speed is pathetic but as there is no upload limit I can queue tons of stuff to upload overnight and when I'm not not using my computer.

There's free trials for both so give it a go for a few days. Prices are only about 20-30 euros per year.

If anybody wants to switch to SmugMug use this referral code and get 5 bucks discount:

http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=USOPnUOzRjsIg

Or Zenfolio (seriously cool)
http://www.zenfolio.com

Free trial available and a similar referral code scheme to SmugMug.

Referral Code:
QAF-54U-XKT

SemperFidelis

I use an external HDD, they're very cheap these days, peats have a 500GB HDD for €129. Just plug it in and copy the root folder over, or use some of the sync software. Its also a good idea to get rid of duplicate files before you backup.

davmigil

phog wrote:

All - thanks for your replies, I really have a lot to go through to decide the best option.

Can one of the external drive users clarify - does this have to powered up all the time or do I just need to power it up when I need to copy new pictures onto it? If I go with the external hard drive can I just select and copy each of my folders then paste to the new drive?

Thanks again.

Drive only needs to be powered up and connected when you copy new pictures onto it. You can unplug it and stick it in a drawer or a safe etc. in between times. Just be careful not to drop it (done that!). You can copy and paste, but much easier to get some syncing software and schedule it. If you are being really careful get two external drives and keep one off-site in case of fire etc.

devildriver

I suppose how many backup options you use depends on how important your photos are to you.

I use a hard drive (Seagate 750gb) and the online options (Zenfolio).

You'll find that most pro-photographers use multiple backup sites, HD's, discs etc etc But I suppose as their livelihood depends on it you can't be too safe.

As one photographer said on DPReview or some such site "If you live in a hurricane prone area there's no point in storing a second set of backup discs at your friend's house down the street!!!" :eek:

Muineach

I had some problems setting up Synch (or whatever they call it now), it caused me a lot of grief. then I tried plain old dos and then I found this application XXCopy, i know it sounds dodgy but honestly its safe for anyone, no pron.

It's an upgraded version of xcopy(dos command) and does what you'd want xcopy to do. It's nice as you can destroy the files on one and replace, or just copy over files that are new/changed. If you don't know what a dos batch file is, DO NOT go this route, bad things can happen.

I have it copying over files, music, photo's etc every day to an external hd (500gb 130e) and to my main drive non xp/vista drive which is a 300gb Mirrored RAID array, so if one HD dies, I'm ok, I can just replace it, if two die at same time, I'm buggered. That's why I copy to the external drive and every month I copy them (by date) to DVD's (x2, so duplicates).

Then for "good" photo's (family events, etc.) I upload the RAW and PSD files to a "uber" secret server that's backed up, I know it takes ages with eircom but I take them into work and upload at about 5mb/sec

As for fire, if my house is on fire I won't be worrying about the photo's :rolleyes: but I'm just an amatuer

Spyral

what about an A+B=C type raid array, sure its 3 discs but pratically guarantted to be backup-able

CptBeefheart

I use the Delkin Archival Gold dvd-r. they come in a nice folder and are supposed to last for 100 years. I burn the .cr2 (RAW) files one on disc along with the canon software and another copy in .DNG format. Just make sure you burn them on slowest speed (2x) that way you wont get any crc errors and tick the 'verify data on disc after burning'.