How do you like to keep your personal photos/videos safe?

[Mizango]

She's not gonna remember anything, why would you waste money on this?

Also this. Sounds cynical as fuck, but I live it first hand with my daughter. You will drop a few hundred bucks, she seriously will not remember it EVER. The pics will be nice, but she wont give a fuck because it might as well be a drawing. Depressing as fuck, but 100% truth.

[Tajin]

A spare HDD or two and some dvds

[TummieGaruda]

I believe in multiple copies multiple places: You can use hard drives, cloud, and other physical copies and keep them separated. Store one set of physical copies in a fire proof safe, and another in a safety deposit box if you can (Or parents/in-laws house). For local storage you can use a NAS storage device with a mirrored raid setup. If one drive fails you can swap out the drive for another and the data will be mirrored so you have redundancy. I learned the hard way last year when I realized my photos from my phone weren't being backed up to my dropbox account and I lost over 800 pics including a picture I took with Grant from Mythbusters and a photo with Stan Lee

[Ksandra]

Also this. Sounds cynical as fuck, but I live it first hand with my daughter. You will drop a few hundred bucks, she seriously will not remember it EVER. The pics will be nice, but she wont give a fuck because it might as well be a drawing. Depressing as fuck, but 100% truth.

Why do you all think going to Disney would be just for her?

I mean technically speaking, her ticket is free until she is 3 years old, and husband I both love Disneyland. This isn't just about her having fun, it's a great opportunity for ALL of us to have a fun day together.

Pray tell what else could we spend $200 on her that she would magically remember at one year old? I have no illusions that she's going to remember disney, but then she wouldn't remember anything else we did with it either. And again my parents specifically sent the money for us to have fun with her and want us to take her to Disney.


My husband has been working 70-80 hours a week for the past few months and that kind of crunch time is probably going to last til around her bday. Stop stomping on our chance to kick back and do something fun when both the baby and I barely get to see him atm!

[Toxictaru]

Have the fun you want ._. Disney isn't JUST for kids.

I'd consider any of a few methods, SSDs are expensive but won't have mechanical failure. The only issue you're really going to have is space, potentially. Its hard to pay 400 bucks for a 500gb SSD (I did, but whatever) solely for storage. High capacity SD cards might be an option, but I'm always afraid of losing small things, and I don't keep much sensitive data around, so I can't image the feeling of losing pictures for that reason. BD is an option, and not too expensive, but still not HUGE amounts of storage.

What I do for the stuff I want to save is keep it locally on the computer I use, and replace HDDs once every year or two. The old ones keep the data, and I just keep moving stuff around. It isn't particularly expensive, and the risk of having an HDD die after a year even if it isn't in use is incredibly close to 0%. You could just do incremental backups of the data, and replace the storage HDD with a new one every year or two. Maybe a bit excessive, but if you're particularly invested in not losing your data, it might be the easiest mass storage option.

[deshende]

I use Backblaze as a backup client to save stuff to the cloud (personal preference and all). It's unlimited storage for a few dollars a month. (Used to use Mozy before they put a limit on storage). I've got around 550GB uploaded so not specific to photos/videos. (Have not had to do a mass recovery but the couple times I've gone to retrieve a few files for test I haven't had problems). Not the optimal choice for everyone, but after working disaster recovery at a previous job I like to have my data off site.

Also one note on Fire safes - Keeping something from catching on fire does not mean it won't get hot enough to melt/warp media. Most generic fire safes are made in mind to keep things like paper from going up in flames, but may not keep it cool enough in side to keep media from warping to the point it may not be readable (variable by media type). I think they do make safes now specifically stating they'll protect media (I haven't researched it much but this concept was explained to me when one of our business units was wanting to keep server backups on site inside a fire safe and they were told no).

[synistar]

Like this fire safe http://www.costco.com/Sentry%c2%aeSa....11297000.html

[Mayareira]

Yeah, Disneyland is not for kids only. Its a fun moment so go out there and enjoy, take plenty of photos, etc.

To keep photos safe, never rely on a single external drive. 2 drives at different places + online storage is the way to go. I use flickr and they've recently started handing out free pro accounts. I also liked Toxictaru's idea of replacing HDD's if you are using

[Ghostsix.Midgard]

Keep a copy of your folders on a hard drive, the others on these:


http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-95355.../dp/B000H3B6EO

Preserve Your Critical Data

Look to Verbatim UltraLife Gold Archival Grade DVD-R media to preserve your critical data. Each disc is manufactured using proprietary unique dual reflective layers to maximize both compatibility and longevity. To further extend media lifetime, Verbatim UltraLife DVDs contain a hard coating on the recording side to protect the discs from scratches.
Long Archival Life

Verbatim's proprietary dual reflective layer technology is comprised of a silver layer for broad compatibility and a gold layer for long archival life. The highly reflective silver layer allows the UltraLife DVD-R disc to look like a standard silver disc to DVD drives and recorders. This feature provides a low initial error rate after recording, important for long archival life, and the same drive read/write compatibility as standard silver-only discs.

[hey]

Keep a copy of your folders on a hard drive, the others on these:


http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-95355.../dp/B000H3B6EO

At that price, i'd rather just spend a bit more for an ssd. Not that much more expensive, and will last longer.

Or even just use regular dvds and make 5 copies of each. That'd still be cheaper than those things, and surely far safer.

[Pendulum]

i work in a precious metal testing lab, i would dearly love to see just how little gold those discs contain.

They are priced at $1.52 per disc and gold is ~$53/g. From a quick google, 50 dvds weigh roughly 800g so its clearly (near)negligible

[Apelila]

Remember that the entire disc is not made of gold, rather the reflective foil is.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...scs-en-us.aspx

+99% of the disc is the plastic.

[Kohan]

Admittedly, I only skimmed the thread, so I may accidentally reiterate some things. That said:

1. Don't use SSDs or SD cards to store your photos. If these fail due to wear and tear, defects, or damage, recovering any data from them is borderline impossible. Old school platter HDDs can at least be taken in to a specialist for recovery—SSDs and SD cards just go in the trash.

2. As far as cloud storage goes, I can't imagine any company's longevity, redundancy, etc., being more reliable than Amazon's. I personally use their Cloud Drive for storing my photos and other essential documents, and 1,000GB is $500 per year. Their pricing per GB is identical across all tiers, so 500GB is $250 per year, 100GB is $50 per year, and so on.

[iitrueii]

Make loads of backups they cant all fail!

Usb's, extrnal and internal HDD's even online storage...etc

YOu could even print them out and put them in a safe