Photo storage

June 14, 2010 4:01 PM

Help me back up my 25,000 photos in a safe, reliable, convenient way.

I take about 200 photos a months of my kids, pets, cooking, whatever and it’s added up. I’d love your advice and experience with the best method to store/backup photos. I want safe but I also want easy. What I’ve tried, pros and cons:

1. USB – portable but not enough space, easy to misplace/lose
2. CD’s – what I’ve been using but kind of a pain and I have hundreds at this point
3. Websites such as smugmug, snapfish – pros not using my memory space but cons really time consuming uploads, remembering passwords, and I’d like to have the photos in my possession (I have a secret fear these sites will disappear from the internet taking my photos with them)

Bonus questions
1. Anyone have experience using external hard drives?
2. Anyone think they have a good organizational system for storage as far as naming and dating photos?

Thanks.

posted by greensalsa to technology (21 answers total)

One suggestion: get two external USB hard drives of identical size (say, 1 TB) and back up your photo directory to both drives. Then put one of the drives in your safe deposit box at your bank, and keep the other one at home to back up recent photos. Switch the two drives every few months or so. If one of the drives dies then you'll always have the other one at the bank. Of course you would lose recent photos.

There are lots of other much more complex schemes, but this one is pretty simple if you don't want to go down the other more complicated paths.
posted by kenliu at 4:07 PM on June 14, 2010

Flickr is $25 a year and has a really convenient uploading tool. In a pinch, it'd do what you want, and you can mark most/all your photos as private as well. I'd consider that, since it grants you unlimited storage, you can organize by set, add keywords, etc. (And Flickr isn't going anywhere for a good long time, methinks.) Just leave it to run over a couple of nights and it'll push everything up.
posted by disillusioned at 4:09 PM on June 14, 2010 [3 favorites]

What OS are you on? I use Time Machine on my iMac and back up my entire internal disk to a bare Seagate Barracuda drive in an Icy Dock enclosure. I also use JungleDisk (Mto back up the really important stuff (photos, home movies, documents) to Amazon's AWS service. Been pretty happy with both setups. If you're on a PC, the above will apply to you except you'd need an equivalent to Time Machine.
posted by DakotaPaul at 4:12 PM on June 14, 2010

Someone mentioned this recently-- try Amazon's S3 for backups.

As far as naming files goes... You generally don't have to worry about it. Each photo should have EXIF data with its date, assuming it's set correctly on the camera. If you don't mind organizing things manually, I would split them into "events" folders to make things easier to find in the future.
posted by supercres at 4:12 PM on June 14, 2010

I also use JungleDisk (Mto back up the really important stuff

Don't know how that (M got in there. And I second kenliu's suggestion of keeping a drive off-site in case you can't get to your cloud backup provider.
posted by DakotaPaul at 4:14 PM on June 14, 2010

Hard drives and CDs are physical media and will fail. You can count on it. So you'll need to make redundant copies. In addition, you're relying on the ability to access your data through that medium's interface (USB or optical drive) which may or may not be available in computers 10 or 20 years from now. Finally, you're paying for the physical equipment, which has its own expense, particularly when you make redundant copies.

The third option is problematic because those services can make it easy to upload, but not so easy to download — what if you want to switch to a different service, because of price increases for the service you're using now? Do said services make it easy to move your data off? That's assuming, as you noticed, that said services are still around in the years to come, or are not bought out and have the terms of service change on you by the new owners.

A fourth option is a redundant, cloud-based backup service like Amazon S3 (via Jungle Disk, for example) or Google App Engine, which is a bit newer and doesn't yet have as much backup software available.

You'd upload your files to either service. The data is stored on their equipment. You pay for the initial data transfer and then a small ongoing fee for storage. They keep redundant copies of your data on their equipment. You have access to your data at any time through standards-based clients, of which there are a number of, including a web browser. It seems unlikely that Amazon and Google will close up any time soon, and the foundation of HTTP and HTML used for these services is more or less set at this point, so there's a fair amount of security from using these services.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:21 PM on June 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

please please please please PLEASE do what kenlui suggested. Get two external drives the same size as the one your photos are currently on. Backup every night to one drive. Keep the other at work or at the bank. Switch external drives every week. Do this or, as jwz said: "Learn not to care about your data."

Once this is done, THEN consider S3 or some online backup system.
posted by ish__ at 5:16 PM on June 14, 2010

Redundancy is the key. Say an external drive (or two, as suggested above) as well as a cloud-based service like Carbonite / Jungle Disk / etc. I also use tape archives for really critical long term stuff.
posted by jjb at 5:49 PM on June 14, 2010

Here's a current discussion taking place at the forum site loosely associated with Smugmug. You'll see that Smug or Flickr are not recommended for backups. Although they are something of a failsafe. There is a strong recommendation for some of the cloud services. In addition to Jungle Disk, Backblaze and Crashplan are also mentioned.

I have a couple of strategies for my own library. Similar to what others have suggested, I have multiple USB/FW drives that I maintain in rotation that I keep in the same town. I also make full backups onto a couple of raid drives when I'm back in Australia ever 4-5 months. And as silly as it might sound, I am having archival prints made for the most important images.
posted by michswiss at 6:12 PM on June 14, 2010

I have a Western Digital My Book for backing up my stuff and it's awesome. It automatically backs up whatever I put in my document folder (which is how I have it set up). I don't have to think about it at all. If something happens to my regular computer, I'll have the My Book back up, and if something happens to the My Book back up, I'll have my regular computer. I've joked that if I ever had to leave my house quickly, the My Book would be the first thing I'd grab.

Plus having a back up drive is nice because it will back up all of your documents automatically, not just your photos. It also helped me a lot when I got my new computer; I just hooked up the My Book and had it transfer what I wanted to the new computer.

To your organization question, I recently learned how to batch name files, so I've been going through my photo folders (which are organized by event, like "2010-5-20 Fathers Day") and renaming all the pictures in this way with the event they're from (use the year-month-day format, as it helps sort them chronologically).
posted by NoraCharles at 6:12 PM on June 14, 2010

I agree with kenlui. Terabyte drives can be had for less than $100.00/each these days.

However, as someone who also takes a lot of photos each month, I would highly recommend you start taking a critical eye to your image making. I bet you could pick the top 10-20 photos each month, name them, and a few years from now you would have a much more meaningful and useful archive. The trick is to pick the best and dump the rest right after you download the pix.

25,000 images are going to be hard to deal with no matter what solution you find.
posted by bonsai forest at 6:14 PM on June 14, 2010 [2 favorites]

Here is my backup plan for you:

1) Buy TWO identical external hard drives. The rationale for buying two is that you want them to be the same size, so you're never tempted to put files on one but not the other to save space.

2) Put your photos on external drive #1 as you take them. Name the folder with the year and month.

3) Also get a Jungle Disk account

4) One day a month ... on the SAME day every month ... copy the month's folder from drive #1 to drive #2. Put drive #2 away in a closet when you're not using it.

5) On the same day, upload the month's folder to Jungle Disk.

6) Keep your Jungle Disk username and password in an extremely safe place, like a safe deposit box or your spouse's wallet.

This protects you against any sort of hard drive failure, since Jungle Disk uses S3 which is an extremely reliable way to store data. If your house burns down, you just buy a new computer with the insurance money and download your photos from Jungle Disk. If Jungle Disk goes kaput or you lose your username and password, you still have at least one hard drive copy.

That's your plan! Now, the tough part is sticking to it for years and years....
posted by miyabo at 7:26 PM on June 14, 2010

I use Apple's Aperture as my photo-management software, and it has a really nice integrated feature called "Vaults" for doing backups. You can create a 'Vault' on any volume that the computer can access (removable hard drive, network volume, etc.) and update it at will.

I keep one Vault on a portable hard drive that is always connected to my photography workstation, so it gets updated whenever I add new photos to my main Aperture library. (In addition to the Vaults, the photos are also stored on my computer's regular internal disks.) I also have a second drive that I keep at work, bringing home only occasionally for updates. I generally bring it home and update it whenever I have a really significant project or vacation that I want to backup. For extra paranoia-proofing I'll also take individual projects' images and export them and then burn them to optical disc. You could probably skip this part if you aren't totally concerned about EMP blasts or magnetic zombies.

If you don't want to do you own off-site backup dance, you can also build a Vault on top of S3 using Jungle Disk, although you have to create it locally and then copy it up to Jungle Disk to get it started the first time.

You could probably do what Aperture does manually, but it makes it pretty brainless. The Vaults feature is IMO one of the most compelling reasons to use it — if not for that I might use Lightroom or something else, but a backup strategy is only any good if you actually do it and make regular updates. Aperture makes it dead easy for me to click "update all connected Vaults" every time I walk away from it for a few minutes, so I do it without thinking. It's not a feature that I bought it for initially, but it's one of its strong points.

If I didn't have Aperture, I would probably build up a directory structure on disk organized by year and then project or "film roll," and use shell scripts to back it up to external HDs. This is basically what I used to do with iPhoto. But if you are like me, unless your scripts are perfect and you can just toss them into your crontab and forget about them, you'll not run them as often as you probably should. One of my hardest (but in retrospect most obvious) lessons was realizing that just because I can roll my own backup system doesn't mean I should, or that doing so is worthwhile.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:12 PM on June 14, 2010

nthing the idea of two bus-powered USB hard drives. I have one at home that backs up every night, and one that lives at work and comes home once a week to get backed up. Whatever you do, make sure a copy of your data lives somewhere outside your house.

Either you will have to train yourself to carry hard drives from home / work and vice-versa, or you will have to remember some username and password. If either of those two things are too much work, well, "Learn not to care about your data."
posted by komara at 7:09 AM on June 15, 2010

Oh, and to answer your second question: my photos (somewhere in the hundred gig range now) live solely in:

Photography -> [year] -> [month]

That's all I need to get me through. The image files themselves don't get renamed because that's just a pain in the ass.
posted by komara at 7:11 AM on June 15, 2010

Get external hard drive AND signup for Mozy. Their newest version allows you to set up online backup and backup to a local external HD all in one shot. Mozy about $5/mo.
posted by teg4rvn at 8:17 AM on June 15, 2010

Every time this question comes up (which is quite often), I am surprised by the number of people recommending Jungle Disk but not mentioning Carbonite or Mozy. [On preview, yo, teg4rvn!.] The latter two are $55 a year for unlimited storage. Jungle Disk is 15 cents per GB.

So the crossover point is ~30.5 GB. That is, if you have 30.5 GB to back up, these services all cost $55/year. Anything above that, and Jungle Disk looks like a bad deal to me. If I have 200 GB, it's $30/month or $360/year. And that monthly charge will only rise as my collection grows. Plus they charge small fees for data transfer.

I must be missing something. Is Jungle Disk that much easier to use? Faster? I could understand not wanting to put your eggs into a less-established corporate basket, but Mozy is owned by EMC. Please explain this to me.

My current backup scheme: I have two 1.5 TB HDDs in my PC. One is the C drive, the other (F) is for backup. I also have an external 1.5TB that I shuttle to and fro my office for offsite backup. I use SyncToy, a free Microsoft tool, to automagically copy files to the backup discs. I also periodically use Macrium Reflect (free edition) to create an image of the C on the F, in case the C fails.

Note: SyncToy is a sync tool, not a backup tool. I have it set to run once a day. It doesn't do incremental backups, so if I delete a file by mistake, that deletion gets automatically echoed on my backup disc(s), and there's no backup from three days or a week ago to go back to. But that's an acceptable risk to me for something that I never have to touch or think about (except for schlepping around the external backup disc).
posted by dust of the stars at 8:59 AM on June 15, 2010

NoraCharles writes "I have a Western Digital My Book for backing up my stuff and it's awesome. It automatically backs up whatever I put in my document folder (which is how I have it set up). I don't have to think about it at all. If something happens to my regular computer, I'll have the My Book back up, and if something happens to the My Book back up, I'll have my regular computer. I've joked that if I ever had to leave my house quickly, the My Book would be the first thing I'd grab."

There is a serious weakness in this back up plan that can be opened by any crack head with a crow bar. You need to have data kept off site to protect yourself from fire/theft/vandalism/act of god/police/roommates etc.

Also does the automatic back up automatically delete stuff when you delete it from your computer? If so a brain fade or unlucky cat-keyboard interaction could be devastating.
posted by Mitheral at 10:09 AM on June 15, 2010

If you go the Flickr route and you want a physical album you could always get a photobook.
posted by ljesse at 1:26 PM on June 15, 2010

Lifehacker just covered this today using Mozy.
posted by teg4rvn at 9:25 AM on June 16, 2010

all of the above. i use extra purchased space on picasa, flickr pro, and load encrypted disk images of categorized folders to amazon s3. two hard drives, one desk top one portable, plus time capsule. every month, any new images get dumped to all these, using forklift/transmit, picasa uploader and flickr uploader. I only have about six gig of photos.
posted by spyke23 at 1:04 PM on June 16, 2010