Image Storage Problems

[Zonda]

Until this last October i had been storing my digital images on USB keys. Then i was persuaded to get an external hard drive. I transferred all of my wildlife images to this £100 external hard drive, and was delighted with its convenient usefulness. It is fortunate that i retained all of my little USB keys, because after 2 months, my £100 external hard drive has failed,,,caput. This leaves me wondering which way is the best way to store my digital images. I know on-line storage space is available, but how reliable is that??

[Padfield]

Digital media are currently considerably less durable than the old paper prints. I store my pictures in duplicate - on DVD and on a Verbatim 300GB mobile hard drive (formerly on a much smaller portable hard drive). At least once a year I load the DVDs and the hard drives to make sure data hasn't been lost. I also keep the hard drives from old desktops, providing a third level of security. This might all sound a bit anal, but the fact is that DVDs do corrupt and hard drives can suddenly lose all access, requiring more expenditure to recover the data than to buy a new hard drive.

Guy

[Pete Eeles]

The solution I use is pretty similar. Essentially - have more than one backup! At any one time, all of my images are in 3 places:

- My laptop
- 2 external drives

Cheers,

- Pete

[Lee Hurrell]

I've been thinking about this.

Although still beginning really, I've amassed a few hundred images since my Canon D10 came onboard.

They are on my PC and the ones I consider best are on a USB stick and a CDR too.

The ones that are on the PC but not on the USB stick I could probably live without in all honesty, but for some reason can't seem to bring my self to delete.

Do you guys keep images that are not 'competition standard' or are you very selective when deciding what to keep?

I think I may need to do some pruning!

Cheers

Lee

[Markulous]

Until this last October i had been storing my digital images on USB keys. Then i was persuaded to get an external hard drive. I transferred all of my wildlife images to this £100 external hard drive, and was delighted with its convenient usefulness. It is fortunate that i retained all of my little USB keys, because after 2 months, my £100 external hard drive has failed,,,caput. This leaves me wondering which way is the best way to store my digital images. I know on-line storage space is available, but how reliable is that??

I'm getting a feeling of deja vu here!
(I've answered on another site and am being sent the disk after Christmas for me to take a look - and hopefully fix/rescue)

Do you guys keep images that are not 'competition standard' or are you very selective when deciding what to keep?

I rarely delete anything as I'll return to past shots and very often process to get something OKish out of them - backup just the RAW files (never shoot anything else!)

Never use CDs/DVDs as I find them unreliable and don't store enough (use them to send replaceable client apps/data for which they're perfect - oh, and burning copies for the car CD player!). Have all my pics online (including processing stages so all 1TB) and take 2 x backup copies to external hard drive (at different times) plus copy to another system - have never lost anything on a hard drive in the last 20+ years (touch wood!) though have lost the very occasional hard disk

[Padfield]

Do you guys keep images that are not 'competition standard' or are you very selective when deciding what to keep?

I take my photos primarily for the butterfly interest and not for photography or art. For this reason, I delete nothing. Even bad pictures carry information and I frequently refer back to old photos to search for information I didn't think was relevant at the time. I went digital in 2005 and still have every picture I have taken since then.

Guy

[Zonda]

Safe storage is a problem, and i don't know the answer. It's looking like we may have to hedge our bets and keep everything on 4 external hard drives, which is ridiculous.

[Dave McCormick]

I had this problem in July, I lost a lot of images I had from December to July!, so I got dual layer DVDs 8.5GB and backed up my files on there, they are on my 320GB External USB drive, I also have a 100GB USB drive (had it for 4 years and never had any problems with it) which I use too. I have three drives (two 2.5 inch drives 100GB (for college work and similar) and 320GB (my website and images and videos) and one 3.5 IDE external drive 120GB which I use mostly for music and some programs I use) and I have had a few problems with the drives, except the 100GB IDe one, had it 4 years and no problems at all.

When I back up, I have a box with a lock which I put the DVDs in, with dates to when I backed up, so if I lose anything, I can get it back easily.

I have found that doing a few things usually helps:

1) When done with using the drive on PC, always use "Safely remove hardware" to remove it before you unplug it or shut down PC. It stops it being hit with a slight shock or anything like that, that could damage it. I lost a SD card that way. I also scan and defrag the disks often to ensure no viruses or other problems like that on the disk.

2) Backup often, DVDs are a good way as they can store a lot, and unless scratched or damaged, they can be used to restore lost files easily. If you feel you won't be using that much of a DVD to start with e.g. you don't have a lot of files to back up and they won't take up much space on a DVD, try using a DVD RW, so you can add/remove/replace files to the DVD whenever you want until its full.

3) Sometimes you can find if you have a 2.5inch USB Hard Drive, (Which is a Laptop drive in a case so it can work externally) its sometimes the part inside the case that connect to the hard drive so it can be used as USB that is the problem, rather than the har drive itself packing in. This little curcuit board is usually not designed that well. So you could try getting a new case for the drive (must make sure you know what type of drive it is, either IDE or SATA) and check the drive case, as some are not designed well and may not always work. I got one online and it worked for my SATA drive, but USB cable was faulty. I originally had a plastic case, but it broke easily, so I had to get a new one.

Do you guys keep images that are not 'competition standard' or are you very selective when deciding what to keep?

Unless my images are bit blurry or generally bad, I keep them, both for record keeping and for my website, pluus then I can see how my photography has changed and see what I did wrong. In my book I am writing, and on my website, I am showing photography tips and hints, so some of my "less good" images I keep for such a purpose, to help people who are more novices.

Speaking on which, how does people sore their images on their storage divice? I store mine like this:

Two files called "Other Images" (This is for other insects, animals, abstract, landscapes etc...) and other called "Butterflies and Moths" Then, within butterflies and moths I have three files "Butterflies", "Moths" and "Videos" then something like this:

First I have the names of the butterfly or moth on each folder:

Moths Folder

Then I have within the species name, a location then date folder within it to where the image was taken like: Eyed Hawkmoth > Montaighs Moss > May 2007 or Dark Green Fritillary > Whitespots Country Park > August 2007

and then the image goes in the date, if I want to know the exact date, I check the image properties to see the EXIF data with date.

[Lee Hurrell]

I take my photos primarily for the butterfly interest and not for photography or art. For this reason, I delete nothing. Even bad pictures carry information and I frequently refer back to old photos to search for information I didn't think was relevant at the time. I went digital in 2005 and still have every picture I have taken since then.

I keep them for record keeping, plus then I can see how my photography has changed and see what I did wrong.

Guy, Dave, I think for those reasons alone you have reinforced what I was nearly thinking.

Thanks Gents.

Cheers
Lee

[ColinC]

There are a number of reasonable priced 2 TB RAID 1 storage solutions on the market today which are in essence two discs, the software automatically creating a "mirror" back up and so giving you 1 TB of effective storage - my suggestion would be to go for one of those.

[Dave McCormick]

Well I was told the best storage devices are USB pen drives r Solid State drives, as they don't have any moving parts, anything with moving parts are more vunerable to crashes and problems, but I think the most you can get on a USB pen drive is 32GB, but this may increase in future. Here is some formats of storage I found: http://www.pjrmicro.com/components/storage.html

Best drives I think, are solid state drives, as I have had a 128MB pen drive since 2003 and its still rusns as if I just got it, fine and great.

I got the 1TB Western Digital external USB drive from PC World, it stopped working about 6 months or so after getting it, checked it lots of times, even took it out of case and plugged it in internally on my PC and it still failed to run. I think this happens more to drives that use an external power supply to run them, well it has with my ones.

[KeynvorLogosenn]

Hi,
Talking of online storage, I use this method to back up important files for work (job) and coursework files. The only problem I have had is downtime when trying to access backed up work. Personally, I use both my laptops HardDrives (just like having an external one, but it's built in), DVD discs every other week and online backups for anything special.
Em

[Zonda]

That is the one that failed me Dave. WD users beware. I have gone back to using usb keys. Gawd there is some rubbish about, and it aint always the cheap stuff.

[Lee Hurrell]

How about memory cards for smaller scale storage?

I was in Currys Digital today and I'm sure I saw 60/80 GB cards... Quite expensive mind compared to some of the external drives / USB things already mentioned.

I was looking at the newer models of camera to mine and was getting broody

Cheers

Lee

[Markulous]

If you know someone with a few GBs spare and you use Skype, you could always use Free Online Backup/Remote Backup to Friends and Family - Cucku Backup

[LCPete]

Hi glad to hear that you did not lose your pictures
I have had a Hard drive fail but I did knock it over while it was running luckily it was new and did not have much on it
I have 3 external drives and also backup to DVD but I have had DVD's fail too so I redo those on a regular basis it is fiddly to keep everything up to date am still looking for an easier completely failsafe system
Pete

[bugmadmark]

Some very sensible advice above. Discipline is key. I copy files to a dedicated photo hardrive in my PC, back up monthly to a separate external 500Gb Western Digital drice. Once every few months I aim to transfer files to DVD-R (not RW so no risk of accidentally deleting). My precious files are duplicated on DVD and I keep 1 copy at work too - this wopuld cover me in event of a house fire/flood (rare event I know - but it happens and my most presious images are of my children and family) Im not so good at making back ups to DVD - in part as because my dvd burner is slow (x4) and they dont hold sufficient data anymore for the number of files i have. Thinking of trying blueray as technology getting cheaper. The only thing ive not looked at so far is archival quality dvds.

[Padfield]

I have a further question for all you technogeeks out there!

I'm pretty happy I'm not about to lose any old photos. However, I'm not so sure I can find, say, that picture of a marbled fritillary on a bramble I took some time in 2005. My current photos are all browsable with Picasa, on my present computer, but the old ones are buried deep in file systems, on other hard drives or DVDs, with a separate folder for each day, so to find them I have to open folders, look at the pictures, then go back &c.

Is there some software available for taking, say, a 20GB picture folder, with dozens of subfolders in it, and creating a highly compressed image of it with thumbnails instead of the full-size pictures? Then I could keep all these compressed images on my main computer and browse them to find the photo I wanted. When I found it, I could dig out the appropriate DVD or whatever and go directly to the photo.

Guy

[Pete Eeles]

Hi Guy,

All editions of PhotoShop (including PhotoShop Elements) allow you to create a web photo gallery from a directory - with the option of traversing subfolders. This will create 3 items:

1. A set of thumbnails.

2. A set of compressed images suitable for the web.

3. A set of HTML pages for viewing the resulting gallery.

However, this won't retain the original directory structure - it will only preserve the name of the original file, so I'm not sure if you'll be able to locate the original image based on this.

If you need freeware, then Jalbum is pretty good at doing something similar. In all cases, you can keep the thumbnails that get created and junk the rest!

Cheers,

- Pete

[Padfield]

Thanks Pete - this is very helpful.

I did get a trial version of Elements, but it has run out. I'll get another copy for another computer to try all this out. I didn't use Elements for anything else - I don't think I've touched it since the day I got the trial version. I use an eighteenth century version of Image Expert and it serves all my other needs perfectly.

Guy