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What's the best storage for approx 30000 images although that may be down to 10000 by the time i get chopping the dead wood of a computer ?
I do have dropbox for a few but is it realistic to go on to memory sticks or external hard drive, last 3 years 25mega pixel before that 15 and maybe another 1/3 10 mega pix. Is <span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">dropbox premium any good and worth paying for</span>
Ive read that an external hard drive only lasts up to 5 years
Ive read that an external hard drive only lasts up to 5 years
* checks
* nope - still running
Stick them on a couple of external drives so that if one fails you have a backup.
Or use Google Photos if you can put up with the compression (or pay for the non-compressed option)
Or a permutation of the above
Spinning drives can fail, 5 years isn't an unrealistic lifespan but they generally work along a bathtub failure curve with it either going pop early, not much in the middle and ramping up at the end
* checks
* nope – still running
Sample size in single figures?
Google Drive with pics for me, simple interface, nice to organise and integrates well with phones and computers. Got about 350gb in there at the moment
Print them out and put in albums.
Spinning drives are cheapest per gb
3 drives with one of them off site. (Protection against fire)
What's the cheapest best cloud storage? How much is the Google drive thing?
Pay for Google photos and one drive too.
Good value.
<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">I'm not sure about hard drives for long term storage personally. We do have drives going back a while that work but that's no guarantee of anything.</span>
But if you go gown that route just get a few drives for redundancy.
https://www.google.com/drive/pricing/
£1.59/month for 100GB
£7.99/Month for 1TB
If you go for high quality but not original pics then it's much cheaper
Google is free up to a point and then you pay for storage thereafter. (15GB)
I pay £15 for another 100GB per year.
(Mike is on it!)
Ive read that an external hard drive only lasts up to 5 years
You've heard wrong. There's no physical difference between an external and an internal hard disk aside from your usage and handling of it. A HDD could last 15 minutes or until the heat death of the universe.
However - even if that's true, so what, you've got backups right? If you've got data in one place, you don't have reliable data no matter how it's stored. You need at least two copies and ideally three for critical data with one of those stores off site (fire / burglary etc).
The number of photos is an irrelevance. How much space are they taking up?
Amazon Prime - unlimited photo storage. All mine back up there 🙂
You see I had amazon prime and I tried uploading my pics there and the ****ing thing timed out before completing even 2gb of pics, snot fit for purpose!
It seems to have got better... the new(ish) app sits on my desktop and just does everything behind the scenes and keeps everything up to date. The new "backup" feature is a God send - previously you had to move everything into the drive and then wait for EVER!
The 16 shots I took today are all showing as backed up on t'web, including the raw files (which I convert to DNG) and my edits... and they are MAHOOSIVE files too 😉
It isn't without it's faults, big uploads sometimes grab too many resources - although I haven't had that in a while - or sometimes take a few days to catch up, but that was only whilst I was getting the backup schedule up and running as I wanted. Now it is all good, runs in the background without me noticing most of the time, and since I have Prime anyway it isn't costing me anymore than I would have been paying anyway.
(Plus it streams the pictures onto my Amazon Fire TV!)
My primary photo archive is on a half terabyte USB3 disk, but it's backed up to both my local NAS (via Time Machine) and the Amazon cloud using Arq. Arq can also backup to Google's cloud, both offer incredible value storage tiers for backups (basically free for storage, almost nothing for upload, and reasonable for download).
I see some people here are endorsing Google Drive which is acceptable for a few files but when you're talking tens of thousands, that gets boring. A tool writing to https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ is what you want (such as Arq).
How many "tens of thousands"? And how can it be boring? It all happens in the background. Stick them on PC, wait a while, there they are in the Cloud.
Also the canonical study of "how long does a HDD last?" is
. Google use consumer HDDs (and redundancy) in their data centres, so back in 2007 collated their monitoring of "over one hundred thousand drives". The results were... interesting.
Google use consumer HDDs (and redundancy) in their data centres, so back in 2007 collated their monitoring of “over one hundred thousand drives”. The results were… interesting.
Got the actual link? A nice data centre will be climate controlled, cold spin ups may be more or less, dust certainly wont be an issue etc. so not much like home use at all....As above rely on a single spinning HDD and beware, spread the load and use cloud it's what it's there for, unless you have some home made artistic shots and you are semi famous...
For those of you with a real desire to keep their files safe, this (or anything describing 3-2-1 backup strategy) is well worth the read...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
For those of you that think buying a reliable hard drive is the best thing to do (it is not), then this is interesting...
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/