the right way to save your photos

Hello everyone ;

i'm new here , as most of people here ,i love photography , and it really hurt when you found out that your dear photos been corrupted , i save my photos in an external hard drive , any suggestion please
that's an exemple how my photo turn to be

Back up you photos immediately upon uploading. You can buy a second external hard drive or upload them to back them up online. If you only keep a single copy of your photos, it's only a matter of time before you'll loose them.

SalmaHea wrote in post #17375794
Hello everyone ;

i'm new here , as most of people here ,i love photography , and it really hurt when you found out that your dear photos been corrupted , i save my photos in an external hard drive , any suggestion please
that's an exemple how my photo turn to be ]

I upload to flickr, sometimes gmail and also save RAW files to a portable hard drive

I save the images, originals and all edited versions, onto two external hard drives I keep at home, plus at least one more at a friend or relatives house. I have a few people who have one of my hard drives and I simply backup when I am visiting someone (this rarely goes more than a few days, until then stuff is backed up on 3 drives at home - one of which is a small one that I tend to carry around with me).

So if a hard drive fails, then I switch to my spare at home (and make another backup). If by some chance BOTH drives at home fail, I can recover from the offsite backups. All my best stuff is on several offsite drives around the country.

There is no "right" way to backup, different people prefer different methods. ALL methods can (and probably will) fail at some point, so the important thing is to have multiple backups, with at least one offsite. Check them regularly and replace any faulty backups with another fresh backup.

If your corrupted images are on an external HDD, try a different cable just in case it is a faulty cable causing good image files to corrupt before they get to your computer. In such a case, your originals may be fine.

Don't rely on off-line storage services as your sole 'backup'...too many have ceased to exist, sometimes giving no warning to its clients of it going out of business, and exiting the storage business without transferring client data to a different off-line storage vendor!

vanmidd wrote in post #17353485
If you shoot weddings, and a good number, I'd suggest a NAS storage device. If you want to just backup JPEGs, I'd recommend a cloud storage option, like Shootq, which now offers unlimited storage for a reasonable amount ($60/m?) and doubles as a beautiful tool for presenting clients with their collection online.

Until something like this happens... http://technologyinfo.​wordpress.com …ompanies-can-go-bankrupt/

Not unique, some companies have left their clients in a lurch, not providing any warning so that data can be migrated.
The corporate world is fickle, with major players withdrawing from the offsite storage service business over the past few years.

http://technologyinfo.​wordpress.com …ompanies-can-go-bankrupt/

• Megaupload, had online storate and viewing services, was shut by DOJ in 1/2012 as an organization dedicated to copyright infringement
  
• The Linkup, closed 8/2008 after losing customer data
  
• Nirvanix, launched 2007, announced shutdown 9/2013 with two weeks notice to customers one month later files for bankruptcy -- in spite of being IBM's Smartcloud Storage partner.
  
• Cryptoseal Privacy, a VPN service which closed, leaving users with the following message:

"With immediate effect as of this notice, CryptoSeal Privacy, our consumer VPN service, is terminated. All cryptographic keys used in the operation of the service have been zerofilled, and while no logs were produced (by design) during operation of the service, all records created incidental to the operation of the service have been deleted to the best of our ability."

Additional closures:

• Symantec, Backup Exec launched 2005, announced exit 2/2012
  
• Ubuntu One, start of service 5/2009, announced on 4/2014 shutdown
  
• Iron Mountain, entered cloud storage 2/2009, exited 4/2011.
  
• Startup Vaultscape, launched its service in 2009, closed its doors in 2010.
  
• EMC, started Atmos 11/2008, announces 1/2010 shutdown of Atmos storage business
  

I have an external HD which I routinely use as well as another "portable" that I update every few weeks. The portable is kept in a fireproof/waterproof safe. Keeping elsewhere would probably be a better idea, but not as practical.

Make prints of your favorites. Digital storage is a crapshoot.

You can upload your photos to drop-box also for backup purpose. Online backup always work for me, wherever I go can access it without any problem.

Cuypers1807 wrote in post #17383085
Make prints of your favorites. Digital storage is a crapshoot.

That's great until you find that the thirty years of slides and negatives, along with the prints that you have in cardboard archive boxes under the bed have all been destroyed when your ground floor flat was flooded. Everything gone. That was my situation, lots of other ways to loose analogue images too though, fire being the other very likely possibility that will get everything in one go. At least with digital it is quite possible to keep multiple first generation copies that do not take up large quantities of physical space. Multiple redundancy is the only way to be sure.

Alan

Not to mention that I wouldn't want to be the one discovering that the "100 year archival ink" from the printers was a bad batch, and all the colour suddenly broke down after five or six years.

Digital copies have the advantage of being exceptionally easy to reproduce and move around. I have data stored across the globe, and can easily access any of it in in seconds. I can archive it in various file formats that support redundant checksum and error correction mechanisms, and make dozens of secure copies of thousands of photos for a few dollars a month.

One thing to remember is that you should be avoiding two-way syncing. Services like dropbox and other simple cloud data storage are BAD for data archiving. Great for working data that you are actively engaged with, but you do NOT want to use a service that so easily syncs deletions as what services such as Dropbox or SkyDrive do.

Using something like a script based on rsync and Not invoking its delete functions is generally far safer. You want to setup your backup/archive system so that it is very HARD to actually delete something from it, ideally you want it to be an annoying manual task to go in and delete stuff, rather than a service that silently runs along in the background with no real input from you.

Most simple cloud based file sharing services will happily delete everything you load on them from all the computers if you accidentally delete/move stuff out of the root folder on one. (Made that mistake several times on a project with DropBox, by forgetting that OSX treats the dropbox folder like a local drive, and NOT a network drive, so drag-dropping out of that folder is a drag-move operation which culled all the files from the cloud drive rather than doing a drag-copy operation...)

So take very careful notice of how any backup service you employ will handle deleted files. "I'll be careful and won't delete stuff I don't mean too" doesn't help you with an error or attack that deletes the files without you wanting them to, and then your 'backup' software happily and merrily chugs along destroying all your archive data.

BigAl007 wrote in post #17383513
That's great until you find that the thirty years of slides and negatives, along with the prints that you have in cardboard archive boxes under the bed have all been destroyed when your ground floor flat was flooded. Everything gone. That was my situation, lots of other ways to loose analogue images too though, fire being the other very likely possibility that will get everything in one go. At least with digital it is quite possible to keep multiple first generation copies that do not take up large quantities of physical space. Multiple redundancy is the only way to be sure.

Alan

Sorry to hear that but that is akin to using your next door neighbor to backup your photos using his wifi - with permission to his hard drive. Then he dies or goes to jail and no one else knew he had this agreement with him. SOL.

Agsin, was poor planning on your part having valuables in a places that were in danger if ttge area flooded.

Luckless wrote in post #17383702
Not to mention that I wouldn't want to be the one discovering that the "100 year archival ink" from the printers was a bad batch, and all the colour suddenly broke down after five or six years.

Digital copies have the advantage of being exceptionally easy to reproduce and move around. I have data stored across the globe, and can easily access any of it in in seconds. I can archive it in various file formats that support redundant checksum and error correction mechanisms, and make dozens of secure copies of thousands of photos for a few dollars a month.

One thing to remember is that you should be avoiding two-way syncing. Services like dropbox and other simple cloud data storage are BAD for data archiving. Great for working data that you are actively engaged with, but you do NOT want to use a service that so easily syncs deletions as what services such as Dropbox or SkyDrive do.

Using something like a script based on rsync and Not invoking its delete functions is generally far safer. You want to setup your backup/archive system so that it is very HARD to actually delete something from it, ideally you want it to be an annoying manual task to go in and delete stuff, rather than a service that silently runs along in the background with no real input from you.

Most simple cloud based file sharing services will happily delete everything you load on them from all the computers if you accidentally delete/move stuff out of the root folder on one. (Made that mistake several times on a project with DropBox, by forgetting that OSX treats the dropbox folder like a local drive, and NOT a network drive, so drag-dropping out of that folder is a drag-move operation which culled all the files from the cloud drive rather than doing a drag-copy operation...)

So take very careful notice of how any backup service you employ will handle deleted files. "I'll be careful and won't delete stuff I don't mean too" doesn't help you with an error or attack that deletes the files without you wanting them to, and then your 'backup' software happily and merrily chugs along destroying all your archive data.

...provided you continually move digital files onto accessible storage locations (remembering passwords and internet sites not shutting down) and convert to current file formats. Prints in a box will be readable in 30 years while a USB hard drive will not!

Ten years from now, when your PC dies a horrible death and you buy a replacement with Windows 16, you find out that you can't get a USB port - or a card reader - or a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive because they have all been replaced with the latest and greatest Whizzbang storage device.

For long term storage, I'm more worried about the ability to read today's storage media than whether the storage media has gone bad. Current devices only need to last until they are replaced with something newer and better. And we need to be prepared to move with the new technology.

Remember when ZIP drives were the biggest and best storage media available?

Since I'm on a Mac, I use Time Machine to back up to one external drive (for versioning), use rsync to perform weekly backups to a different external drive, and use CrashPlan for off-site backups.

HappySnapper90 wrote in post #17388303
...provided you continually move digital files onto accessible storage locations (remembering passwords and internet sites not shutting down) and convert to current file formats. Prints in a box will be readable in 30 years while a USB hard drive will not!

Actually maintaining your data is kind of implied there. The point of keeping digital copies is that they are easy to migrate to modern media. You can just give the proper commands to the computer for the storage methods you're using, and then just walk away. Multiple copies get transferred to the new media and checked for errors, and you don't even have to be there.

As for reading old media... Well, you are really underestimating legacy support. The bigger issue isn't whether or not you have the hardware and system to read the media, but rather whether or not the media itself was able to remain stable for that length of time. I've often heard people say "You can't read floppy disks anymore, because no one has a floppy disk drive!"... Seriously, 3.5" external drives can be had for $15-20, brand new in the box, and produced in the last 5 years. Yes, they are Still in production, because people still have old floppy drives kicking around with data they need to try and pull off them.

5.25" drives are harder to come across, but many of the disks are still perfectly readable. And it has only been a few years since floppy drives controllers were still the norm on modern motherboards. Seems they've finally been dropped by a good chunk of them, but it isn't that hard to find a way to read legacy hardware if you actually want to.

If you had invested in some 'new-fangled-state-of-the-art-gadget' that then never actually really caught on, then you might have more problems. But even tracking down a working zip drive isn't impossible.


However I have many photos that are less than 30 years old which are completely ruined. Many more of them were lost than what I've lost in digital files, in part because I could back the files up and move them around without thinking about them, or caring what was actually in the files. Box of old photos however? Sat in a closet for years without anyone thinking of them, and had a container of something leak, which ruined the whole box of them.