Preserving/digitzing Photos

Basically I want to preserve two kinds of photos:
[*]Digital pictures I have taken over the last 4-5 years (about 4 GBs) and ones I continue to take.
[*]Old photos that are starting to show signs of fading and decay
[/list]I don't trust hard drives after the sudden death of my last 160GB hdd and now my mp3 player's hdd also seems to be on its last legs. So right now the digital pics are backed up on a DVD-RW. I would of course like to have something more permanent. Any suggestions? Are there any online services that would suit my need? (I would want the photos to remain in their original resolution, and wouldn't want them to be available to the general public for viewing).

As to the second category, what's the best way - buying a scanner, or giving it to some professional? In the latter case, I would appreciate any suggestions as to contact details, prices etc.

I came across similar problem just few days back. HDD of my PC died on me, though I was able to recover most useful files (including snaps) it will not always be the case.What I do now is to upload everything on one Flickr account and 6 Gmail accounts. Flicker is not free (it charges $24 per year) but it gives you unlimited uploads and does not place restriction on resolution on images.And it gives you an upload tool, with that upload tool you can upload images in bulk.Just select the option to make images "private" and you should be set. You can try free version of Flickr, it works the same way except you can't upload more then 100 MB in a month.

Have a web space with some nice provider. Choose the high storage and low bandwidth package. You could also make your own personal website 🙂

yeah I checked out Flickr... sounded good... Still have to figure out whether $25 is worth it. Do they have some kind of guarantee that they will not lose your photos? Also do they have some kind of bulk download thing? (In the even that say I lose my DVD / hdd crashes).Also 6 Gmail accounts?? That sounds tedious! Why do you have two online backups? Why not just burn them on DVDs?

Yups. I backup all my data (including images) on DVDs. Much more reliable than a external hard disk or pen drive etc. I have all the great movies that I downloaded from Bittorrent backed up on DVDs 😀.

flickr is a yahoo service.so u can be fairly sure that they cannot afford to lose ur data esp if u are paying them.and they give u 2 gb a month upload on paid accounts from what i know. i have a paid account at flickr.i dont think they have an option for downloading images in bulk... coz its more like a photo gallery to showcase photos rather than preserving them online...

QUOTE(vebmetal @ Dec 14 2006, 06:31 PM) [snapback]70898[/snapback]
Do they have some kind of guarantee that they will not lose your photos?
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Not according to TOS that you accept while registering.


QUOTE(vebmetal @ Dec 14 2006, 06:31 PM) [snapback]70898[/snapback]
Also do they have some kind of bulk download thing? (In the even that say I lose my DVD / hdd crashes).
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Not that I know of. But its a good idea. Flickr's API is open so it is a good and feasible project.

QUOTE(vebmetal @ Dec 14 2006, 06:31 PM) [snapback]70898[/snapback]
Also 6 Gmail accounts?? That sounds tedious! Why do you have two online backups? Why not just burn them on DVDs?
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I have lots of snaps and one gmail account is not large enough. I use GMail drive, so these accounts are just like another partition for me.

I have two backups since I do not want to take chances with these snaps. These snaps and my mailbox is probably the only data that is worth preserving on my PC.

QUOTE(vebmetal @ Dec 14 2006, 06:31 PM) [snapback]70898[/snapback]
Why not just burn them on DVDs?
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DVDs wont last long. They wont survive more then a few years 🙁 Hope that Google OR Yahoo will.


QUOTE(GSV13 @ Dec 14 2006, 06:15 PM) [snapback]70897[/snapback]
Have a web space with some nice provider.
Choose the high storage and low bandwidth package.
You could also make your own personal website 🙂
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Thats not safe. Most web space providers do not provide daily backups. Those who do, charge more then $100 per month.

QUOTE(Sushubh @ Dec 14 2006, 10:33 PM) [snapback]70909[/snapback]
and they give u 2 gb a month upload on paid accounts from what i know. i have a paid account at flickr.
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They removed 2 GB monthly limit and increased free account limit to 100 MB. I think it was just 2 days ago.

Looking at the responses here, the majority are of the opinion HDs are not good, DVDs are better and storing offsite is even better.I have the opposite opinion, HDs are way faster than DVD, DVD is okay if you have the skills to check that your DVD-rs are still readable, this means you have a writer that allows quality scans. And offline, lol, lets store my stuff on the other side of the planet so they will be sooooooo safe.The trick to HDs, is to have a backup, mirror. I have stored most of my personal data & other stuff on HDs for many years now. I always have a mirror that i backup to on a regular basis that is kept offline when the job is done. If the HD fails, buy a new one and sync to it. I do this all with internal HDs btw, swapping them out of the case etc, if you dont want to do that, then a USB drive will fit the purpose just as well. You can have the DVD option as a 3rd backup if required. But then learn about how to quality scan your DVDs so in a few yrs time if you bought cheap mendia then you know when its time to transfer over to newer.

I'm not really concerned about speed at all, just knowing that my photos are safe. Hdd mirroring is okay, but it's a whole lot more expensive than burning DVDs and purchasing online storage space. Also in the event like when your house burns down, mirrored hdds won't be that peachy, though online storage would be. Also, and I could be wrong on the figures, but I think the average life of a good quality DVD (5 - 100 years(?)) is a lot more than that of an average hdd (3-4 years). My hdd in fact died in almost exactly 2 years.I've just been playing around with Google's new service, called Picasa Web Albums, which integrates really well with their Picasa software (which I find to be quite useful and appealing). The basic free package has 250MB of storage, but their paid ones start with 6.25GB for $25 a year (about Rs. 1100). The excellent part is that you can download whole albums in one click, including albums from a friend's collection which then integrates into your Picasa collection.My only apprehension is getting tied into paying this $25 (or whatever) year after year for the rest of my life (or till there is a better solution!). But as I said, it's a whole lot cheaper than buying hdds and having to keep replacing them.

I think you can start with GMail drive. Its free and backup simply means running backup in Picasa and selecting your GMail drive as target.

I am on MTNL so uploads are free for me, and with your unlimited airtel connection restore would be free as well.

URL : http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

free 100 megs upload a month on flickr is awesome. 😀

Yaa it is.

But they use it like a marketing gimmik. If you upload more then 200 pics overall, they "hide" old pics.

This is what they say on my accounts page:

sad that means i am stuck with their paid account for ever 😱

QUOTE(vebmetal @ Dec 15 2006, 04:18 AM) [snapback]70926[/snapback]
I'm not really concerned about speed at all, just knowing that my photos are safe. Hdd mirroring is okay, but it's a whole lot more expensive than burning DVDs and purchasing online storage space. Also in the event like when your house burns down, mirrored hdds won't be that peachy, though online storage would be. Also, and I could be wrong on the figures, but I think the average life of a good quality DVD (5 - 100 years(?)) is a lot more than that of an average hdd (3-4 years). My hdd in fact died in almost exactly 2 years.
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Let's address the house burning down thing. Can't speak for how they are made in Delhi, but here in BLR, almost all houses are reinforced concrete. The only thing to burn in my house is the furniture. Not like in the colder west countries where the majority is wood to keep the cold out. So house burning down is pretty remote. Do you ever read about houses burning down here ? Can't say i have at least not with the frequency it happened in the west. No Earthquakes and i dont live in a flood susceptible area of the city either.

You missed the offline part, my HDs are in a briefcase, so if i have to evacuate ship i just bring it with me along with other "essentials", with a portable HD its not too different. I do monthly backups of all my stuff so its nearly half a TB to sync, it only takes less than an hour, since i'm syncing and not doing full backups. System imges can take up lots of space, but then i have never re-installed windows.

The other big advantage of HDs is you can re-arrange, rename stuff as you like, with write once media, its set in stone. Oh and most of it is checksumed before the next sync, so i know stuff is bit perfect.

I stopped using cd-rs many yrs ago, the time it takes to copy all of them back to a new HD is not worth it to me and this assumes they will all read back perfectly. I only use dvd-rs for movies or stuff i don't care too much about.

Preserving digital media is not easy, the only fail safe way is to copy stuff to new media as time goes on. With the mirrors as bigger HDs come, i just use the older ones for backup.

I will never be in favour of keeping my valuable stuff with a 3rd party site that might dissapear. This may become more useful if we indeed get unlimited Mbs speeds but still its not a comfortable idea.

QUOTE(blr_p @ Dec 15 2006, 12:40 PM) [snapback]70954[/snapback]
I will never be in favour of keeping my valuable stuff with a 3rd party site that might dissapear. This may become more useful if we indeed get unlimited Mbs speeds but still its not a comfortable idea.
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You can get some redundancy by using two or more of them (yahoo/flickr and google in this case)....

Problems that I see with HDD approach:

1. Its tedious, you need to have discipline of plugging in your HDD every few days and taking backups.
2. You need to have Two sets of backup since your "backup" HDD can fail as well.

Advantage:
1. You are on your own, do not depend on someone else to manage your data

With online backups,

Advantage:
1. Its trivial to setup with Flick upload tool / Picasa backup and restore and GDrive
2. Your data is safe if you are using multiple sites

Disadvantage:
1. Need to use multiple sites, Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail everyone have had system problems in past that deleted mailboxes of some users.
2. Its slow with 256 kbps connections.

Ultimately you go with what works in your case and what you are comfortable with.

For me, backup to GMail drive and Flickr upload works fine. Mostly because I can schedule that to happen automatically.