How do you archive photos?

[granfire]

as I am running an all day boot up scan on my computer I am realizing that I need to get more vigilant about backing up my pictures.

I do have an external harddrive...but I have already put some files on there, some of which I am sure since modified on the desktop....
I could go OCD and get a different for my different themes, like band, scouts, misc.....

I have a mess of thumb drives (same problem there, plus many doublicates) and SD cards.

How do you keep track of stuff?

 

[rlobrecht]

There's a copy of all our pictures on my computer, and my wife's. Each of those computers is backed up to its own external hard drive. (Thanks for the reminder, we don't really do this often enough.) And then annually, usually over Christmas break, but sometimes it spills over into January, I make two copies of all that year's photos on DVD.

The one thing I don't do, but wish I had a good way to, is to back up somewhere outside my house. At one point I tried one of those, $5 per month unlimited backup services, but during the trial period I didn't get everything backed up, and our internet was miserably slow the whole time. A friend of mine takes an external hard drive to his mother's place.

 

[granfire]

I have some pictures on 4 different photobucket accounts...but that's not the sole answer either...

 

[Sukerkin]

Making a clear directory structure is very helpful for such things, Gran.

If you haven't been categorising your collection from the start then I fear that it is a bite-the-bullet moment and knuckle down to it. Get all your files in one place to start with (don't worry about duplicates at this stage) and then go through hem sorting them out - thumbnail view is useful for this as it let's you spot duplicate images more easily.

 

[granfire]

Making a clear directory structure is very helpful for such things, Gran. If you haven't been categorising your collection from the start then I fear that it is a bite-the-bullet moment and knuckle down to it. Get all your files in one place to start with (don't worry about duplicates at this stage) and then go through hem sorting them out - thumbnail view is useful for this as it let's you spot duplicate images more easily.

I know, it has to be done! Would make it easier to find the pictures, too...

 

[Bob Hubbard]

oh boy...

I used to burn each shoot to a CD. Ended up with a stack of them, and some were iffy burns. Lost some pics.

I sort all shoots by date and subject:
2012-1-1 Miller Wedding
2012-1-24 Jane Doe Model Shoot
etc.

These are on my main hard drive, backed up hourly via TimeMachine (OSX) to an external drive.

Each year I take the entire previous years shoots, dump them to -2- external drives and store 1 remotely.

I periodically retire drives as they get older.

I have 4 in rotation right now, 2 are current up to last december. 2 more are current. In january I'll be rotating again.

The 2 connected are kept in sync.

It's a bit complicated and overly redundant.

 

[jezr74]

I use Google Picasa as my last resort backup.

I use the Picasa desktop tool to sync my photo directory structure, it's says you have something like 1GB per account, but if you tell it to backup as "photo size" it's unlimited.

So as a backup it works well for me..

http://picasa.google.com/

[h=1]Free storage limits[/h]Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos. However, files under certain size limits don't count towards this free storage limit. This applies to uploads for other Google product that store photos and videos in Picasa Web Albums, including Blogger, Google+ and Google Maps.