Storing Digital Photos

[sceadugenga]

How reliable are USB storage devices for backing up photos?

Anyone had any bad experiences with them?

[astral]

I bought a new WD 500Gb disk 3 months ago

to go in my external USB case.

It has died on me..................

Not the first time I have had a problem with that brand.

[neverdie]

I'm fairly new to this Digital Camera stuff, but I have chosen to store my valuable photos on two seperate external storage devices & many are also on my computers main hard-drive. I have heard of many people losing stuff when they just kept it on one single device. Not so good, i guess. I also know a few people that just back their stuff up onto DVD, but I don't know how long these things will last for?

Hopefully someone comes along and tells us the facts soon.....its a minefield for us technological challenged people.

[H2oDunc]

I tend to go for the double back up as well as having it on my HDD. Just got a 320 GB external HDD so all my pics are backed up, the drives on my computer are backed up and they are still on my laptop. Also you can get online storage as well.

[Nordlys]

How reliable are USB storage devices for backing up photos?

You mean HDD?

I use 1TB external HDD (firewire) for storage and I never had trouble with that.

I might get another one for double back up.

One day I have to delete some of those raw raw files from the storage.

[sceadugenga]

I was thinking more of the little plug in bizzos... flash drives?

[astral]

If nothing else, photographs can be a precious source of memories.

I endorse the double back up strategy!!

[fabianfred]

In the last three months I had a 500Gb HDD go tits up (about two months old)...but i managed to save most of the important data because only one of the four partitions I had made was bad...

I saved that data to a new 750GB HDD (server model...which is supposed to be tougher because servers usually run 24/7)...that died after only a month...and I lost everything

I think having important stuff on at least two HDD (in the computer or as externals) and also written onto CD or DVD is probably the best protection.

all of the above are not to be relied upon...but chances are they will not all go at once

Flash memory is getting very large now....and without working parts would seem to be more reliable than a HDD..... but no more than a DVD....since strong magnets etc. could corrupt data...

I have 16GB SD cards for my Video camera...and this year 1 TB cards are expected to be available....

....but those of us who are Buddhists must remember that everything comes under the law of impermanence

[sceadugenga]

1TB cards... That's almost unbelievable isn't it?

1000gb, 1,000,000mb, 1,000,000,000kb.

I see they're talking in petabytes now.

According to Kevin Kelly of the New York Times, "the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages" would amount 50 petabytes of data. Wiki.

[ignis]

Nothing is 100% so best to store on more than one place.

Myself have on one of my hard drives in the PC + on a external backup HDD + on a re-writable Panasonic DVD. infarct all my data is backed up this way as well..

In 5 years here I have had 4x HDD's fail and 3x Flash drives.

[lopburi3]

The HD backup is a good idea but not 100% safe as one virus attack could wipe it all out. Believe for better safety you must use at least one non connected back up. DVD or the new flash cards should serve that (as long as you keep separate). I would advise make a new complete back up to such media on a regular basis, on fresh media, and keeping the old ones just in case, in case. Murphy's law

Edited March 22, 2009 by lopburi3

[Nordlys]

I was thinking more of the little plug in bizzos... flash drives?

I don't know what the maximum memory available for those drives these days but if they suffice for you how about using memory cards themselves to keep the images as they're becoming cheaper and cheaper these days (after all they're flash memory too). You can then copy them to HDD (if flash drives suffice for you then it won't take so much of your HDD space) so you'd have double back up.

I have 16GB SD cards for my Video camera...and this year 1 TB cards are expected to be available....

Really? I know 32GB CF are available now but suddenly a jump from 32GB to 1TB???

Edited March 22, 2009 by Nordlys

[fabianfred]

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0903/09030602...ccfcard666x.asp

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0903/09030601pretecsdxc.asp

above is about the new generation of cards..... not forgetting that sometimes thumb drives and camera/mobile phone cards can be made unable to be accessed because of viruses....

[jukapot]

I’ve had 2 WD external drives go out on me. The new 1 TB never worked and an older 350 GB stopped working. Just this week I discovered on the Aperture Forum that all external drives need to be formated for Apple and not used as it comes out of the box. The drives come formated for PC's with Fat32 (what ever that is) and need to be re formated for Macs. Both drives now work fine and I and reformatting 2 other external drives which have been working with the wrong formating. Perhaps you PC users are having similar formating problems.

As far as flash drives go - they don’t, no moving parts. Apple has an over priced deluxe MAC BOOK AIR with an internal 120 GB flash drive built. They don’t call it a flash drive but it has no moving parts and is fast. I hope that is the wave of the future.

The Aperture program has a strange storage / backup system. My main hard drive does not leave me enough room to use their regular file system. My work flow is to have all new photos put on a 500 GB drive. I immediately put the new photos on a DVDs for archiving, and then I import the photos into aperture. The photos stay on the external hard drive and are referenced as they are imported into the Aperture program. I will use the backup system called vault and back up all the changes (editing) that I made to my photos and place this into my partitioned TB drive. All new photos will be manually copied to another 500 GB drive. I have the master file on an external drive, a back up on another external drive, and individual dvd's.

The rest of my main drive has a 100% back on the partioned TB drive and will be updated daily with Apples Time Line program. All I need now is to get my music in iTunes off the internal drive and have the library on a separate external drive.

Remember there are also on line storage programs like flickr, google"s pica, go daddy, and often free storage with some internet providers.

[Kan Win]

How reliable are USB storage devices for backing up photos?

Anyone had any bad experiences with them?

A lot of folks have had bad experiences, mainly due to the fact that they did NOT 'exit then safely' when taking the USB storage devices out of their computers.

Yours truly,

Kan Win

[sceadugenga]

So how do you know when to do that Win?

I can't say I've ever been directed to do that when using them.

[astral]

If you go to the Explorer and select computer, to see all the disks.

Put your mouse on the removable disk and right click.

One of the options is Dismount.

Click on that.

If it is not safe to power off you will get an error message,

and should wait before trying again.

[Kan Win]

Link to How to Safely Remove a USB Flash Drive from the Computer

The same applies to external hard drives using a USB port.

Hope this is helpful to you all.

Yours truly,

Kan Win

[sceadugenga]

Thanks for that, I'll have a practice later.