Computer backup/Mainly Pictures

[sdrobertson]

I'm looking for some ideas on the way others in the Hearth world back up their photos off their disk drives. I have about 6000 pictures (wife and kids really like the digital camera) and I want a good way to back them up in case of computer failure or a house fire. I've been just making disks and taking them to work to store off site but I'm wondering if there is a good way to backup the whole computer once a month and take all of it off site. What are others doing?

Thank You,
Shannon

 

[fossil]

These days you can find external hard drives for about $100/TB. Hook up with a USB cable, and away you go. Rick

 

[begreen]

It's a growing problem. The media is not archival and one has to hope that in 10-15 years time that whatever the storage media is that it still can be read. For anyone that's had a floppy, zip, jazz, scsi or tape drive you know what I mean. For that reason, I would do multiple copies, one to a DVD and one to a drive. For the most precious pictures, print them with the most archival media at your disposal.

 

[Highbeam]

After a near loss of my photo albums on the built in hard drive I bought an external hard drive. Really very cheap and easy to use. Plug it into power, plug the USB into the computer and the external drive appears on your computer to be loaded up with the latest copy of my "photo" folder. I have yet to even touch 10% of the things capacity and it has always performed well.

Now I really should store the device in another building or something offsite but I am mainly concerned with my computer taking a dump.

Having the external hard drive makes setting up a new computer super easy since you can copy pretty much your entire old machine onto the hard drive and then move the plug to the new machine and upload the info.

The external hard drive is about the size of a small novel.

 

[fossil]

I got a 250GB Seagate. It's about 3" x 5" x ½", and gets all the power it needs through the USB cable. It's pretty amazing how cheap these things have become. My ex-wife worked for Hewlett-Packard back in the late 1970's-early 1980's when they produced the first microchip with an astounding 1MB of memory on it. Used to have a little transparent paper weight with one of the early production rejects imbedded into it. Rick

 

[sdrobertson]

Thanks guys for the input. Looks like I need to do some online shopping!

 

[semipro]

You can also use network attached storage if you have a home network. Its basically a hard disk attached to your network. These have the added benefit/risk of being accessible via the internet. If you have one and so does a buddy you can both backup your files to each other's unit, giving you secure & redundant off-site storage.

 

[stee6043]

I recently picked up a 1.5TB external Seagate drive at Best Buy for something like $119.00. Heck of a price for that much storage. I also keep a copy of DVD's at a family members house just in case. Sadly...I don't update my DVD's nearly as often as my external hard drive. Better than nothing I guess...

 

[Wood Heat Stoves]

save important things to my pc, and server drives
multiple 1-2 tb drives on each>

 

[PapaDave]

It's a growing problem. The media is not archival and one has to hope that in 10-15 years time that whatever the storage media is that it still can be read. For anyone that's had a floppy, zip, jazz, scsi or tape drive you know what I mean. For that reason, I would do multiple copies, one to a DVD and one to a drive. For the most precious pictures, print them with the most archival media at your disposal.

Keep 'em in different locations. I don't mean, one in the closet, and one in the laundry room.
One at the office, one at a relatives house, etc.....
Depends how important these are to you. I keep mine on cd and dvd, and hope in a few years, I'll have something to read them with.

Remember vinyl records? Record players are still made, some with usb connections to the computer.