Do u keep ur photos in HDDs or Cloud storage?

[poh6702]

Cool...learn something useful here.thanks all.

Yes, it is as simple as that, if you already have Gmail account, you already have about 10G of Google Drive space, just download the google drive and install on you computer(the USID and password is same as your Gmail account), then you will find a folder called "Google Drive" created in your computer, but must remember to configure to sync their sub-folders. copy few files into those sub-folders on your computer, give it sometimes to sync then go to Google Drive website to check and ensure that they are uploaded. I was the early adopter of Google Drive, I paid US$20 a year for 80G cloud storage and I don't know why I am having 96G space now.

As for Skydrive, after creating an Outlook Email (Hotmail) from Microsoft, it also come with 7G of Skydrive cloud storage.

I choose Google Drive and Mirosoft Skydirve because these are big players that I don't believe they will "fly by the night" and disappear.

I also have more than 100G of cloud storage from Dropbox after buying Galaxy note 2 and Galaxy SIII Mini, but only use a few hundred Mbytes for sharing files with friends. I don't rely on Dropbox as my primary storage is because I also worry that one day they might just decide not to continue the service.

 

[Hinata76]

im using dropbox for my phone camera (syncing as u snap..) sadly not available for Box.
currently its 54.75gb for dropbox (50gb free for 2 years..duh..) and 50gb for Box.

Google + didnt use it..flickr nope..

 

[edutilos-]

I have 3 backup hard drives. :bsmilie:

 

[Octarine]

It's not either / or but rather: chose the right tool for the right job. Both have their strength and weaknesses.
Define requirements, define how much efforts you want to put in (money, equipment, knowledge), check service levels (especially for commercial offers) and select what fits.

 

[poh6702]

After reading the postings, it seems to me that there is a miss-conception of Cloud storage, most people thought cloud storage is like facebook, you upload your photos there and only able to view or download them via Internet: That is a wrong concept.

I view the cloud storage as automatic on-line backup, for those who stress on having local copy and backup to HDDs, life is still the same after you setup Google Drive, dropbox or Skydrive, you still have your local copy and making copy on your external HDDs, and on top of that you have a copy safe kept for you by the big guys automatically at the back ground and better still you can access them on line when necessary.

In the digital age today, where people takes photos on digital camera and hardly print hard copy, I have heard many people lost their photos when they lost the phone, change computer, HDD crash etc.... Those precious photos once gone will never be able to get back, especially parent who takes photos of their children and family life.

BTW, I always proud to tell people that since I started my first digital camera in 1996, I have not lost a single photo, I have thousands of photos of my 2 sons' life story until today, I always keep them in multiple HDDs, as HDD get outdated every other years, I changed new HDD, and recently I added cloud storage to further safeguard the photos, I recently start to print them out in photobooks.

I hope that helps.

 

[catchlights]

yes, most people have thousands and thousands photos of their family.

but what is the point of having so many photos and most of them you hardly see them? or you need to turn on computer and search for it? or look at them on your teeny weeny mobile/tablet screen?


too many photos can be an issue, so best is print and display them.

 

[poh6702]

this is the problem with digital age, in the past, we brought only 3 to 5 rolls of films when go on a one week holiday, every shots is carefully composed because we can only look at the result when we are back home after development. With digital camera today, people takes photos without control, one can end up with thousands of shots in one holiday, and all of them are in high resolution some more, they just dump them in big HDD, that is why most people needs Terabytes of HDD, it also poses problem in backup.

Some people thinks mirror drive is safe, but I tell you that is not true, it only protect you from hardware failure, but then there is still a risk of software corruption, accidental delete, most external drive will not have trash folder to do recovery, worse still a virus infection might wipe out the content. The safest approach in my view is to keep the size small, have backup (either cloud, home NAS or external HDD) that keeps revision and deleted file history (one example is the WD drive backup software that can configure from 5 to 20 revisions).

Now come back to how to keep the size small, in my opinion, if one need to print out photos up to 4 to 6R size, 2000 x 1600 resolution is good enough, if you are doing Arts or com comercial photos, then yes, it should be as high resolution as possible, even the HD LCD display is only up to 1920x1080 resolution, and that is enough for our eyes, most notebook LCD resolution is only 1388 x 768, it will not display better even if the photo is 4000x3000. Usually I only keep a few critical photos in its original size, few of them in mid resolution and most of them resize to 2000x1600 and delete always the almost duplicate and bad photos.

As for printing, one will find that if we print out 4R size photos and file in photo album, it will be very thick and heavy, the best solution today is to print out in Photobook, you can also add words and remarks to make it nicer, furthermore they are highly durable, water proved and not so thick and cheaper than individual photo printing.

My 2 cents of contribution and apologize if my comments offended anyone.

 

[ricohflex]

CD and DVD are not lasting than harddrive, beside, you can't modify the data burnned in CD / DVD.

and also, capacity to cost wise, HD is still better.

Actually you can modify in CDRW & DVDRW. I have been doing it for many years.

 

[TWmilkteaTW]

HDD for me..

:bsmilie:

 

[catchlights]

Actually you can modify in CDRW & DVDRW. I have been doing it for many years.

I uses to have lots of CDRW & DVDRW for short term storage, but they are not reliable and not so convenient (read slow and write even slower)
switch using thumbdrive instead.

 

[ricohflex]

Agree. DVDRW is slow and small capacity. Big HDD is cost effective and fast.

 

[ninelives]

Actually thought of hdd but who knows when that thing will die on u..guess I'm lucky still.. years of old photos still in my good old 500gb hdd.

Cloud wise..darn true..no network can just kiss it goodbye...

that why u need mirroring or raid 1. dont need expensive hardware raid, software raid will do. linux, windows, all can do it. just plug the HDD into your PC and then configure the raid. dont need addition software either.

 

[ricohflex]

Some one explained it better here

This is a quote from a post by sminlal

RAID is not a backup. RAID can protect against a [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]drive [/FONT][FONT=inherit !important]failure[/FONT][/FONT], but that is not the only way you can loose your data. If you value your pictures, you need to protect them from other risks such as viruses, data corruption (as a result of memory errors or power failure, for example), theft of your system, [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]accidental [/FONT][FONT=inherit !important]deletion[/FONT][/FONT], disaster (such as a fire) etc. etc. RAIDdoes nothing to protect against these possibilities.

A sound backup strategy requires you to make two copies of your data which are offline, at least one of which is stored offsite. If you are going to purchase extra disks for purposes of backup, buy external drives and use backup software, do not set them up as RAID.

I managed a data centre for many years and we used [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]RAID [/FONT][FONT=inherit !important]arrays[/FONT][/FONT] for our servers because ANY downtime would idle hundreds of workers and cost the company a LOT of money. We received several requests every month to restore data from our backups - but our servers were never down due to a [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]disk [/FONT][FONT=inherit !important]failure[/FONT][/FONT]. That's the real reason to use RAID - not for backup, but to increase uptime.

 

[ortega]

I use a personal cloud NAS, which I also back up the NAS to an external hdd, I also store selected images in google+/picasa, now with Facebook, google+, Dropbox automatically backing up my images from my phone too