Where do you store all your pictures?

[srap]

Every hard drive will fail, and every cloud storage service will eventually shut down. 
 ... [rest of post upthread]
 If your care about your pictures at all and want to be able to view them in the future your need - in the very least - one local backup and one off-site backup.

Excellent roundup of strategies.  Thank you!!

[Yellow]

Every hard drive will fail, and every cloud storage service will eventually shut down. If you keep your pictures only on one hard drive you will lose them. Do you really think that Flickr, Snapfish, et al will be around in 30 years from now? Or even in 10?

The trick to storing and preserving your pictures is to have a thorough backup strategy. Keep one copy on your main commuter, which will be your "working copy" - when your want to browse your pictures that's where you'll find them. Then on a separate hard drive keep a complete and preferably automated copy. This will be your main backup - if (or more accurately, when) your hard drive crashes you'll be able to restore everything from there.

Once you have your main backup, you need an off-site backup. Unfortunately fires and floods do happen; in such a case you could still lose everything. That's where a place like Flickr comes in - a good place to keep your pictures and be able to restore them if something happens to your physical drives. And when Flickr announces that they're shutting down, or that from now on its $20/month, you still have all your pictures on a hard drive and could upload it somewhere else.

An alternative is keeping a third hard drive at an off site location (relative, office, etc.) and bring it home once a week to sync. More time consuming than the cloud, but easier to restore if needed.

A memory card is a terrible place to store pictures - they break or get lost extremely easily.

And most importantly - print your pictures. Nothing compares to looking through a real physical album.

TL;DR: If you keep you pictures on only one place you may as well just erase them now. If your care about your pictures at all and want to be able to view them in the future your need - in the very least - one local backup and one off-site backup.

Thanks!
Any clue how long it takes to upload 7,000 pics to flickr?

[Something Fishy]

Thanks!
Any clue how long it takes to upload 7,000 pics to flickr?

Depends on your connection, plus flickr themselves may throttle you. Also make sure to upload them in an organized fashion (for example each folder into a different album), so that means you can't just set a huge upload and forget about it.

[Something Fishy]

Let me clarify one thing - all these online picture-sorting sites are only somewhat of a solution. There are some issues that you have to know of going in. A few of the important ones were already mentioned by others upthread (possibility of deletion, compression). As I breifly touched upon in my last post, there are orginization issues as well. Also to consider is that even if you could download your pictures, it'll likely have to be done one at a time, and they may get new and confusing filenames.

With that in mind, the best cloud solution is not a photo-sharing site, but a backup provider. I personally use Crash Plan, but there are many options out there. For $5-10 a month every file on your computer will be backed up and could be retrieved and downloaded exactly as it was.

My personal backup plan consists of:
- A complete weekly backup of every single file on my computer to an external drive.
- 2 daily backups of all important files (all pictures, working video files, certain documents, etc.) to a third drive and fourth drive.
- A continuous backup of every file to Crash Plan.

That means that at any given time I have at least 3 backups of everything, plus 2 additional backups of my most important files.

[Centro]

SF this is all nothing, you have no plan against the apocalypse O:-)

[Yellow]

Let me clarify one thing - all these online picture-sorting sites are only somewhat of a solution. There are some issues that you have to know of going in. A few of the important ones were already mentioned by others upthread (possibility of deletion, compression). As I breifly touched upon in my last post, there are orginization issues as well. Also to consider is that even if you could download your pictures, it'll likely have to be done one at a time, and they may get new and confusing filenames.

With that in mind, the best cloud solution is not a photo-sharing site, but a backup provider. I personally use Crash Plan, but there are many options out there. For $5-10 a month every file on your computer will be backed up and could be retrieved and downloaded exactly as it was.

My personal backup plan consists of:
- A complete weekly backup of every single file on my computer to an external drive.
- 2 daily backups of all important files (all pictures, working video files, certain documents, etc.) to a third drive and fourth drive.
- A continuous backup of every file to Crash Plan.

That means that at any given time I have at least 3 backups of everything, plus 2 additional backups of my most important files.

Oh wow!
That's a lot of backing up
So the third and fourth drives are external, right? Where do u keep them?

[yoshyosh]

A tape in a fire proof safe is the best option such as http://www.amazon.com/HP-Ultrium-C7976A-6-25-Cartridge/dp/B00AHQUV3S although it is a slight inconvenience I also use drop-box accounts for each set of photos.

[Something Fishy]

Oh wow!
That's a lot of backing up
So the third and fourth drives are external, right? Where do u keep them?

Officially at work, but since I started using Crash Plan I got lazy

[etech0]

Officially at work, but since I started using Crash Plan I got lazy

CrashPlan's whole maila is that you can be lazy

[googwallet]

I store my pictures locally as well as Google drive ($1.99/mo for 100gb... just hitting 70gb now). I believe having two places is enough, the chances of both of them tanking at the same day is slim to none.

[A European]

I store my pictures locally as well as Google drive ($1.99/mo for 100gb... just hitting 70gb now). I believe having two places is enough, the chances of both of them tanking at the same day is slim to none.

I wish (or maybe not) I had less then 100GB...

[DovtheBear]

I wish (or maybe not) I had less then 100GB...

+/-1
Drive is $10 a month for a TB.

[Something Fishy]

I wish (or maybe not) I had less then 100GB...

Ha! This is what I got from my Maui trip last month

[Emkay]

Ha! This is what I got from my Maui trip last month

How so much??? What am i doing wrong?
I dont think I have that much altogether

[cozmohoot]

Smokes! High definition video?

[Something Fishy]

How so much??? What am i doing wrong?

You're not doing anything wrong... I have thousands of pictures in that folder from a 36MP camera - each file is around 75MB. Add hours of GoPro footage and you get numbers like that.

[SuperFlyer]

36op, I'm reducing to 10mp.
It's way too much otherwise.

[Something Fishy]

36op, I'm reducing to 10mp.
It's way too much otherwise.

There are certain pictures there that I plan on printing more than 5' wide. These things always depends on your needs.

[cozmohoot]

There are certain pictures there that I plan on printing more than 5' wide. These things always depends on your needs.

yup. most people dont print pics larger than 5x7

[Emkay]

yup. most people dont print pics larger than 5x7

most people never end up printing their pictures altogether