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Best practice for eternal photo backup/storage?

J

johnarcher

macrumors newbie
Feb 14, 2013
1
0
Digital Asset Management

walangij said:
I've been trying to find the best solution for my budget to store family photos/videos from the past 25 years. In total, once scanned & converted, the files should number only around 2-4TB. Cloud storage for this amount is just too expensive for me right now. I've been looking at other storage solutions such as a Drobo, or several external drives. The plan is to duplicate the entire collection so that I have a fully copy and my brother has one as well. Two backups in two geographical locations (fire safes).

Anyone have a setup/experience in this arena?


EDIT 1

The more I look @ different solutions the more I am thinking that I just suck it up and do a cloud storage solution. 4TB is $1024 from Google Docs. Amazon's cloud storage is the same price for 1000GB. The cost of purchasing hard drives, drobo/enclosures, then backing them up for 2 physical locations (thus multiplying all expenses by 2) will likely end up higher than the $1024 a year (though the cost of maintaining will be cheaper over time) but I can only assume that online cloud storage prices will slowly go down over time as well.

Just for perspective:

8x 1TB hard drives ~ $60 x 8 = $480
enclosures = $100-$800 (drobo) x2 = ~$200-$1600
fire safes = $200 x2 = $400

the lowest cost estimate is around $1000+, highest cost well above.

Let me know if my calculations are wildly off or if I'm going about the wrong way completely. I am just concerned about keeping my family's photos/videos (hard copy & digital versions) safe in the best possible way and I'm sure some of you have done so already.
Click to expand...

You may have already found a solution but I would still encourage you to look at our digital asset management features from http://www.widen.com or http://www.smartimage.com (yes I am a rep :) The costs of many cloud based services have decrease over the last couple of years, making asset facilities a reasonable choice...especially when you consider that your assets will continue to keep growing over the years. This would allow you to share assets with friends and family by setting them up as users, and grant certain permissions to individuals. I hope this is helpful to you. Please feel free to msg me directly if you have any questions about our services. Thanks!
 
R

rjoudrey

macrumors newbie
Mar 19, 2013
1
0
OpenDrive

OpenDrive is a very good online storage option. What I like about OpenDrive is that the information you put in your OpenDrive folder in file explorer is offloaded to the cloud. It essentially frees up your valuable hard drive space. No other program that I am aware of does this. It also has customizable backup routines as well for incrementally backing up your hard drive.

Go to my website to see what OpenDrive has to offer! (I get some free space if you like it!)

https://sites.google.com/a/rickjoudrey.com/www/
 
dimme

dimme

macrumors 68040
Feb 14, 2007
3,020
27,481
SF, CA
rjoudrey said:
OpenDrive is a very good online storage option. What I like about OpenDrive is that the information you put in your OpenDrive folder in file explorer is offloaded to the cloud. It essentially frees up your valuable hard drive space. No other program that I am aware of does this. It also has customizable backup routines as well for incrementally backing up your hard drive.

Go to my website to see what OpenDrive has to offer! (I get some free space if you like it!)

https://sites.google.com/a/rickjoudrey.com/www/
Click to expand...

Looks interesting, However I believe with a good backup routine you should have one or two backup locally and one off site. I would never just have my files in the cloud. I use crash plan now and I an very happy with the service but the interface is very ugly.
 
R

Razeus

macrumors 603
Jul 11, 2008
5,348
2,030
Just get 2 4TB external drives and alternate them weekly. Do you know how long it would take to upload 4TB worth of data to the cloud with these ridiculously slow upload speeds we are given? About a year. External drives is cheaper and easier. You don't need fire safes (honestly, while fires do happen, they are rare, and if you did catch a fire, that's why you have 2 drives in 2 locations that you alternate). Don't over think this man.
 
M

MacCruiskeen

macrumors 6502
Nov 9, 2011
321
5
snberk103 said:
Consider that photos from 100+ years ago are still easily viewable today. Can you say the same thing about digital images taken 30 years ago? Some, perhaps. If the media is survived. If the media is even readable (think 8.5" floppies). If today's SW can read the file formats (think of WordStar).

It's not enough to just print, you have to use archival media. Colour photos from the '70s and '80s were not archival, and have not fared well either.
Click to expand...

The archival qualities of color and b&w materials are very different. If you want 100+ years of storage, color photo printing is pretty much right out. Unless you're going to do Cibachrome for everything, which is unlikely given the cost and difficulty of finding anyone who can do it these days. Kodachrome, sadly, no longer an option. Kodachrome transparencies from the 1940s still have good color. Your best bet would be to output your color onto color-separated b&w negative material, process and store archivally, then, if you find that your digital copies are unretrievable for some reason, you pull out your backups and rescan.

Your great-great-grandchildren will thank you.
 
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