What's on your hard drive?

[SheRidesABeemer]

My "hard copy" photo albums stop abruptly in 1999. There was some transition period where I had film cameras and was getting hard copies plus digital on CD.
My earliest (and poorest quality) digital pics are from 1997. The pictures started piling up in earnest in 2000.

I now have close to 3Gigs, 8,460 files in 176 folders. That's cleaned up pictures...no dupes, no throw outs. I keep up with them.

So all I'm saying is I'm ready to play no repeat Free Association for a while. ;)

[PAULBACH]

After several hard drive melt downs, malfunctions or just bad juju there is only a couple of years of shots on hard drive #2. Fortunately most of the pictures had been backed up to media. Now I have one of those back up devices outside the machine and that spare inside the machine.

So what is on the hard drive? Only those files I don't care if I lose. That's not pessimism - that's experience. :type

[Hodag]

nothing but
0
1

[rocketman]

nothing but
0
1

Well that equates to 1 in decimal and probably the shortest, most compact operating system ever, you could have made a fortune with that, but of course now that you have posted the machine code for it, you kinda blew it, didn't ya?:laugh

RM

[RJM2096]

I hve about 8000 pictures, some scanned some from digital cameras. I estimate I will have about 12000 when I am done scanning old stuff.

We have them sorted/filed by the content or context. It is a pleasure starting a slide shown on our flatscreen.

I have them on several computers and a removable hard drive at home and work.

[DeeG]

Lots of pictures. I've been going through my 'box o pics' and slowly scanning them into the computer. The are all on an external 50G hard drive, along with financial stuff and the like. That way, next time a wild fire rolls through, I won't have to crawl under the desk and unhook the 'mother ship', I can just grab the portable and toss it into the car.

[gabentx]

We (my wife & I) probably have around 2-3k pictures or so on our hard drive. I've also started scanning in the older photos as I'd hate to lose them if something happened. We take all our photos/finances/etc and burn 'em onto DVD's once a month and put them in our bank's safe deposit box along with anything else critical not too lose.

Highly recommend others do it and put it offsite somewhere....

[PAULBACH]

We (my wife & I) probably have around 2-3k pictures or so on our hard drive. I've also started scanning in the older photos as I'd hate to lose them if something happened. We take all our photos/finances/etc and burn 'em onto DVD's once a month and put them in our bank's safe deposit box along with anything else critical not too lose.

Highly recommend others do it and put it offsite somewhere....
http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g264/PaulBach/Smilies/readingcomputer.gif
SMART, very smart. It is not a matter of IF a hard drive will fail but WHEN kind of like a final drive.

[rocketman]

I have two back-up outboard drives, that i rotate backups on, the chances of both failing at the same time along with the internal drive are slim, when one gets around 3-4 years old it gets replaced, they are certainly inexpensive enough, 160gigs for under $200? yeah that's doable, considering what the personal value of the data is. Pictures that I have uploaded for viewing or modified for printing etc. get copied to CD's though storing them offsite is probably not a bad idea. In the end though only around 15% max of my pictures are really worth saving, most I store i should just toss into the bit bucket since they are ones I'd never share or print, but just like in the days of film, I just can't let go of all the crappy ones either!:laugh Sentimential valve I guess.

RM

[dlowry]

A backup without off-site storage is only marginally better than no backup at all. One disaster at home, flooded basement, fire, weather, and "poof", it's all gone. I keep 4 copies of the photos, one on the home server, one on the macbook, one on an external drive and a set on DVDs that live off-site at the cottage 100 miles away. I guess I have 5 copies now if you include the TimeMachine backup on the macbook.

I have over 12 GB of photos and another 8-10 GB of raw video that I've shot, and that does not include scanning anything in from the archive I inherited from my parents. I have photos dating back as far as the 1930's and 8mm film from 1950-1970 that still needs to be converted.

[SNC1923]

A backup without off-site storage is only marginally better than no backup at all.

That's what's so great about SmugMug. All the photos I care about are there. And on my HD. Short of intercontinental nuclear missle strike, I should be OK.

[SheRidesABeemer]

That's what's so great about SmugMug. All the photos I care about are there. And on my HD. Short of intercontinental nuclear missle strike, I should be OK.

Really, you have an HD? ;) I'll ask Kev if I can store my pics in his HD...not sure how safe they will be. :scratch

[Rapid_Roy]

:laugh There isn't anyway you are going to outrun that ICBM on HD. I hope you have something faster.:stick

[gabentx]

That's what's so great about SmugMug. All the photos I care about are there. And on my HD. Short of intercontinental nuclear missle strike, I should be OK.

Unless SmugMug goes out of business, has a hardware failure of thier own, etc. :) Unlikely but possible. Kind of like preparing for the worst with your riding equipment. At least that's my thoughts. :)

[Mongo]

The owner of the company I work for said I could back up my pics on my work server. He said we have more storage than we could ever use. The IT guy partitioned me off some space and that is where I back them up. He did caution me against putting things there I don't want anyone else to see. Fine by me.

Nope my bike can't outrun an ICBM. Yet......:usa

[mrich12000]

3.2 gigs of landscapes and riding pics:lurk

[SNC1923]

Really, you have an HD? ;) I'll ask Kev if I can store my pics in his HD...not sure how safe they will be. :scratch

Gail, you can't store pics on a HD. They eventually all become blurry from the constant vibration.

:laugh There isn't anyway you are going to outrun that ICBM on HD. I hope you have something faster.:stick

Oh, I've got something faster.

Unless SmugMug goes out of business, has a hardware failure of thier own, etc. :) Unlikely but possible. Kind of like preparing for the worst with your riding equipment. At least that's my thoughts. :)

That isn't really a problem because I'd still have the pictures on my Hard Drive. Of course it would be a problem if BOTH of them went south at the same time (nuclear missle attack) but I'm comfortable with those odds, which I calculate to be in the billions.

[jdmetzger]

I'm quickly eating up space since getting a 10 megapixel camera. I have a number of gigs that need to be backed up. As an IT guy (systems administrator) I'm obsessive about data backups and hardware redundancy. At home, I rarely back anything up. I know, it's kind of weird, since I know the nightmare that is lost data, Just last week I dug out an old unused hard drive and copied all the important stuff over there. That will work as a stopgap measure. I'd hate to be forced to spend a grand or more to send a failed hard drive off to some data recovery people to restore my trip photos. BTW: if anyone has a hard drive fail, those data recovery places can really, REALLY work wonders. Sometimes they can be expensive, but if you HAVE to have those files back, give one of them a call.

Now I'm busy copying personal files off my work laptop to my home computer, since I'm changing jobs. Then I'll get my new laptop and start all over again. :)

[bricciphoto]

I'm quickly eating up space since getting a 10 megapixel camera.

:D I know the feeling. It gets worse if you have multiple versions of large .tif files that haven't been flattened in Photoshop. Years ago when I was messing around with X-Pan files the transparency scans were over 500 MB each!

I probably have 10s of thousands of photo files on my hard drives. Once upon a time I made a semi-serious effort to back up those I felt were important. It was a lot of work and consumed a lot of time, so now I just wing it and hope for the best.

A photographer friend of mine (works for a museum) keeps all his critical work on two mirrored hard drives, when the HDs fill up, he swaps them out, shelves them, and just adds new drives. Sort of expensive, but I guess if one's work has value, it's a prudent thing to do.

Over the years I've accidentally deleted more files than I care to think about. I've got almost 11,000 images on Pbase and some of them are the only remaining versions--useless at 4"x6" and 72 dpi. :scratch

[PGlaves]

We got our 1st digital camera in 2000
Voni got the camera, I got an external CD burner,
Every now and then I would backup photos to CD.

We start a new photos folder, with subfolders, lots of them, every year.

Finding stuff from prior years off of CD got to be a big pain so I got an external hard drive for storage. Still burn CD's (now DVDs) too as archival backups. kept in a firesafe.

The photos now stored on that external HD:

27.2 gig
41,746 files in 546 folders. That does not count 2008.

Yikes!!!

[Voni]

But I have TWO grandboys!

And sunsets.

And sunrises.

And mountains. And roads.

I need all those pictures.

Voni
sMiling

[SheRidesABeemer]

Voni, thanks for getting up early and getting those sunrise pics! I mean someone has to (and they are red!) :clap

[dlowry]

But I have TWO grandboys!

And sunsets.

And sunrises.

And mountains. And roads.

I need all those pictures.

Voni
sMiling

Voni,

Are you at least putting comments of keywords on the pictures so they might make sense to the grandkids when you will them your plethora of images? My mother was a shutterbug and I have photos of family members going back 70-80 years - too bad I haven't a clue who half of the people are! I can't say that I'm even doing that myself yet, but it might be a good idea for those who get this stuph down the road..

Cheers!