Backup Warning!
You can lose YOUR precious pictures anyway!

Foreword:

I am increasingly involved with attempting to recover pictures from aging hard drives. It makes no difference if the hard drive is an external one.   Users do not realize that hard drives are mechanical devices that often do not survive five years. 6 years is a blessing, and 7 years... I've seen only one.

 External hard drives are the cheapest method to provide useful backups. They are the  same as internal hard drives.  They fail at the same rate. 5 years is my expected limit of usability.

Warning: 

Digital cameras have made it so easy to capture pictures and movies, it's time for all of us to adapt our attitude to the times regarding what to keep.

The days of shoe boxes keeping all of our pictures is over.  We used to put a few special pictures into a Photo Album suitable for a coffee table or a family gathering. Every year would generate a new photo album.

Today we place the photo album on the web, using a web site that stores it safely and securely away from the physical homestead.  Often one can order prints from the album.

If you are old enough for using boxes to store pictures, how often did you search the shoe boxes for pictures?  Is saving all those pictures really worth it to anyone besides you? Be honest. Is the rare occasion for a regret worth all that hard drive space and organization hassle?

With proper organization and practices, I am suggesting that your attitude toward losing all those "other pictures" is not so stressful since you have the best ones saved elsewhere.  Actually, all the hard drive space consumed is not really worth it unless... you save them on a different hard drive than the C: main hard drive.
Q. Why?
A. Because you have other important data you need to back up. When Including all your pictures and music with that personal data, you complicate the backup, and you consume horrific amounts of space that you pay for but are wasting.  Commercial backup procedures that handle that better are not for the home user.

Considerations regarding Online storage
 for personal data:

 

  • Music, Pictures and movies consume a lot of hard drive space quickly.
  • Online photo albums for sharing do not accommodate movies or itunes.
  • External hard drive in the home is relatively cheap. It should be used only for short term situations and disposable data.
  • All mechanical devices (hard drive) have a limits life.
  • Anything stored at home is not safe from disasters like fire and theft.
  • Online services have a monthly fee.
    • Are secure
    • Are backed up
 

If you just have to save them, at least shrink their file size to something under 300 KB!

Recommendation:

  1. Get smart about ALL images saved:
    • Crop appropriately all images you want to keep
    • Unless you are going to print a Poster, keeping an original size (resolution) image is the biggest waste of resources in your life.
    • images displayed on computer screen can not benefit from a width over 1600 pixels
    • Images printed should be properly cropped first. Why do you want to save the oversized original?
    • There is no benefit in image file size of about 380K (380,000) bytes. Some cameras make images over 5,000 KB.  Saving all those images without reducing them can not be justified in any way.
    • Windows has a neat tool for resizing.  All Photo editors can resize, but is not as quick overall.  The Windows Power Toys Tool can resize all marked files in one pass. Link: Get "Image Resizer".
  2. From every photo batch of images, pick a few that are Photo Album quality.
    • Put those photos into a Photo Album folder(s) organized for long term reference.
  3. Backup those photos to a place more permanent than your own hard drive.
    • CD or DVD (Stored in your residence is not safe from disasters)
    • Online Photo Album
  4. Delete the remaining photos, or store them externally. (Why?)
    • If you store them, recognize it's not a big loss if they are lost.
    • Admit that those photos usually are of no interest to anyone except you.
    • External hard drives and CD/DVD are all at risk in your home.

I will be the first to admit that I am like you. I have a lot of grand kids images from 1999 to 2005.  Cameras then did not produce such large file sizes., so they are not a problem. They still print great pictures up to 5X7 and 8X10.  Those site images are great even after being resized down to 640 x 480 (50K).  The space consumed on the hard drive for all those years is less than 1 GB (1,000 MB)

Newer consumer cameras produce image file size that are absolutely insane.  You and I have no way to utilize that. (It was not on purpose. It is a side result of technology improvement at the hardware level.)

Looking for a place to store images for a short while? Or store other files.  It's better than attaching larger image files.

Drop Box
Lets Crate
Sugar Sync

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Definitions:
Byte = alphameric character
KB = KiloByte or 1,000 (actually 1024)
MB = MegaByte or 1,000 KB
GB = GigaByte or 1,000 MB  (1,000,000,000)
1 CD = 670 MB or 450 floppy discs
1 DVD =  7 CDs
1 GB = 1,492,537 CDs (almost 1-1/2 million)
1GB = 53,033 DVDs

How we got here (or Learning from history!)

Across the decades...

As camera usage became more common, the quantity of pictures that we kept... increases.

Where did we keep all those pictures of the kids growing up?

How did we organize them, and why?

Photo Albums to lay on the coffee table contained a few of many pictures we saved.  The rest were stored in boxes. 

Shoe boxes eventually evolved to commercial products.  Boxes with indexing were useful for organizing the increasing numbers of pictures.  For some reason, we want to keep them all.

How often do you go to those boxes to find a few pictures? ... and why?  What is the "pay back".

The movie camera became common in the 1950's  Remember the 8 mm cameras? IMaybe that is before your time? It was film that had to be developed.

Computers in the home.

40 years  and a couple of generations later, digital cameras came along.  The cost per image and quantity of pictures began to explode.

Improvements in technology increased the storage capacity of hard drives, and was accompanied with improvements in picture quality (digital size increased dramatically).

TIME TO REVIEW OUR BEHAVIOR

We are storing so much data because getting it is fun, and reviewing it is fun, too.  But dealing with the complications of backup and storage is critical and time consuming.  Unless you don't care what you lose, it's time to get smart about the issue.  Otherwise there is also risk to the other personal files that you do care about... like taxes and financials, or maybe legal documents or school work.

Plan accordingly.

 Movies: If you think saving a picture here and there has become a space
 problem, What do you think about all movies we save?

Q. Why?

A. Because you want to show them to someone else?
Q. Who?
Q Why?
Q. How many of those people do you thin really want to see it? or are they just polite?
Q How long to keep it?
Q. Where and how to organize?