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Hi Photography forumites I've got 5 years' worth of family pics on my HD at the moment (about 14.5Gb), all tagged and tidily tucked away into folders. Backing up all these pics is a very necessary pain in the arse now, however, being very disorganised I've not got any DVDs to split the archive across with 7-zip. I *do* have a couple of spare 4Gb flash drives handy. JPEGs seem very hard to compress down, but I think I've found a possible solution- Blubox. Has anyone had any experience of using this software? I've done a test run which compressed 13Gb down to about 4Gb, but I haven't had a chance to go through all 4000 pics to check for artifacts yet. If not, any other recommended archiving software/methods? Cheers |
Archiving, backing up and bomb proofing a load of old pics- Blubox?
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Immaterial 2,626 posts
Seen 5 hours ago
Registered 14 years ago -
Storage is cheap and likely to get cheaper, why would you want to compress your files and risk (a) file degradation and (b) finding yourself in the future unable to read your data? I used something similar about ten years ago to compress all my stuff to fit on consecutive floppies and of course now I can't read them.
My solution is to keep multiple back-up of all my photos, full size, on different drives kept in different locations. I have one at the office and one at my parents and one at home. You could also use an online archive though I wouldn't trust them for my only backup.
14.5 gigs is nothing at all. Daft to try to compress so little, to be honest! -
Never heard of Blubox, but if I were you i"d go and get an external hard drive and get a backup solution set up. You can get a terabyte of storage for about £100, which is easily what you'd spend in a year on an online backup subscription service.
I have an external 750GB drive for my 750GB iMac, to double it's storage space, then a 1.5TB drive daisychained to that which backs up both drives every night. I double up the last two years of photos on both the iMac and the expansion (with everything before that exclusively on the expansion), so as both drives are backed up onto the other drive, I'm pretty much covered.
I also subscibe to Backblaze to backup on their servers the vast majority of my most important data from both the iMac and the expansion drive, including the photos, but that's the last line of defence in the case of all my drives failing or being caught in a fire or whatever.
I'd suggest you buy an external backup drive and some software that you can set to do a backup every single night. Problem solved.gif)
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urban 13,148 posts
Seen 4 days ago
Registered 17 years agoyou have 15gb of data you want to backup, hard drives cost about 20p per gb these days.
Buy a redundant storage drive and keep it cool and dry. easy. -
What does 'redundant' mean in this context? -
jellyhead 24,356 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoI imagine he means a drive dedicated to just holding the backup data. Connect it up, backup what you need and then disconnect it and store it somewhere safe. -
Why not pay for a flickr pro account and then upload the lot? -
Red-Moose 5,344 posts
Seen 6 years ago
Registered 19 years agoImmaterial wrote:
JPEGs seem very hard to compress down, but I think I've found a possible solution- Blubox. Has anyone had any experience of using this software? I've done a test run which compressed 13Gb down to about 4Gb, but I haven't had a chance to go through all 4000 pics to check for artifacts yet. If not, any other recommended archiving software/methods?
Cheers
I would advise against using compression on your photos. Remember the core aspect of the digital age: every is duplicatable multiple times, infinite times with no loss of quality.
Basically, buy 2 or 3 small HD drives and copy all of the stuff on to each, putting one in a friends, family's house, and so on. Duplication MULTIPLE times is what the digital era gives us, not simply one tape-backup style system. Make 10 copies, make 50 copies on a BR. -
Immaterial 2,626 posts
Seen 5 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoSo a fast scan of the thread tells me that nobody's heard of Blubox. Shame- it got some nice reviews in the (photography) press, according to their website.
Kal- I was thinking of possibly upgrading my Picasa storage, then making my ISP complain about me uploading the equivalent of several films. 20Gb storage for $5 per year...
I am aware of how cheap external memory is nowadays, so I've got one more question for the crowd- short of going for MrED209's muscular and robust back-ups, is there a problem with just burning a DVD or 2 and sticking it in the household safe?
Thanks for the help so far! -
mal 29,326 posts
Seen 4 years ago
Registered 20 years agoNothing wrong with that. It's not quite as good as storing the backups in a physically different location, but it would stop your backups being theved along with your computery bits in case of a burglary, and may help stop your data going up in smoke in case of a fire (two eventualities that MrEd's solution doesn't cover). The main problem with it is you have more than 9GB of data to store.
That said, I used to backup 4GB drive to to CDs, though a lot of that data was OS and programs I could just reinstall if I needed them. -
jellyhead 24,356 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoIf you're looking to store the DVDs for a while i'd look at getting some Taiyo Yuden disks or the like as they are recommended for archival use. -
mal 29,326 posts
Seen 4 years ago
Registered 20 years agoThat may be true, but it's worth bearing in mind that backups generally get less interesting as they get older. I've still got a set of backups I made in 1994, and I've still got a machine that's capable of reading them, but I've never bothered to actually do so. I've still got most of that data on newer machines and backed up as part of their backups, so that makes the old backups largely redundant.
Unless you're trying to store data for future generations to find, rewritable storage that you can reuse (be it a DVD-R, hard disc in an enclosure, or on-line storage) makes most sense. -
neilch 749 posts
Seen 3 days ago
Registered 16 years agojellyhead wrote:
If you're looking to store the DVDs for a while i'd look at getting some Taiyo Yuden disks or the like as they are recommended for archival use.
Most consumer CDs that I wrote as backups 5 years ago have started to degrade shockingly. With external HDs being so cheap and handy these days I'd go for something like a Western Digital Passport. -
Immaterial wrote:
Yep, the problem is that DVDs degrade. In 15 years there's no saying whether a) the format will still even exist or b) if it does exist, whether the discs will be readable. In fact the latter problem could raise its head in less than 10 years.
I am aware of how cheap external memory is nowadays, so I've got one more question for the crowd- short of going for MrED209's muscular and robust back-ups, is there a problem with just burning a DVD or 2 and sticking it in the household safe?
Thanks for the help so far!
Seriously dude, buy a hard drive or two and back up onto it/them. Apart from anything else you should reeeaaally have a backup system for your machine. One day the hard drive in your computer will die, and it's only then you'll realise the true value of the hundred or so quid you spent on backup drives! -
Immaterial 2,626 posts
Seen 5 hours ago
Registered 14 years agothanks for advice guys- time to see if I can persuade the missus that I need to buy more tech -
Dunneh 158 posts
Seen 9 months ago
Registered 15 years agoYou could also RAID your hdd to protect against disk failure. -
Still don't get why uploading them to flickr isn't the best solution. It's kinda what it's there for, and it means you can share your pictures at the same time, and download them to any computer from wherever you are if you want to. Plus Yahoo's servers are way safer than any HDD you'll buy.
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