Storing Photos & Videos

[Anonymous]

Looking for recommendations on best way to store digital photos and videos. I have the photos on CD but wondering whether putting them on thumb drive would be better. Is there some type of service that can put my video clips on DVD.

[Anonymous]

My systems manager at work told me not to rely upon CD's for photo storage. He said that CD's often are defective, and no one knows how long they'll last. I have two stand-alone hard drives that I keep copies of my pictures on (a big Verbatim hard drive that I also use for general backups, and a smaller one that I use for photos only), plus I download most of my pictures to Kodak Gallery. About once a year, I order a copy of the entire archive on CD from them. I don't know how reliable thumb drives are, but I would use two. I had the hard drive on my computer crash at work recently, and, while most of my stuff was on the network, I lost enough that it has made me paranoid. When I researched which hard drive to get, it became clear that no form of storage is immune to disaster. The best bet is to have redundancy.

[Anonymous]

Agree with PP. I have been making CD backups of my pictures, and recently decided to save them all to an external hard drive. Imagine my surprise when some of the CDs that were only 4-5 years old seemed to have corrupt files on them. Luckily, I also used an on-line backup, so I could recover all my photos. But I think the golden rule is to have at least two backups (plus the original storage device), at separate locations, and preferably on different media (say website vs. CD vs. hard drive).

Good luck!