[99PanozAIV]

My wife and I have a lot of digital images (10s of thousands) from a lot of camera sources, scattered around on 3 different computers (all Mac). We started with iPhoto, briefly moved to Aperture (which tanked real fast) moved back to iPhoto but it was a bit limited so moved to Adobe Lightroom. I've just heard that Lightroom is going to mandatory cloud storage. Fuck everything cloud...just me...I'm tried of my filing/organizing software packages changing.

So, I'm thinking of exporting everything from all the software packages I have into folders onto a couple external terabyte drives for now, organized in folders according to camera source, then organizing them in more detail into folders by subject, date etc...haven't decided yet. I'm thinking about a Synology NAS to hold everything. Any comments here pro/con about this? I'm retired so going through the old photos will just be something of a past time.

 

[RJAZE]

If you care about keeping things long term experts use the 3,2,1 rule.

Three copies on two different types of media with one stored off site. Off site is critical in case of natural disaster, fire, etc...

Cloud is so so for making sure your data will be there when you need it. I've got some real horror stories from shop owners that believed the hype of cloud storage being the best way to preserve your files.

I bought a gun safe with one hour fire rating for hard drive storage. Design file hard drives are in another fire proof safe within that.

Still working on the off site deal. Probably get a safe deposit box at the bank.

 

[99PanozAIV]

Thanks RJ.....have been reading reviews on different hard drives now. As cheap as they are I guess multiple drive copies is the way to go. It seems like none of them get 5 star reviews and the main 1 star review category is drive failure after a few uses. Multiple drives make sense from that standpoint as well. Just kind of a pain I guess.

Does anyone here use Gimp for their photo software?

 

[ratssass]

...sorta on subject.....how many archive as DNG??

 

[99PanozAIV]

I fooled around with raw for a bit but then realized, who am I fooling? My pictures are keep sakes and I rarely fool around with them that much. Most of mine are TIFF or JPG.

 

[99PanozAIV]

Bumping this for something I just discovered. I just bought a Blu-Ray burner with plans to burn images onto Blu-Ray discs but stumbled across something else; fortunately the burner I bought can handle them. They're called M-discs and have a 1,000 year life expectancy.....and they're available now. So, I'll be using those, Blu-rays and a HD for my 3:2:1 storage as suggested above, except I'm doing 3:3:1. Check out the m-disc.

http://www.mdisc.com