Keeping photos on camera

[Mohamed Ellozy]

Kevin Rooney posted for a friend:

Lost Sony Camera ... Memory stick has all 48 of my 4000 footer pics. REWARD ...

Many of my friends seem to carry all their photos on their camera/smartphone. I, on the other hand, transfer them to my computer the minute I get home.

What do you folks do?

 

[TDawg]

I never keep more than a hike or two in the camera without transferring to PC, so I'm with you.

 

[David Metsky]

I always transfer to the computer, and back them up in two places. Then I reformat the memory card.

 

[Peakbagr]

Dave, I back up in two places as well. How come you reformat the memory card though?

 

[David Metsky]

Dave, I back up in two places as well. How come you reformat the memory card though?

Because an occasional reformat is good insurance against corrupted file systems on the memory card.

 

[sardog1]

And now a word from someone who used to get paid to think about such things.

Be very sure that your backup is not subject to the same hazards that could destroy the original data. My backup goes on a portable hard drive (which I have tested twice with a full restoration.) If I'm not home, that hard drive goes with me. Otherwise, a fire or windstorm or burglary could make the backup worthless at a time I will most need it.

Years ago, a lab full of grad students at the University of Washington learned this the hard way. They dutifully backed up their research daily ... to drives that sat on the floor of the lab next to their work stations. A lab fire wiped out years of work for several of them.

 

[Peakbagr]

I back up all of my documents and email backed up remotely on Carbonite with constant backups running in the background.
Our desktop PC has twin 1TB internal HDs. We have Norton's Ghost, a program which does an entire mirror backup from one drive to the other and have it set for 1/week, but sometimes I run it more often.

Carbonite is the off site backup and it would take about 5-6 days to restore all of my docs online should something happen to our PC. Ghost automatically does it locally.

Had the chance to test Ghost in Sept. Main HD was failing so I dropped off the computer at local small business who built and services it. They dropped in a new HD, moved the entire copy of the failed HD back onto the new HD. When I went back the next day to pick it up there was no charge for labor or materials as the failure happened 20 days before the warranty expired on the HD. Plugged it in and had lost nothing since the last Ghosting was done the evening before it failed.

 

[WinterWarlock]

I always transfer to the computer, and back them up in two places. Then I reformat the memory card.

Yep - exact same method and for the same reason. I have a 750GB pocket drive I travel with and use that first, then store it on a 2TB drive that never moves off my desk.

 

[WinterWarlock]

I back up all of my documents and email backed up remotely on Carbonite with constant backups running in the background.

Ghost seems interesting - will have look closer at it. But, if you use Windows, you can download SyncToy from Microsoft for free...that's what I use, and it does a nightly backup from my local drive, to pocket drive, and then to the larger drive.

 

[Peakbagr]

Ghost has been great and saved me having to do a Carbonite download that would have involved reloading every program.
It covers a local failure, and Carbonite backs up the documents offsite for something happening to the computer at home.

 

[WinterWarlock]

Just don't store anything on Google Drive, unless you agree with their license agreement, which says you give them the right to do whatever they want with whatever you upload/store there!

 

[MichaelJ]

Photos come home with me and immediately get transferred onto both the laptop and the desktop. One of them is then the designated workplace for dealing with those photos, and when I'm done with the album, everything gets consolidated on the desktop. On long trips, I take the laptop and transfer onto it every night, and also back up to a 64GB usb stick.

The desktop photo library gets backed up continuously off-site to Crashplan. I also have two hard drives that do a encrypted backup of all my stuff (not just photos) and one always lives in my desk drawer at work, alternating every month.

It's better to reformat a flash card than to do "delete all." Reformatting is one quick step that just writes a new, blank filesystem (do NOT do "low-level" if that's an option on your camera). Doing delete-all performs a whole lotta writes to the card, rewriting the filesystem info repeatedly as each image is deleted. It also uses more battery. The only caveat is with certain devices …*for example, my Contour helmet-cam has to register a bluetooth address with the desktop software and keeps that address in a file. If I reformat that card, the file is lost and I have to reconnect the camera to the desktop software to reregister it. Very annoying to find out the hard way.

As for the phone, I have an iPhone and use Photostream. Any photos I take, once I hit wifi they're uploaded to the servers and the most recent 1,000 are stored. On my desktop, Aperture (and iPhoto will do this to) can be programmed to see the Photostream, but can also be separately set to automatically download it, too. So any photos I take on the iPhone (or iPad) will eventually make their way into my photo library with the only intervention from me being when I fire up Aperture for my regular uses.

 

[nartreb]

Copy from camera to PC as soon as I get home (or within a day or two anyway). I sort through and pick the good ones for my website. Uploading to my website functions as an off-site backup. Periodically I burn my recent shots to DVD; only after that do I delete them from my camera's card. So once I'm home I've always got at least two copies of everything, and eventually I've got four copies of the good stuff, one of which is offsite. In a fire, I'll lose my most recent shots, but the bigger risk is hard drive crashes, and I've got my data (not very quickly though) if that happens.

Actually I have some older stuff that's on DVD but not (at full size anyway) on the website, so I need to fix that - either upload it, or make an extra copy of my DVD collection to keep offsite, or both. Also I should keep a separate hard drive with the full collection, since restoring from many DVDs is a pain.

Offsite backups are important. I once had a laptop stolen from inside my apartment. The burglar also grabbed the Zip Drive (remember those?) - with my backup disk in it! To add insult to injury, he stole my pillowcases to carry the loot in.

 

[Tom Rankin]

I just started using Picasa, a Google product. If you have an Android smart phone, you can upload to Picasa and not have to worry about running out of space on your phone. As long as you are connected, you can show people your pictures from your phone. And you can share them with whoever you choose on Picasa via the web.

 

[yvon]

When I am back home, I copy my photos from my card (with a cards reader) to my external drive of my PC.
My external drives are a WiFi Western Digital with 2 hard drives who always do a backup automaticly between the two.
I always reformat all my cards instead of erased the photos on the card.

 

[DougPaul]

Periodically I burn my recent shots to DVD;

Home writeable CD-ROMs are more reliable than home writeable DVDs. (Mass produced DVDs and CD-ROMs use a different technology--they are printed, not written once at a time.)

I download my pics from the camera card to my main disk and copy them to an online backup disk (which backs up everything from the main disk). Every now and then I backup everything to an external disk which is stored (offline) away from the computer.

I used to oversee the backup of professional machines where we used a combination of 6-month epoch (total) backups, monthly incrementals, weekly incrementals, and daily incrementals to mag tape. Backup to offline tape is unfortunately impractical for the home user. Backup to multiple disks is, IMO, the most practical solution for home machines.

I consider my data to be private and will not back it up to anything on the web.


I have a small website which I build locally and copy an image of the local build to the website. Thus I cannot lose my website files if something happens to the website copy.

Doug

 

[bikehikeskifish]

...and daily incrementals to mag tape.

FLASHBACK!

(I too remember these as I manged many time-shared systems before there were workstations and later PCs.)

Tim

 

[Quietman]

FLASHBACK!

(I too remember these as I manged many time-shared systems before there were workstations and later PCs.)

Tim

I was there also. 170MB at 6250 BPI on 2,400 ft of mag tape. Now we put 64GB on a chip smaller than a dime. My back remembers hauling fireproof cases of mag tapes to offsite storage sites.

 

[Tom Rankin]

Tape certainly has not gone away. It is evolving, just like hard drives. If you are curious, you can google up quite a few examples.

 

[DougPaul]

Tape certainly has not gone away. It is evolving, just like hard drives. If you are curious, you can google up quite a few examples.

No it hasn't. Last I checked (admittedly quite a while ago), good tape systems were too expensive for most home users. In comparison, I recently bought two 3TB disks (main and online backup) for under $150 each.

And I started with DEC tapes before stepping up to 1600 BPI 1/2 inch mag tapes.

Doug