Online sites

<p>I did a little bit of searching and didn't completely find my answer on here so I'll go ahead and ask it.</p>

<p>I am wanting to make sure that my best photos are backed up. There are many posts on what most people do, but my question is:</p>

<p>For an amateur photographer, as a last resort would you be ok with backups from photo.net or similar sites incase of a catastrophe?</p>

<p>I do normally back up my photos as follows:</p>

<p>Copy from CF card to my 1TB dedicated photo HD.<br>

About 1x a month copy new files from HD onto DVDs.<br>

I'm ok with the fact that hard drive could crash and I could be out a month or so worth of photos, if I was a wedding photographer I understand that I would need to be more redundant, but i'm not.</p>

<p>What are your opinions? sorry if this post is a little vague.</p>

<p>How many pictures do you take in a typical month? Do you have enough flash memory to leave them (also) on the card until you back up the hard disk to DVD? If not, memory cards are cheap, so why not? Or if you really take that many pictures, back up to a DVD-R (or CD-R) once a week instead of to a DVD-R once a month.</p>

<p>Personally, I do not detele pictures from a memory card until after they are copied to a hard drive (actually the best ones, two hard drive, the inboard and an outboard) and then (once a month) burned from the hard drive to two CD-R's, a Delkin gold and a Verbatim. When the Delkin box of ten is all used, I take them to work and leave them there. Am I a little AR? Yeah, I guess so. Is the system perfect? No, if I had (say) a house fire, I could lose up to a year's worth. But I'm reasonably content.</p>

<p>If you want to do more, you could use an on-line backup service.</p>

 

<p>Short answer to photo.net....no. first off there's a size limitation. Your current solution is not bad, though I find burning to dvd's a pain. Because the cost has come down so much and the reliability has gone up, I just prefer to back-up to another external HD or drives of various sorts though when i get a serious shoot, I do also put a set on DVD. I try to have one in two places besides the original HD.</p>

<p>thanks for the input guys, Dave, good Idea of just leaving them on the disks. I think I upload my images to my computer too often. I do need to start using some of the size that today's modern cf cards allow.</p>

<p>My workflow is like this:</p>

<p>- All photos are on my local laptop<br>

- Every night, it is backed up to a network hard drive<br>

- Every week, I back everything up off-site to Flickr. I have a Flickr Pro account ($20/year) that allows unlimited images, and I make sure to upload the original images (not a scaled down version). <br>

Although not perfect, this system greatly reduces my risks. My biggest risk is if something happens to my laptop and network hard drive before I backed up the files to Flickr</p>

<p>The cheapest way might be to get a basic website from a reliable hosting company and put the photos there. They have professional backup systems so they're sure not to lose anything if a hard drive fails.</p>

<p>This gives you the option of setting up a publicly accessible section where you can put photos you want to show off, while the bulk of them are just stored for safety.</p>

<p>- Leigh</p>