Do i have to back up?

[Fnaar]

I used to keep all my photeez on CDs (remember them ) but they kept corrupting. For about the last year or so, everything is in "the cloud" (I like living dangerously, perhaps) No probs so far.
It used to be only me that bothered to organise them into folders, holidays, special occasions etc, and now that the kids are older, have their own mobiles/cameras/facebook etc, I find that I'm reduced to taking snaps of my bike and the dog, and I don't need to bother so much any more. But I know that one day, when I am dead and gone, they will thank me for my current organisation

 

[rh100]

Totally disagree - memory sticks have a finite amount of times they can be written to before they become corrupt. Even before that limit, they can be very flakey. They are great for convenience but no good for the long term.

Pure FUD. If you are using memory sticks for back-up you aren't writing to them constantly, in fact really only once. MTBF is around 10,000 cycles on even the cheapest sticks and you can read as often as you like.

FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. I would have all of those feelings if backing up my most valued data to a memory stick. I've seen too many fail.

 

[gaz]

Blimey

question is - how do you manage the backups and do you test them and is there any redundancy?

A lot of the process is automated..
All you have to do is copy the files you want to back up to the file server in the basement. Then after that the process is automated. Apart from the off site stuff which we update a few times a year.

 

[plainlazy]

Twowheelsgood

How do you go about using a memory card ? i have a slot on my printer but i think that is just for printing photos from a card.

 

[swee'pea99]

Oh, I forgot to mention, they're terrible scaremongers too.

(Having said which, I personally stick to Sandisk sticks - I think they are the least likely to fail.)

 

[ian turner]

Twowheelsgood

How do you go about using a memory card ? i have a slot on my printer but i think that is just for printing photos from a card.

If your pc doesn't have any memory card shaped slots then you'll have to buy a card reader. Don't ask which one just buy one of those with 4 slots and claims to every format of card under the sun. It's not one of those items where there are any standout models neither.
Don't use cards to store your photos on as they are too easy to lose/ for the dog to eat and you would have to keep a catalogue or resort to going through evey one on a quest to find the right one.
Also note that cheap cards can go as low as 3000 writes before failure and that you don't write once to the FAT structure but once evey time you create/delete/move/copy a file and it's going to be a block of memory that goes rather than a single location.
An external drive and backup eveytime you load more photos is a good start as it's unlikely that both locations blow up at the same time. Use a NAS drive if you want separation between your pc and the drive by plugging it directly into your modem/router where it will be availabl to all your pcs and you can even schedule regular checks for new files in your photos directory in case you forget to backup. You can get a 1tb nas drive for £120

 

[PaulSB]

Totally disagree - memory sticks have a finite amount of times they can be written to before they become corrupt. Even before that limit, they can be very flakey. They are great for convenience but no good for the long term.

Pure FUD. If you are using memory sticks for back-up you aren't writing to them constantly, in fact really only once. MTBF is around 10,000 cycles on even the cheapest sticks and you can read as often as you like.

I'm not a technical person at all. I recently bought two new Imation 4GB sticks for work. One is fine the other failed on the third time of using, will not open and cannot be recognised. I also have a work colleague who insisted on backing up to a stick, when his Sage data (accounting software) became corrupted the backup was found to be faulty, it cost several hundred £££s to have a data rescue and took 4 days (no accounting work done in that time). He now uses an external hard drive. I feel anything like this that you pay a few £££s for is cheap, disposable and liable to fail. It's not the 99.99% that are OK it's the 0.01% which fail one should be concerned about.

I have a couple of external hard drives; one I use every day, and have done for several years, to back up my work system, the other is used occassionally to backup the home PC. Both cost around £70/80. I have friends who accidentally erased their hard drive, two PC shops have been unable to help them, and have lost every digital family photo they had and no backup.

£5 for a stick or £70/80 for a hard drive. What price the family photo album?