Keeping photographs or storing on laptop/ external drive dilema.

[Nana]

We have so many photographs in albums & loose in boxes that I'm not really sure what to do with them. We even have two albums that belonged to my OH's parent's friend. She died without family & as we were friends of hers were given them by a neighbour. A few years ago mum said that my brother wanted the family photographs when she died. I also wanted them, so one week I scanned them all & made discs for my brother, sister & myself. I sorted them all into albums for her & returned them.

I have an external hard drive which I save loads of pics, all my art college research, art courses/artwork etc records of things which can't be replaced that stretches over years. I've got so many pics of GSs that I've put in folders & put onto the external hard drive too. I do this periodically to make more space on my devices.

My question is how much do I trust putting everything in one place, now that technology's changing so quickly? Will there be a time when I won't be able to retrieve my 'gems' from the hard drive? When I first had a computer there were floppy discs. I still have course work on about six of these but don't know how to view them now. Can I? How many backups should we have? All my stuff's in one place so if anything happened to my external hard drive I'd loose everything.

I'm one to like the feel & smell of books, turning pages, so I don't have a Kindle. Do I need to change my habits & get all my books onto my IPad/Pod to allow me to pass on all my books to Charity shops so I make space? How much would this cost? The same with my photographs ... my dilema is shall I scan them all & store them on the external drive too? Shall I make picture books to pass on? I need to make some space in the house. Who will want our holiday pics when we've gone? When we downsize there won't be room for everything we have here.

I still have two Vinyl LP cases of my records from when I started collecting ...Beatles, Kinks, Donovan, Joan Biaz, Motown, Lionel the list goes on. For my 60th my DD transferred some of them onto a new IPod which my OH got me but I just can't let the vinyls go. Books, photos, vinyls are all so tactile & memory provoking. Some dilema eh?

[Shemadee]

We share your dilemma to some extent. We have a box of LPs though DD2 has taken the pick of them as they have a thing about vinyl. We also have loads of tapes (as in tape recordings), videos and DVDs which are pretty well obsolete now that we have tvs with Amazon Prime etc. I did pair down a lot of photos but still have loads left. I suppose the sensible thing would be to just dispose of them all rather than leaving them to moulder away in the loft!

Can photos be stored on an i-cloud? No idea what this is or how it works but I understand you would then still have access to them even if something happened to all of your gadgets. I do envision the whole of outer space being clogged up with all our photos and documents sent out into the ether for safety.

[Daisy]

Nana - I think you've neatly set out a dilemma most of us have in this day and age.

As far as storing on your external hard drive(s) go - that's fine, provided of course nothing goes wrong with the drive. You could back that drive up on the cloud. There are some site which store photos etc free, but I've never used them so can't help with that. If you have an Apple device you can store things on their i-Cloud, but it isn't unlimited - a small amount is, but I've run out of that now and don't feel inclined to pay a monthly charge for storage. You could get another external drive and copy the first drive onto the second one and store it elsewhere eg with a friend or relative, and you could do the same for them.

When I was doing professional photography, especially weddings as soon as I got home I'd download all the photos I'd taken on to my computer, back them up on an external drive and also on DVDs and give the DVDs to my son to keep. I also left the photos on memory cards until I'd done all the proofs! But that was a bit of overkill. LOL

I'm sure there will come a time when we'll be saying "external hard drives - so quaint, do you remember them?" But that time won't be overnight and you would have time to move everything to whatever the latest technology is. I think the only way you could get the information off floppy disks is via a computer which has an 'A' drive.

Cine and VHS films can be transferred to DVD, and if anyone is interested I can recommend the company I used.

I think what will probably happen is that we'll all get used to the idea of paying for cloud storage, and the storage providers will maintain back-ups for us. This is basically what happens with this forum -we use a reputable hosting company who also do hourly backups.

If anyone's got good suggestions about copying vinyls and keeping good sound quality, I'd love to know. I haven't got loads, but I do still love the music. For CDs I use iTunes and then stream them to a radio. I don't bother to back them up because I've still got the actual CDs, it's just more convenient to have access to them via the computer.

Shem - I've got this wonderful picture in my head of all our photos, documents and music spinning round in outer space. we could have musical meteorites, or paper storms!

[Plantaholic]

I have a tape that containes all our 8mm cine films going back to our marriage, the children and various holidays. GD put it in the video player for me and it chewed part of it up, I was very upset. Eldest GS arrived this afternoon to show off his new car and reminded me that he had copied them but wasn't too pleased with the quality so had just stored it so he downloaded it from the server for me. I am going to take the video to a shop to see if they would be able to salvage any of it. I also have some slides I would like on a CD. I got rid of a lot of my pics. Some time ago didn't see much point in keeping pics of gardens and houses visited and duplicate pics. The children don't want to sort them out, I might go through them again and see if I can dispose of a few more.



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