How do you store and backup your photos ?

I started converting my old, paper family photos to digital but lost the will to live about a quarter of the way through. So to you, John! Quite honestly, with the rate at which technology changes now I think it's a bit of a lost cause. I've still got a music collection of vinyl discs, cassettes, CDs and DVDs which again, I started to convert to MP3 until I realised that formats had already moved on before I was halfway through.
In theory, the Cloud is the way to go, but I've no confidence in future providers of 'space' being able to honour long-term contracts. The companies are almost as ephemeral and rapidly-changing as the formats.
I'd say the best we can do is store it all on a HDD and hope that, by the time someone is interested in retrieving it, they'll have the wherewithal to physically access and view it in whatever format is current at the time.

 

I’ve used Amazon to store my photos. Can only hope they’re safe there I assume that as long as the Prime fee is paid then they’ll be ok….

 

As a complete non computer person I’d look at this from the other end of the telescope. I’d select the few really good, important images and get them professionally printed onto good quality paper. I have old paper photos that I took going back sixty years and my brother has the family photos of our grandparents that were taken in about 1890, still all in good nick. Who knows what life will be like in 135 years from now? But the paper images could still be in fine fettle.

Some of my ancestors are shown in my little logo on the forum here. The original photo still exists even after all that time. I could ask my cousin to print me one off if I needed one.

 

I've got my photos (digital camera ones and also old black-and-white ones of several ancestral generations) on my two laptops and 3 external drives, although they need putting in some sort of order. I'm afraid of using clouds because I don't understand it and I keep thinking they won't be 'mine' any more.

I am now the 'family archivist' as my brother calls me, and I've also got a box of 8mm cine films and many slides to put on something soon, and I think it will be my computer. My brother will have them after my days - that is if I go first, and since I'm the elder one that may happen - and if my brother died first then his youngest boy 'wants' them.
What will happen to them after that I don't know.

I've also got Beryl's family photos and I mean to give them to her relations but never seem to get around to it.

On the cine films there are lots of bits of local interest, such as places that have changed, buildings that no longer exist etc, and I mean to give those 'bits' to local history societies. I'll have to enquire with them how I can do that.

 

@JWK Think you have done about all your can, similar to what we do.

Most importantly is having someone trusted not in your house, who knows what you have, where it is and if its protected by any passwords.

While SSDs are becoming more popular, we have found they are less reliable than a HDD when used in a PC,( ie 2 failed under 4 years old) but no idea what they are like for such long term storage ? can their stored data degrade quicker than a HDD ?
Would make sure at least one or two of the backups are on HDDs.

Assume you are using a Copy program that will quicky update your backups by just adding any new photos, not a full lengthy copy.

Cloud storage, it works, but how safe long term and how do you know other folk cannot illegally access your pics? it has happened !

Over the years folk reckoned they could store data for years only to find that it does not, eg Magnetic tapes , Floppy Disks and Optical Disks were all said to last a lifetime, but not the case.

Think the recent LA fires and our UK floods show how important a copy of our online details, not just photos, should be stored somewhere super safe well away from ones current location.

 

I've got a hard drive with lots of photos on, back in the day I started backing them up on discs but they now appear almost obsolete so the hard drive is the one now, most are not anything special, just plants, but I do have scans of the family from years ago, and the prints are still around, but it will probably all go to landfill when I'm gone.

I do have some old video, mostly on mini VHS which I'd like to look through and was thinking of getting something that I can play them back on, but there never seems to be the right time to do it.

 

There are places that you can send your tapes to that will convert them to the Cloud, DVD, usb key etc, if you cannot get around to using one of the VHS to PC converter kits you can buy.

eg Convert VHS to DVD | Rated 5/5 on Trustpilot!

 

Thanks @ricky101 , I was at one point thinking of getting a player but never got round to it, this is an option, thanks.

 

Nobody, not even yourself, is going to look through 100,000 photos. If you only looked at each photo for 2 seconds it would take nearly 60 hours to go through them. You need to go through and delete all but the most important. You probably took dozens at a single event so, if it's the people you are interested in, just make sure you have one or two images of all the attendees and delete the rest.

 

I also have many 1,000s of photos - over several HDD as well as in the cloud. It's certainly difficult to know what to do with them & how you can make sure they will be "viewable" in the (not so distant) future. Technology is changing fast. When we moved back to the UK from Spain 20 odd years ago I brought the entire OS of Win3.1 with me - on 10 floppy discs! (The original official ones). Imagine doing something like that with a dozen DVDs today & Win11!

 

@Balc when I started a job which included PC support and installation, the basic Win3.1 system was on 3 1.44 HD floppy disks. 'HD' meaning High Density gave a huge 1.44mb each. Imagine how many would be needed now. The other question is how much of the bloatware included in present day software is really needed. I certainly don't use much more functionality of Microsoft Office now than I did when it first came out.
Back on the subject of how to store photo's, my wife and I are considering looking back over holiday photos and other special events and printing no more than 100 from each event and keeping them in albums. Prints these days are very cheap. Anybody can pick up an album at any time and flick through it. They are far more likely to do that than to sit at a screen, assuming the digital image format is still available. I actually have an album from the late 1800's of family portraits. Unfortunately there are no details on them, but one or two were the spitting image of living family members so they were certainly our family.