Storage Solutions Storing digital pics, what are the reliable options ?
- Thread starter raksrules
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HDTune seems more suited for sector scans. For real-time SMART stats monitoring, tools like CrystalDiskInfo and Hard disk sentinel are better.
Storing something online does not mean that you won't have a chance of loosing it in long term. Large companies all over ( especially the internet related businesses) are cutting costs in every possible manner. They might not take as many backups as before or may in future reduce their offshore data centers. Security, integrity, data verification all take a hit in such circumstances. There's no telling when a company doing very well today could go belly up the next month. You suddenly find that you have GB's of data to save in a months or week's time before the company closes. Online data storage is not the holy grail of long term storage. It can very well be a passing fad if some new form of data archival method comes in future.
Its always wise to keep a copy or two with you at hand.
Its always wise to keep a copy or two with you at hand.
raksrules
Oracle
I seem to have found a solution to my problem as of now. I have one copy uploaded on box.com. Entire weekend i was doing this. Now my box.com account has like 25+ GB of pics / videos. Apart from this i have been writing few DVDs so they are stored in the CD Case somewhere and i never look at them.
My brother has a 250GB external HDD which he never uses so am gonna wipe that out and put a copy there and on top of all this my media player houses a 1TB Internal HDD which has few movies and TV shows but largely it is empty. So on copy along with videos is going there.
You can never have too many backups
This all may sound paranoid but with personal pics i don't want to take chances.
In fact i plan to sort out these pics and get them actually printed. Still unsure whether i want to do it. Watching a hard copy album is something i always feel good about rather than watching on TV screen / laptop etc.
My brother has a 250GB external HDD which he never uses so am gonna wipe that out and put a copy there and on top of all this my media player houses a 1TB Internal HDD which has few movies and TV shows but largely it is empty. So on copy along with videos is going there.
You can never have too many backups
This all may sound paranoid but with personal pics i don't want to take chances.
In fact i plan to sort out these pics and get them actually printed. Still unsure whether i want to do it. Watching a hard copy album is something i always feel good about rather than watching on TV screen / laptop etc.
raksrules
Oracle
print outs are best option , i have an entire wall of prints , which keeps changing and a digital frame which keeps on changing , memories is all you get
Yes i want to take prints but i need to find some time to sort of the pics for prints. Moreover it becomes very difficult to decide which photo to chose and which not . But i shall get it done.
@kippu
I have a digital photo frame and i am gonna put the pics in a USB and attach it to the frame. But before that too i shall need to compress all pics since some of them are 5 and 8 Mpx and i don't want the frame to display pics in their entire resolution. It also takes time to display so i better compress them.
Any good software to mass compress pics ? I have 1000s of pics to compress.
On top of all these the videos occupy hell lot of space now and i don't bother to encode them in other formats. With high end smartphones and 1080p videos from camera i have videos of 20 Min or so running into 1.5 GB or so but it is worth when you see them on the 46" TV
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ya its inbuilt in Windows 7. Just right click a drive and you will see the "Turn on Bitlocker" option.
Its the safest(free) option. Other better option are Symantec PGP or like ones.
I am using bitlocker for 2+years. Doesn't matter if you format you OS drive or change machines or connect HDD to any other PC the behavior is same everywhere...
The drive is locked by default and not accesible without a password. Once you enter the pwd the drive will stay unlocked till the next reboot. This is the only flaw I found. - No explicit way of timing out or locking the drive again without restarting your machine. But I can live with that for now. Its not everyday I access that backed up drive
Its the safest(free) option. Other better option are Symantec PGP or like ones.
I am using bitlocker for 2+years. Doesn't matter if you format you OS drive or change machines or connect HDD to any other PC the behavior is same everywhere...
The drive is locked by default and not accesible without a password. Once you enter the pwd the drive will stay unlocked till the next reboot. This is the only flaw I found. - No explicit way of timing out or locking the drive again without restarting your machine. But I can live with that for now. Its not everyday I access that backed up drive
eternoMind
Herald
You can try FS Photo Resizer for compressing photos. It's light and portable and does a good job for me.
I keep one copy of all my photos on another hard drive and sync using SyncBack every now and then. Have also burnt a few important pictures on those Verbatim DVDs i bought a couple of years ago from DVDstoredelhi. That apart, have used Box.com and GMail to varying degrees for storing pictures.
I keep one copy of all my photos on another hard drive and sync using SyncBack every now and then. Have also burnt a few important pictures on those Verbatim DVDs i bought a couple of years ago from DVDstoredelhi. That apart, have used Box.com and GMail to varying degrees for storing pictures.
Ray
Explorer
raksrules
Oracle
I am also enticed by this. Mainly because apart from space, it has the ability to see the pics online and put in albums and all such stuff. And yes it is then accessible anywhere. So i might upload pics there but only after sorting them. Don't want to upload random GeeBees there.
Does Flickr allow videos too ?
Yes it does . Yesterday or prior they had put restriction of 300 MB which they have now removed . Storing your pics in a 32 GB pendrive is a better idea as have seen two people who lost their stuff which was in HDD . HDD were in closets and upon checking after 6 odd months were found dead so ....
babhishek
Herald
@raksrules,
Use Irfanview to mass compress/convert images. It has a lot of plugins for various formats. Research and choose your format wisely as the image quality will always decrease after compression. A jpeg file is already compressed, so check if you are getting a decent compression ratio otherwise it is better to keep the original file.
Also avoid multiple compressions on a single file. I mean don't convert .bmp->.jpg->.png. Go directly from .bmp->.png.
Use Irfanview to mass compress/convert images. It has a lot of plugins for various formats. Research and choose your format wisely as the image quality will always decrease after compression. A jpeg file is already compressed, so check if you are getting a decent compression ratio otherwise it is better to keep the original file.
Also avoid multiple compressions on a single file. I mean don't convert .bmp->.jpg->.png. Go directly from .bmp->.png.
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raksrules
Oracle
Its like an image might be say 8 Mpx one and occupy like 2-3 MB, so if i can make it less size (MBs, KBs) then it is good.
Also the one use i have for the compressed images is to put in a smaller pen drive and attach it to the digital photo frame. This is because if each pic is like few MBs then i can store far less pics on the pen drive and also the digital photo frame takes time to display the image (sometimes).
Also the one use i have for the compressed images is to put in a smaller pen drive and attach it to the digital photo frame. This is because if each pic is like few MBs then i can store far less pics on the pen drive and also the digital photo frame takes time to display the image (sometimes).
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