19 replies to this topic

[Lutya]

We went away this weekend and came back to find that our house had been robbed. They stole my laptop, among other things. I hadn't backed up in a year, which is right when I started birding. I lost a years worth of pics of all 160 of my lifers. I have some of the best uploaded to picasa but not all. I'm so bummed!

[Liam]

Thanks for getting the word out! That's the right thing to do. I've been backing up my photos on the internet (Panoramio.com) for about a year and a half now.

I also keep a gallery documenting all the record shots I have: http://www.panoramio.com/user/6372052

[Platypus]

Oh Lutya, that is horrible news. I'm so sorry.

I'll take your advice one step further and recommend people back-up to an external hard drive AND the internet. There's no reason not to now - external hard drives are cheap, the software is easy to use, and your internal hard drive is liable to die at any time given how most stock computers are made these days.

I don't go all the way though. I back-up all my photos to my external and then upload the best photos into a dropbox folder.

[Lutya]

Does Panoramio let you download your pics back to your computer (if you lose them) at full size?

[Lutya]

I do have a flash drive that is big enough for all my pics but my problem is remembering to do it! I've now set an alarm on my phone to remind me to do it once a month.

[calepo]

I'm so sorry to hear that! But, how wonderful of you to remind all of us to save ours in the midst of your loss. So thoughtful. Thank you!

[meghann]

Oh Lutya, that is horrible news. I'm so sorry.

I'll take your advice one step further and recommend people back-up to an external hard drive AND the internet. There's no reason not to now - external hard drives are cheap, the software is easy to use, and your internal hard drive is liable to die at any time given how most stock computers are made these days.

I don't go all the way though. I back-up all my photos to my external and then upload the best photos into a dropbox folder.

And if you want to go EVEN further, you do what my dad does. Back them up online, back them up to an external, copy the external to another one, and keep the extra at someone's house that you trust. I think he picks up and syncs the extra external once a quarter or so. Might be overkill, but he does have a point. If your house burns down, it won't matter if you had those photos on an external drive, if it's in the house with the computer.

[Doug Herr]

Back them up online, back them up to an external, copy the external to another one, and keep the extra at someone's house that you trust.

I have an external backup drive at home, one at the office, one at my brother's house, one at my daughter's house.

[Seattle]

I have a back up hard drive at home and I've thought about getting a back-up for that. I have unlimited storage at Photobucket but the resolution isn't the best. Hardrives are pretty cheap anymore so I guess you've convinced me to get another.- sorry to hear about the theft. I hope they catch the people that did it.

[zoutedrop]

Like Seattle, I feel bummed about what happened, that is a life changing event. My initial thought was, well, you start birding from scratch. I have over three hundred birds and the new ones are slow in coming. To start over would add some excitement to your trips.

I then started thinking about some of my shots that would never be replaced, the BCNH yardbird (my avatar), a hunting white morph Reddish Egret, a couple of rare birds. I am going to have to rethink this a bit. A sad story lutya, but I think you helped me get this right, an external drive away from home.

[cabirds]

I tried to backup my hard drive... But I couldn't find the reverse switch!

Sorry to hear of your loss! That's always heart-rending! I have a friend's drive here to put in the clean box and do a platter-swap on to try to save half a TB of photos that weren't backed up. Theft, unfortunately, isn't something I can help recover though!

>> Does Panoramio let you download your pics back to your computer (if you lose them) at full size?

If they're storing what you sent them at full size, we can get the data back off - even if I need to write you a scraping/mirroring script to do it! Let's give that some thought - that's a good workaround for you.


I have three sets of externals (1.5TB x 2 each). One is always in the fire/flood safe at home, one in the fire/flood safe at the office, and one plugged in whenever I make a big dump to the internal photo drives (2TB in RAID 5). I've done video professionally long enough to know that I need fast _reliable_ storage, and offsite storage at that. I alternate my drives in and out once a month, and replace them every nine months religiously. I have a stack of "probably pretty good drives" that have been retired and removed from their external eSATA housings.

I need to start looking soon at larger drives as my library continues to grow. Hard to keep up when you're generating at least 16GB a week!

[cabirds]

You know - thinking about it now:

Not for _every_ photo, but for your "hero photos" - send them out to be printed on archival paper with archival ink. If you store them in compatible archival sleeves, they should last longer than our lifetimes. If the end of your world should occur again, you could take the archival prints to be drum scanned. There'd still be some loss, but you'd recover the vast majority of the bits. I know it sounds archaic, but there's something to be said for it.

I lost all of Thor!'s puppy pictures for 16+ years ago and was heart broken. Then I looked at the prints I had framed and thought: "hey, wait a sec!". I scanned them on just my prosumer-grade 1200DPI scanner, and darned if they don't look pretty good printed all the way up to their current size and even a little beyond. Some enhancement in photoshop actually brought out a lot of dynamic range that didn't exist in the cameras back then.

[JimBob]

I haven't backed my photos up. . . but the computer their in is a 50 pound box that I don't think anyone would want!We're getting a new one soon though.

[Liam]

Does Panoramio let you download your pics back to your computer (if you lose them) at full size?

Yes, Panoramio lets you download full size photos at top quality. It can even upload RAW files, I think.
Here's a full-size image from November 2010.
http://static.panora...al/60272942.jpg

[Platypus]

http://static.panora...al/60272942.jpg

Om nom nom.

[LauraC]

I'm so sorry to hear you lost your photos. I lost all of mine in 2008 when both hard drives were fried. I was able to recover some from Photobucket and Kodak (paid for CDs) but I didn't post them to those websites in their full size so all I got back were a lot of 800 x 600 (or less) photos. I now have Carbonite that backs up my files every day on their servers.

[lonestranger]

That's a tough lesson to learn, Lutya, and a tough way to learn it. I hope the other lost valuables are easier to replace to than your photos.

I too lost my photos at one point, my external hard drive at the time was my only backup and I used it for ALL of my raw files. I had just finishing transfering a few months worth of photos from my laptop when the dog's tail lightly tapped the hard drive causing it to ever so gently fall over. That was the end of my first 25,000 photos, with the exception of the jpgs I keep on the laptop and the ones uploaded to Picasa, everything was lost. Yeah, I take a lot of repetitive photos and I save ALL of them, after all, you never know when they'll be coming out with a new photo editor that magically turns a crap photo into a wonderful piece of art.

I still only have one backup for my raw files but after reading this reminder, I think I will start working on the rule of thirds for backing up photos. Keep a backup of your photos at home, a second backup online, and a third backup somewhere else. We hope it'll never happen(again), but eventually our current storage devices are going to just up and quit on us, or possibly even be stolen from us. What photos will you have left when your computer crashes?

[Lutya]

Thanks for all the sympathy. I knew you guys would understand. Are there any good, reliable online storage backup places that don't cost too much? As user-friendly as possible. I don't know how online backup works...

[cabirds]

Carbonite has pretty much become the "gold standard" - $60-$150/yr. They say it's unlimited - I wonder what they'd do if I bought the $150/yr plan and sent them ALL my photos?

"Please note, however, that for exceptionally large backups – 200GB or more – backup speed will slow noticeably after the first 200GBs have been backed up."

[lyceel]

Awful, awful news! I always hate to hear when someone loses irreplaceable data. I hope you're able to get what you can back without a problem.

I have a Drobo with three drives in RAID 5 configuration at home in addition to the RAID-1 array in my main PC. I also regularly burn my new photos to Blu-Ray discs and give them to my parents to keep in their safe (they live two hours away from me).

A good rule of thumb I've heard is the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with at least one copy off-site.