Posted by Patrick on October 13th, 2009
A little more than a year and a half ago (right before Ted was born) I wrote about storing digital photos, specifically about how we’re keeping our shoe boxes of photos online. At the time we had around five-thousand photos, which seems like a lot, but was manageable.
Instead of backing up our photos on just a hard drive, or just DVD discs, I had started pushing them up onto the Amazon S3 online storage service. (It’s like a hard-drive on the internet.) While a little technical in nature, it offered lots of reliable storage for about two bucks a month.
Fast forward to life today – we have this little boy who is awesome, and not one but two digital cameras snapping away the moments. Backing up photos online has been relatively easy, and I’ve been able to keep up with it. The only downside to this is that in 2008 we took nearly 3000 photos, and we’re on track to take more than that this year.
So – the cost to store them has been increasing (as Amazon S3 charges you more the more you upload). Instead of paying 25 bucks a year (pre-Ted cost), we’re now on track to pay 50 or 60 bucks a year, and it will only get more expensive. We had to switch to something more affordable.
Enter Flickr, which has been around for a while, and offers lots of online photo storage. In fact, for 24 bucks a year you can get unlimited photo storage. Its also much more easy to use, and keeps track of all the photo’s meta data (like the date it was really taken, the camera used, and lots more) and allows you to organize everything in interesting ways. It also keeps copies of the original photo, which means no weird resizing or compression.
This past weekend I finally finished uploading the full lot of our photos. It took about two weeks of uploading them at night to get them all up there, and from here on out its just the occasional upload of photos as we take them.
Flickr offers privacy on a per-photo basis – meaning we can keep embarrassing photos under wraps, while allowing us to share the good ones.
The only real downside compared to Amazon S3 is that I can’t back up non-photo/video files with Flickr – so documents, freelance work, and music files will still have to be backed up somewhere else.
Sometimes I think I overthink all this (and thinking about overthinking… well that’s a lot of thinking), but we now have more than 10 years of digital photos, detailing our lives. Keeping them around is important.
Conclusion:
Amazon S3 is hard to use for most folks, stores any file type, gets more expensive the more you use.
Flickr is easy to use for anyone, stores only photos and some video, maintains a fixed price.
Whatever you use (there are many backup options) make sure you have at least one backup method in place. Lightning strikes, hard drives burn out, DVD’s get turned into coasters. You just don’t have the negatives anymore.
Posted in Nerdery, Product Reviews, Ted |
6 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on June 5th, 2008
A short list of things I would have written long blog posts if I wasn’t so into the whole parenting thing*.
1. The iPod Touch. I picked this up as one-last-toy-for-me before Ted was born and can’t seem to not have it with me, ever. It’s like the iPhone, but without the phone part (and without the $60/month fees). Music, movies, Gmail and wifi internet in a tiny little package. It’s awesome all around and has totally changed the way I think about the mobile internet and UI’s.
2. The new Portishead album called Third. I listen to it all the time now, it’s great at-work music. It’s been nearly a decade since they put out music, and the wait was well worth it.
3. The inevitable and long overdue demise of the giant SUV as daily driver. Unfortunate that it comes with the price of declining economy, soaring food prices and a certain sense of dread every time I fill up. It is exciting that the capitalism around it is spurring innovation and futurist thinking though. Ted will no doubt fly his jetpack over homes made from recycled Tahoe’s.
4. Web technologies I’m learning about. The past few months at work (and in freelance work) have filled my brain with new exciting knowledge about web design and the construction of websites. I’ve spent a bunch of time learning about Wordpress (the system that powers this blog), Drupal, and the jQuery javascript framework. Learning is good, and I feel more confident about my skills with each passing week.
5. Fatherhood as subject matter. I like writing and would like to write more about being a dad to Ted. It’s the new highlight of my day, coming home to a family and hanging out with Ted on the weekends. He’s high-maintenance, but every time he smiles at me I know what we’ve done is totally worth it. I also know that its probably also diaper-change time.
Hopefully going forward there will be lots more posts on fatherhood.
* Full Disclaimer: I took a two hour nap after coming home from work today. Clearly there’s some time out there, just not as much for blogging.
Posted in Automotive, Baby, Dadness, Employment, Music, Nerdery, Random, Ted, iTunes |
2 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on April 9th, 2008
Ted, with Kate and Grammie Cass in tow, took a trip to the capital city today to visit his old man at work, and have a little lunch.
Ted wanted to help me with my web design work. At first, he just couldn’t concentrate. He kept throwing pencils into the ceiling tiles. Not productive:
Then he told me about this really big idea he had for a website. Something about social networking or something, but for babies.
I was pretty happy that they all came to have lunch with me. I found that hanging with the family around lunch time is way, way better then working.
Posted in Baby, Employment, Nerdery, Ted |
3 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on March 15th, 2008
In my humble opinion Google Maps is a pretty sweet online mapping service. It’s all about uncluttered interfaces and, for the most part, useful driving directions. When it first came out I blamed it for getting us lost a few times, but they’ve been pretty spot-on lately.
One new feature they’ve added in metro areas (like Raleigh) is Street View. Google actually paid some people to drive around all the streets in a given city and photograph everything. They then stiched it all together and tied it to Google Maps so you can not only see an overhead map, you can actually see what’s there at eye-level (or what was there when the camera-car drove by). For a long time they only had big, big cities like NY and LA, but more recently they’ve added medium sized cities like Worcester, Massachusetts and Raleigh, North Carolina.
I checked out the street where I park my car most days for work, and saw the Celica right there! It’s a nice feeling to have my ride semi-imortalized on the internet.
They haven’t driven through our town yet, but maybe some day they will. Sometimes it feels a little big-brotherish, but for the most part it’s exciting stuff.
Posted in Automotive, Nerdery |
3 Comments »
Posted by Patrick on March 10th, 2008
The Backstory
A funny thing happened on the way to living our lives – we ended up with seven thousand digital photos. It started out innocently enough… checking off the “Put Photos on a Floppy Disk” option when dropping off rolls of 35mm shots at CVS. Years later we’re sitting on close to 9 gigabytes of data.
Many of our photos will not be eligible to win awards because they’re the kind of photos everyone takes. Camping trips, parties, super-hot silver cars, and maybe one or two of the cats… but they’re our photos and are important to us.
In days gone by we’d take printed photos and put them in the (relative) safety of a shoebox or photo album. Now we hardly print them out, only to fill the occasional album or photo frame. Many of our photos will remain bits and bytes forever.
I use to be fairly obsessive about backing up our pics onto shiny metal discs. This gave me the good feeling of knowing that should hard drive failure occur (it has, it will), our data would be tucked away somewhere safe.
That somewhere might even be your house. I’ve been stealthily leaving CD-R spindles of MP3 music files with friends for years, and leaving DVD-R’s of photos at my folk’s place whenever I got the chance. The thinking being that should wherever we were living be sucked into a black whole, I wouldn’t have to worry about our photos and data.
This was all well and good for then. The reality of now is that the allotted time I’ll have to burn discs will mostly likely be shrunk down considerably. The reality of the next few months is that we’re going to have this new life around here who will no doubt be attracting copious flashcubes, increasing the number of photos we have exponentially.
Dealing with the Ones and Zero’s
So here’s how I’m handling this. A few months ago I met up with a few co-workers (including DJ Sipe) and went to a local nerdy user group meeting to hear a guy from Amazon.com’s Web Services group come and speak about all the very nerdy things they offer web folks such as myself.
One of the things they offer is online storage. Cheap, plentiful online storage. And not just any old storage, backed-up backup-up storage. Whenever you upload a file to them (say a photograph), they automagically make backup copies of it at remote locations around the world. Should meteors strike down one of their server farms, our photos will be safely backed up at another.
And its cheap, too! It costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 a month to keep all our photos on their servers. I compare that with the $30+ a year I was spending on blank CD’s and DVD’s and then add in all the time it took me to burn them and, for me, it’s a moderate no-brainer. The only real downside is that the setup was a little complicated, and uploading all the photos took almost a week… but being able to set it and forget it makes it all worthwhile.
But
I wouldn’t recommend Amazon’s backup system to most folks… it’s complicated to set up and not very user friendly for day to day use. There are plenty of other online backup options that make it fairly easy to backup your data online. Picassa Web Albums and Flickr are good places to leave your digital photos, and Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword allow for online document storage and editing.
Save yourself from tears! Back up your data somehow!
Posted in Nerdery |
3 Comments »
