Revisiting Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer
Posted by Patrick on October 13th, 2009A 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.
