I have hundreds of photos on my pc and need to save them.....?

Question

What would you recommend - a Memory Stick or something else? Are they expensive? My system has Windows XP - AMD Athlon (tm) 64 processor - 3200+ 2.01 GHz, 512MB of RAM

Thank you!

Answer 1

If you mean archive, then you may consider burning them to a dvd or cd. Depends on how much room they take up though. I backed all mine up to my PS3

Answer 2

a portable hard drive is your best option

i got one from pcworld, 500gb for about £70 (reserved online for better price) - it will hold thousands! also good for storing music and anything else

Answer 3

Why not put/burn it into CD for compilation. Memory stick still have a possibility that your data will be gonna  lost or destroy.

Answer 4

I would get a USB drive, a 250gig is only about £60 or less now

Answer 5

A USB drive will do the job for you I feel.

Answer 6

For the expense of buying a new external drive as others have said, why not spend the same money and buy an extra internal drive and put that in and run it as extra storage. It can be a bigger capacity than your hard drive if you want. If you change your computer all you do is take the drive out and put it in the new one.

That way they are immediately accessible and the drive is protected like your hard drive by the tower. I installed one for extra storage and it works with no problem and everything is instantly available.

External drives are all very well but the downside is that they are easy to damage beyond repair either by dropping them or knocking them while they are working.

Answer 7

You have to work out, or estimate, how many photos you are likely to want storage for, and how accessible you need them to be. If you are thinking of using memory sticks, or similar small storage devices, for archive purposes, then I would counsel against it. These are better used for short term portability, taking a load of photos to a friend's PC, that sort of thing.

My current photo collection currently occupies around 40Gb of space, and that is without digitising the extensive film collection I have yet to scan. My strategy is therefore to archive my photos on to a free-standing high capacity hard drive. Photos remain in my "My Pictures" folder on the PC only until I have checked and pruned them, then the folder is moved off to the external drive.

I actually use two external drives for this, and the second is always kept in synchrony with the first (Microsoft's Synctoy is excellent for this). This is because you should always have at least two backups separate from the main PC or laptop, in case one backup device fails.

There are many such external drives you can buy, but I like the Seagate "FreeAgent" stand-alone USB drives, with a 500Gb capacity.  Mine are labelled FreeAgent1 and FreeAgent2. FreeAgent1 is the one to which I directly archive photos, music, and documents. Once a week, I then connect FreeAgent2, and use Synctoy to ensure that everything on FreeAgent1 is reflected on to FreeAgent2.  These drives cost about £60 each. This keeps my photos safe, and keeps my main PC clean and containing only photos I'm currently editing for print or web use.

The other advantage of these free standing drives is that they keep your files independent of your PC ; if you buy a new PC, you have no work to do as all your files are accessible simply by plugging the drive into a port on the new PC - no need to use data migration tools in Windows. And indeed, if your new PC is running under Linux (I have one such PC on my home network), you can again just access your files by plugging the external drive in, and Linux will read it. This scheme keeps all your data independent of your computers and their operating systems.

EDIT

The cautions about the possibility of damage to external drives are worth heeding, but they are not a reason not to use them. If you merely install a larger drive in the same computer, then your data is not backed up, even if there are two drives in the tower. The point about effective backup is that the backup data should not be co-located with the source data. If anything were to happen to your computer, like it caught fire or some corrosive liquid got into it, then all your data is at risk. A shelf-mounted external drive is quite stable. And if drives were that fragile, laptops would be too risky to transport!

External drives are highly effective, and have far more advantages than perceived disadvantages.

CDs are effective for small to moderate volumes of data, but note carefully that they are not archival grade storage. The failure rate of CDs, even new ones, is very high. No data should be committed to CD for archival purposes unless you are prepared to make at least three copies, and to check them all for integrity and recopying at least twice a year.

Answer 8

Apart from using a memory stick, which is not as dependable and meant to be more for transferring stuff, you can use almost any of the other options. External HDD, Internal HDD or CD's/DVD's.

I personally uses a combination of these, but most of my valuable photos are backed up in a "library" of CD's.

I've been doing this for many years now and find it the cheapest and most secure option.

Answer 9

Burn them onto a cd, one CD will hold about 600-700 photos....if you have them in ALBUMS, and you want to keep them separate, blank CDs only cost about 12 pence each

Answer 10

an external hard drive would be able to store more for less. you can find them for cheap online. probably go with a usb external hard drive.