To remind you all to back up your photos.

[trixymalixy]

We've just lost loads off the laptop. Thankfully I had backed most of them up on cd, but there are some I haven't found yet and I'm praying they were backed up.

I'm spending the day ( and probably the next few weeks!) uploading stuff to Flickr which now gives 1 terabyte free to everyone. I don't work for them honestly!!!

What went wrong with the laptop? Is it the hard drive itself that died, or something else?

Why would you consider this unreasonable?

Don't know what happened. There are still loads of photos there, just several folders have disappeared.

I don't think anyone ever posts on AIBu thinking they are being unreasonable Vivacia!!

Dropbox is awesome. It automatically syncs with your enabled devices including camera phones and computers, so that for example when DH lost his cameraphone on holiday we didn't lose a single photo.

Mine get uploaded to Sky Drive when I take them. I can access them from any computer.

I filled up Dropbox and its a fortune to buy more space, so I'm using that for ongoing backup now and I plan to upload everything to Flickr in batches.

Does skydrive cost?

Thank you for posting this! I've bought storage on dropbox but keep forgetting to actually upload the thousands(!!!) of pics that need backing up. That can be my plan for tonight!

Sky drive doesn't cost anything

Just had a look, it seems superior to Dropbox, thanks. You do have to pay for extra storage just like Dropbox though, so Flickr still seems the best for long term storage.

This is a great reminder thanks, as it's something I keep meaning to sort. I've got hundreds of pics on my laptop and I did back them all up to CD about 3 yrs ago but not since.

I've just looked at Sky Drive and it looks great. I hadn't thought of uploading them before.

Anyone who uses it - how many pics can you upload before you have to pay? And how much is it?

the 'cloud' is all very well, but you never know when things will change.

buy a portable hard drive (or two if you are really nervous). Put everything on there. For the ultra-secure, leave one copy in another house!

Skydrive has a 7gb limit before you have to pay. You will use that up in no time. Flickr offers 1 terabyte for free, you'll never fill that.

I'll do that thanks special subject.

See, I think the cloud is safer than an external hard drive by a factor of about, ooh, a billion.

Because the cloud is run by companies who are constantly updating their hardware, software, firewalls, etc. They use redundancy and duplication and backups of backups so that your stuff doesn't just disappear.

An external hard drive ... well you've got control of it but it degrades and you have to replace it. And if in the meantime you accidentally drop it or put it near the radiator or your child sticks a Peppa Pig magnet on it, all your data is irretrievably lost.

Unless you are or live with a computer boffin with very expensive upgrading tastes, the cloud systems will be ahead of you in terms of security and technology. Fact.

Once a year I take my memory card in and get hard copies of my photos for my album collection. Am I the only one doing this? I like to look through the albums rather than just have them stored on my computer.

I do have them backed up on my computer just in case but to view I look at my albums.

Mine are on google drive. And on an external harddrive.

mine are in the cupboard, and copies of the the best at my mums. I have lost a whole film though when dd pulled it out of the back of the camera.

Peanut I have copies of the best pics printed to put into albums - I can take them to the Great-Aunts (and everywhere else if necessary)much more easily - and the DGC love looking at them (novelty value..!)

Mine are on backblaze. Pay a bit & it backs up everything on your computer, automatically. Like digital insurance policy.

I've just organised all our holiday ones. I upload to Snapfish to keep them as well as printing them. I also used a Cloud Device.

We have our photos on an extra hard drive and CDs were are both in the fireproof locked box. FIL also has copies of CDs which are updated at certain intervals. The computer is also backed up to some com
Any which we pay £8 a month for.

Thanks for the reminder, I was just thinking about doing this yesterday. I have taken about 500 photos of my 6 month old daughter .

When I was growing up my parents were often so strapped for cash they couldn't afford film for their polaroid camera. There are hardly any photos of us as children (and there were 5 of us) - only 2 exist of my older brother as a baby!

If privacy isn't an issue then using the cloud as a back up is a good idea. Anyone who steals as computer is likely to take the hd next to it. Also fire etc.

And I get a photo book printed every year or so with the best photos in.

We have a WD Live Book (personal cloud) so everything stays in the house - you can access online as well and ours is 3TB. We also back that up to a 3TB external hard drive and take off site in case of a fire.
This is because we lost all our photos and music about 5 years ago Lesson learned.

Sorry to hear you have had a similar experience, it maybe worth getting a geek to look at it - some of my DH's files 'disappeared' last week and a guy from work bought them all back in binary or something they were all strings of numbers, but the files worked....

Photo box will send you DVDS of all photos you've uploaded to them for not very much.

I upload all mine to Flikr and print them off and put them in albums too. Be careful tho I used to use Kodak in this way who went bust so I then had to re upload all my digital photos to a new provider.
It took days and days. Luckily I still had them all on my computer otherwise I would have had to download them all back before reuploading. And Kodak gave us about 5 days notice.