What do I do with the 40,000 photos on my computer?

[TheLogLady]

I have 10 years worth of photos on my hard drive.

computer is getting a bit old (10 years!) and crap.

Do I save them somewhere else? On what? disk? stick? how?

Print them? How much would that cost? Where can I get millions of photos printed cheaply?

Thanks.

I'm currently putting some of mine onto discs.

just as back up.

You go into 'my pictures' and click on copy to disc or whatever - I am winging it a bit, but am trying to collate the pics I want to keep into folders ready to copy to disc.

You can often click and drag images into a new folder.

I keep mine on an external hard drive as backup and order prints from Snapfish, not sure they are cheap enough for millions of photos though!

External hard drive would be a good idea, and it's easy to transfer (there are many tutorials online though...)

Gosh I don't even know what an external hard drive is.

Hopeless.

I have a flickr account www.flickr.com/. It costs around £17 per year, and I keep almost all of my pictures on the private setting.

As well as very reliable storage, it's also good for sharing the odd pic or two when we've been to an event.

Good god! 10 years old PC and you don't have a backup!

Does your PC have a USB port? Assuming it does then what you need to do right now is hotfoot it down to your local Tesco/PCWorld/Currys and pick yourself up a portable hard drive. Look for something like this:

Tesco

Expect to pay between £40 & £60 depending on the size. Get one which says "portable" on it. You dont need the really big ones.

Plug it into your PC and after 30 secs if you open up "My Computer" you should see a new drive which is empty (or near as dammit). Copy all your photos onto there pronto!

Please don't delay. Hard disks rarely last 10 years! I've seen so many people lose their photos and having nearly lost 5 years worth of my own photos last year, I really urge you to do this sooner rather than later!

An external drive is a disk drive which may be plugged into a desktop or laptop using one of a number of types of cable, for example, USB v2.0, FireWire, or eSATA.

Your old machine might support one of those (eg a Mac may support FireWire) but odds are somewhat high against being able to plug in a drive - Windows 95 had poor support for USB, Windows 98 / 98 SE supported USB v1, but might need a plug-in card to offer USB 2, and if you are going to have to open the PC up, then taking the hard drive out and copying it entirely is perhaps an easier option.

You say your machine is old, so let's go back to basics... what system is it (Make, Model, Operating System) ?

Do you know how much disk space your photos (well, everything really, as the rest might be 2% of the 'used' portion of your machine) are using? It would be easy to point you to an external drive of say 500 GB but that could be significant 'overkill' for your needs.

It may be worth seeing if there's a local computer specialist, or small shop which will copy the hard drive for you. Once you can tell how much disk space is in use, it will be easier to judge whether a quote for copying the data will sound reasonable (assuming they include a brand new blank drive to hold your photos and other documents).

I mention someone else doing it for you because the older the machine, the less likely new (cheap) devices like external drives are to work with it, or work at a reasonable speed, if at all.

Have you already decided on buying a replacement system, or is this just feeling the need to copy what you already have "just in case" ?

My DH is in the middle of sorting out our photos as we have ours spread between 3 laptops some on discs and some not. Its just a mess.

We lost 3 years of pics about 2 years ago and ever since we have backed up with discs but tbh have been a bit slack now and again.

I also randomly upload my pics onto a private and free Photobucket account - make sure your album settings are private, as an additional back up. Not every single pic os on there but a selection - in my mind I just think - should the house burn down with all our discs and computers in it - at least we would have the few hundred (maybe thousands now) on there.

sorry for disturbing you with my lackadasical computer attitude

i have no idea what make/model/windows/size it is. however it does have a USB port. portable hard drive appears to be the way forward.

An external hard drive is a start, but you should have off site backups as well. Do you have a DVD writer?

You should burn all your photos to DVD and store the DVDs with family and/or friends, then, if the worst happens you can still get your photos back.

Internet photo storage sites could go bankrupt and disappear, just when you need the backup.

lol step 1....get the drive.

step 2 - back it up!

step 3 - leave it at someone else's house for "offsite"

Let's not put the cart before the horse here!

my brain feels like this.

will look tomorrow.
thanks

"Let's not put the cart before the horse here!"

I thought you had, suggesting a solution without knowing the OS or even whether it has any USB ports.

lol

I did ask if LogLady had one and continued after stating she did. I did think about the fact it would likely be USB1 so slow as a dog with three legs but figured taking a few hours to back up was better than no backups!

Yes, my apologies, I now see she does mention a USB port.

Have to admit my thought was more on the lines of 'what if it is a Mac' as my iMac has a Firewire port running 400 Mbps I think, so using that to an external drive would make sense instead of chugging at 12 Mbps with USB 1.1 (or finding the drive is unable to work on USB 1.1, or is not recognised eg by Win 98 and has no driver CD for it).

This thread has galvanised me into action....I also have umm...several years worth of photos on my (ageing) PC so I have been out today and bought a 250GB portable hard drive. The Hitachi one on the link provided by Niceguy2 was out of stock on the Tesco website, but I managed to buy one in Maplins for similar price.

Now need to pluck up the courage to take it out its box. But just wanted to say thanks!