best way to store home video clips and photos

[southeastastra]

i have quite alot of camcorder clips stored on my pc, also tons of photos. what's the best way to store these, should I upload to a site or buy something to copy them to, if so what do i need? there are about four hours worth of clips

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Have you heard of Flickr... (www.flickr.com). My stuff stored/shown there (you can have full privacy). It's also on my computer too.

Possibly that is what you need. I had something similar, then got a huge memory i-Mac. That works!

Keep them on your computer & back it up with backblaze so you can retrieve them if the computer gets lost or breaks.

thanks will look at flickr, what is backblaze? seems you have to pay monthly

backblaze is effectively an insurance policy for all your data. you pay around $50 per year, they back up everything (really, I've got 5 TB backed up) to their servers in california. it all works automatically and keeps up to date automatically. if your computer is lost / stolen / breaks etc, then you log in and ask them to send you the data back. so all your music, letters, photos, all your digital life is all secure. well worth the money, I think.

An external HD is more than adequate. There is no need for an 'insurance' type service when they will be doing exactly what an external harddrive would do for you. its very unlikely that both will break at the same time.
I purchased two external HD and i back up to both and leave one at my inlaws and when i / they visit i update the contents.

flickr is ok, but i have been a member there for years and so many people complain that they're material is lost, it does happen from time to time. most often its accounts are deleted for no apparent reason and the terms clearly state that they are not a storage / recovery service.

i would go with the external HDD approach , its cheaper simpler and you own all your work.

While the risk of an external hard drive breaking at the same time as your computer hard drive is low, Murphy's law applies. Also, there are certain risks that are only covered by off site backups, such as a virus wiping/encrypting both drives, fire or flood affecting both drives, etc.

My choice is DVDs, or, for large backups, Blu Ray disks. They are easily posted to friends/family for storage and can not be wiped, unless you buy the RW (read/write) disks.

There is no need for an 'insurance' type service

Tell that to my friend who was recently burgled and they stole her laptop and external backup drive.

It comes down to this. Are your photos worth $50 a year to you to have peace of mind? Or do you want to faff about with backing up your photos etc to a disk, risk forgetting or messing up or being burgled.