Best way to safely store digital photos for eternity?

[Hathor]

Have lots of digital photos on my PC. Up to now have been backing up on DVD or CDROM. But no idea if this is going to last.

Is this a good way to preserve them for posterity, or is it better to get a flash memory thing, or an external hard drive.

Anyone know anything about keeping photos safe so our grandchildren will be able to enjoy them?

bump

No?

We just got an external hard drive, which backs up all our files automatically every day. It stores thousands of files too, so not much danger of running out of space.

Is this any good. Know nothing about such things...
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Print them out on good quality paper.

Honestly, CDs and DVDs have an expected lifespan of about 10 years. Any current technology will become obsolete - you would need to check every few years that they were still accessible, and move them to new media, and possibly change to a new format when .jpg or whatever becomes obsolete.

Yes, good idea, but there are so many!

What about storing them with an online company too? Don't know much about it tbh but have heard people talk about it!

I thought about that, but am reluctant to put stuff on online storage. What if the company goes under or something?

Use a big one? Even though I LOATHE the amount of the market Tesco have control over, it is fairly doubtful they would go bust..?

you could store them on photobucket.com. you can make your profile private but give ppl a guest password.

We store ours on Picasa -- owned by Google so unlikely to go bust any time soon!

I would print out a small selection of them, if you have loads. The others I would store in more than one place, and more than one format. All the options here - hard drives, CDs, DVDs, online storage etc - should be fine for a few years, but if you are thinking in terms of making any digital files available in 40 or 50 years time then you have to bear in mind how much technology changes. File formats like .jpg may no longer be readable (.tiff is generally considered the most future-proof as it is an open source format so less liable to changes in companies etc), physical things like CDs and DVDs will degrade over 10-20 years, and online companies will come and go (hopefully they'll be bought out by someone else, but there's no guarantee).

You can't just put files somewhere safe then not think about them for many years - companies have already reached the point where important business files cannot be read because the software or hardware have changed so much, and are only just realisign how much effort they are going to have to put into looking after them for the future.

Put them on DVD, you can get a lot of photos on DVD. Store the DVDs at least 10 miles away, somewhere you know you will be able to access occasionally and you won't forget where they are. Maybe a friend or relatives loft, or even a bank vault.

In 3 to 5 years get them out copy them to HD-DVD, which should be reasonably cheap by then. (Don't forget to add all your new photos as well). Put the HD-DVD back with the original DVDs.

In another 3-5 years create another copy on whatever the latest storage technology is and so on.

Keep all the copies on all the different technologies. Even when the oldest are obsolete the latest 2 or 3 should still be readable and even if something happens to the very latest you can get most of it back from the one before.

The truly paranoid can keep half a dozen copies in separate locations.

Thanks for all the useful info. Am copying the photos on to DVD now, and will also be getting and external hard drive, which will be useful for all my backing up too.