[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] follow-up question re hard drives and long term storage

Fri Nov 26 05:49:20 PST 2021

 CD and DVD are just external storage. Provided you have a USB DVD drive, they can be copied to The Cloud, or copied to local hard drives. 
As archival storage media, it's hard to beat DVD-R and CD-R media. They are durable and stable. The only drawback is that modern computers and laptops don't have optical drives. That problem can be solved with an external CD/DVD reader or writer. Those connect via USB, and most devices and OSes can read from them. 
I would not rush to convert CD or DVD photo collections to other media. The only reason for copying your favorite photos to the Cloud or a hard drive is to make them easier to view and share. I consider shared content to be temporary storage, so I don't care where or how shared content is stored. It's whatever is convenient to you and to those with whom you want to share the photos. 
By the way, Google Photos offers some free storage. This counts along with GMail, Google Docs other Google Apps, and Google Drive toward your total free storage quota with Google Services. For serious sized collections, go ahead and pay for an upgrade to more Google storage. Also, if you are really serious about photo editing, go for a paid product for editing. 
I use Google Drive and to some extent, Google Photos. I also have done a presentation to a Chicago computer user group via Zoom, about the limits on Google's free storage and how to organize and clean up your Google storage across several of their services. I have my slides (LibreOffice Impress and PDF formats) from that presentation and can present and/or share them.
Microsoft offers OneDrive for Cloud Storage. Limited free storage is built into your Microsoft Account if you have Windows installed. Good Windows desktop integration features.
-- Bob Primak
    On Thursday, November 25, 2021, 04:58:24 PM EST, Umesh <ushelat at gmail.com> wrote:  

 I've got family videos on DVD-RAM discs. Any thoughts on how I can convert these files to a durable format and save them to an external hard drive?
Thanks,Umesh
On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 6:32 PM Harry Forsdick <forsdick at gmail.com> wrote:

Denise,
You describe that the data she wants to store are images/pictures/photographs.  Carbonite is a general-purpose backup system.  There are better ways to store photographs that have the online qualities of Carbonite, but have a lot more useful features if you are storing photographs.  Here are three of those systems:   
   - Google Photos (https://www.google.com/photos/about/)
   - Amazon Photos (https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8&node=13234696011)
   - Apple Photos (https://www.apple.com/ios/photos/)
There are many other systems out there and it is not my intention to say that other offerings aren't as good.  But, these three are offered by large companies that are likely to be around for a long time, and have the resources to keep up to date with the latest technology and features -- and that is important.
Each of these systems will provide you with the following capabilities:   
   - Online photo storage
   - Reliable backup of that storage so, depending on your trust level, you can count on the service to take care of backing up your valuable photos.
   - Organizing mechanisms such as folders and albums.
   - Presentation capabilities, such as slide shows, the ability to produce printed books of your photos, etc.
   - Higher-level capabilities such as face recognition and object recognition so that you can search or organize photos by automatic recognition from the photo itself, rather than someone manual labeling effort.
I personally use both Google Photos and Apple Photos.  They both are very good and worth the modest amount of money they charge for their services.
Of course, the quality of any collection of photographs depends on how much time you spend curating the photos.  Some of the futuristic Machine Learning (ML) capabilities of these systems include automatic curation where the ML system chooses the best photographs of your collection based on analyzing how someone has selected a few photos from a lot of photos taking into consideration things like composition, focus, colors in the scene.  It's pretty amazing what is being done or starting to be done these days.
Hope this answers some of your daughter's questions.
My first and last recommendation is that she do something -- she will find out that exploring the capabilities of what can be done is very interesting and at the same time will be a safer way of storing her photos than on her own disks.
Regards,
-- Harry

| Harry Forsdick
Lexington Photo Scanning
Town Meeting Member Precinct 7
harry at forsdick.com
www.forsdick.com
 |   | 46 Burlington St.
Lexington, MA 02420
(781) 799-6002 (mobile)
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Click to see my other websites
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On Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 5:46 PM Denise <denise at rcn.com> wrote:

Hi All,

This is a follow up question re hard drives and long term storage.

So my daughter has about 5-7 external hard drives and none are newer…..She wants a long term safer solution (like Carbonite) rather than keeping everything on these hard drives; as she now knows they will all fail eventually.

The pics (only pics on all these drives) that are on these drives are on no computer at all, just on these hard drives.

Given that Carbonite backs up your computer (and word, excel, etc.) and these pics are not on a computer or iphone, what’s a good option for her?  She does not need backup for word, excel or other computer stuff.

How should she get all these to transfer to a better and more long term solution?

With Carbonite you would have to have one computer and only ONE hard drive connected; so that might not be the best option.

thanks,

Denise

p.s. we’re still working on taking in the failed drive.
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