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Hi All, I'm looking for the easiest and safest way to store my photographs. At the moment they are all on my laptop. Is the preferred way of saving them to transfer to a memory stick? Are there any sticks that are recommended? Cheers

I think it all depends on how paranoid your are

Diversity is probably the best protection in the long term. Consider copying to one of the on-line 'cloud' storage systems, as well as 'local' storage. I have a fairly cheap Network Attached Storage (NAS) system (D-Link Share Center Pulse), fitted with two 2 Terabyte drives - one set to back up the other, each day. The system is set up on my wireless network, so that I can easily copy files from my laptop or desktop computers. If one of the two drives should fail, than I would replace it and copy everything back from the other. One important thing about back-up systems is to test them from time to time, to make sure that all is OK.

Of course, if you are really paranoid, you will worry whether software to read your disks will still be available in the future. In that case, archival prints are probably the best solution (perhaps, keep them in a bank vault ) .

I sometimes wonder how much we would know about Egyptian civilisation if they had stored everything on computers instead of carved in stone

Mike

Thanks Mike , I will look into it. I think I should also do the old fashioned thing and just print off the ones I want to keep!

flickr is an option... it is not too expensive ( $24.95 for 1 year, $44.95 for 2 years )

Picasa Web Albums is about £5 a year for up to 10,000 images.

I always wonder about storing pictures on flickr, Picasa, etc. The pictures I have uploaded to Photobucket and snapfish, but they are very much reduced in size. I back up my laptop to a hard drive periodically, but I suppose I should really keep that hard drive at work in case of burglary or fire!

I was backing up my photos onto memory sticks but as I was beginning to have a number of them I bought myself one of these this year,

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Minista ... 863&sr=8-1

Loads of room to store backups at original size plus all in one place rather than on a number of memory sticks.

I have also started to use flickr but am well behind on updating it

Cheers,

Neil F.

I have one copy of my photos on my computer. Plus copies on two external hard drives: one is hidden in my house and another is at a friends.