Saving Pictures?

[bigtattoo79]

So we have pictures on CDs, mini CD, thumb drives, SD cards, old cell phones, and a old laptop that’s probably about to crash.

So I’m looking for suggestions on the best solution to view and store pictures, my first thought is a new laptop and a external hard drive as a backup kept in a different house.

Is a laptop the best solution for viewing, and adding the pictures to the hard drive? If so should I look for a simple chrome book?

Any suggestions?

 

[tso]

Take a look at the SanDisk extreme SSD. It’s a solid state drive therefore no moving parts I have three of them for two years and regularly use them for special projects and have no issues they connect via B and C USB. Another option would be cloud-based storage like box.com or dropbox.

Steve

 

[AustinBR]

So we have pictures on CDs, mini CD, thumb drives, SD cards, old cell phones, and a old laptop that’s probably about to crash.

So I’m looking for suggestions on the best solution to view and store pictures, my first thought is a new laptop and a external hard drive as a backup kept in a different house.

Is a laptop the best solution for viewing, and adding the pictures to the hard drive? If so should I look for a simple chrome book?

Any suggestions?

I recommend doing the first two options below:

1) Backup the photos to a solid state drive. Keep it in your safe or whatever.
2) Backup the photos to Google Photos. I pay $100/yr for 2TB of space.

If you want a bit more protection, back them up on a large flash drive or two that you keep in a separate house/location.

Google Photos is absolutely fantastic for saving photos. It also allows you to assign names to faces and then search for the persons name and it'll pull up all photos of them. You can even search with more detailed things like "mountain" it'll show you all pics of mountains.

 

[bigtattoo79]

Thanks for the info. My son is really into our family photos so even tho I’m not a big picture person I wanna preserve them for him.

Will definitely get the solid state drive and other storage methods mentioned above.

For downloading and moving the pictures I assume a chrome book is fine, but are some brands better than others or any I should stay away from?

Thanks

 

[AustinBR]

Thanks for the info. My son is really into our family photos so even tho I’m not a big picture person I wanna preserve them for him.

Will definitely get the solid state drive and other storage methods mentioned above.

For downloading and moving the pictures I assume a chrome book is fine, but are some brands better than others or any I should stay away from?

Thanks

Moving the pictures will utilize the processor, but if you have time you don't need to spend a bunch of money on a badass PC just to move pics quickly.

I would recommend investing in cloud storage (if you have many GB of photos), such as Google One, and uploading all of the photos there.

 

[shrxfn]

I would be leery of using Sandisk for storage right now I remember an article recently stating that Sandisk extremes were failing often due to a bad controller or something. A spinning disk is also good for deep storage as they don't rely on NAND chips for storage and if you unplug it for a long time you are less likely to see degradation.

 

[Fugum]

Another vote for Dropbox or Google photos, I use both, but for different things. Dropbox offers 2GB of storage on their free plan, and it's easy to share files with others, or viewing your photos on a different device, like your phone.

I've never had an issue with SanDisk drives, but I usually make my own portable hard drives with a USB enclosure and Crucial, or WD Blue SSD. You get more space for less money, especially if you grab the drives when they're on sale.

 

[AustinBR]

Rule of thumb of "two is one, one is none" works very well for backups. Just make sure that they are independent and not in the same place.