ACOT Message Board

How do you all save your photos? Mine are in iphoto, but if something happened to my hard drive I would be mortified. Should I download them to CDs? Any suggestions and organizational tips would be appreciated. I do have SOME in the Walgreens site, but not all. Any suggestions about digital/online storage would be great, too. Thank you for bringing me up to date. I am not keeping up with the technology very well. Tee hee!

I have mine saved on my hard drive, and External Hard Drive, and because I'm paranoid, I keep the SD cards and lable them as well. I just buy new ones when I run out of space.

I put mine on photo CDs, download those to my hard drive and have an external HD, as well. Now I'm looking for the best way to safely store the photo CDs and their index prints.

I keep mine on portable memory sticks

Funny you should ask this today. I just had a little scare with my computer. I couldn't get it to load windows and I was in a panic that I'd lose everything... all my photos, documents, this years taxes that I've been working on. Miraculously I was able to fumble through a few things and got it back up and running. Once I was back in business I copied all my photos & documents to an external hard drive. I also periodically go through and put them on CDS too but I haven't done that in a long time. That'll be my project for the next few weeks. I like to have my pics in 2 different places just in case. I even started making 2 cds for each group of photos so I can give my parents a set to keep at their house... LOL! A little paranoid? I have thousands and thousands of pics saved on my computer. When I copied them over today it said something like 57 gigabytes.... yowzers... not something I'd want to lose forever!


BTW... the only thing that I recently loaded was SCAL for my cricut and once I was able to restore to a prior date without the SCAL software loaded my computer was fine. Is anyone else running SCAL with Vista? Any problems?

scrappie_stacie wrote:Funny you should ask this today. I just had a little scare with my computer. I couldn't get it to load windows and I was in a panic that I'd lose everything... all my photos, documents, this years taxes that I've been working on. Miraculously I was able to fumble through a few things and got it back up and running. Once I was back in business I copied all my photos & documents to an external hard drive. I also periodically go through and put them on CDS too but I haven't done that in a long time. That'll be my project for the next few weeks. I like to have my pics in 2 different places just in case. I even started making 2 cds for each group of photos so I can give my parents a set to keep at their house... LOL! A little paranoid? I have thousands and thousands of pics saved on my computer. When I copied them over today it said something like 57 gigabytes.... yowzers... not something I'd want to lose forever!


BTW... the only thing that I recently loaded was SCAL for my cricut and once I was able to restore to a prior date without the SCAL software loaded my computer was fine. Is anyone else running SCAL with Vista? Any problems?

One of our staff members just had a scare this week. ALL his family's photos and home movies from when his oldest (now 10) was a baby until now was on his hard drive and it crashed. He was able to retrieve everything after putting the hard drive in the freezer overnight. Now he has it all backed up on an EHD and is saving his sd cards.

Oh my! I am glad I asked today, too. You all are scaring AND motivating me to get this done. I don't have an external hard drive, but I do have a load of blank CDs. I'm going to start copying right now!!! I've tried saving the SD cards and buying new ones, but I think I am going to give that up. I have thought about making two copies of my CDs and putting one in a safety deposit box! Now, that is paranoid, too. I just want to be sure to have our photos in case of any type of emergency.

What is SCAL?

Thanks everyone. Keep that info coming!

imwickedwitch wrote:

scrappie_stacie wrote:Funny you should ask this today. I just had a little scare with my computer. I couldn't get it to load windows and I was in a panic that I'd lose everything... all my photos, documents, this years taxes that I've been working on. Miraculously I was able to fumble through a few things and got it back up and running. Once I was back in business I copied all my photos & documents to an external hard drive. I also periodically go through and put them on CDS too but I haven't done that in a long time. That'll be my project for the next few weeks. I like to have my pics in 2 different places just in case. I even started making 2 cds for each group of photos so I can give my parents a set to keep at their house... LOL! A little paranoid? I have thousands and thousands of pics saved on my computer. When I copied them over today it said something like 57 gigabytes.... yowzers... not something I'd want to lose forever!


BTW... the only thing that I recently loaded was SCAL for my cricut and once I was able to restore to a prior date without the SCAL software loaded my computer was fine. Is anyone else running SCAL with Vista? Any problems?

One of our staff members just had a scare this week. ALL his family's photos and home movies from when his oldest (now 10) was a baby until now was on his hard drive and it crashed. He was able to retrieve everything after putting the hard drive in the freezer overnight. Now he has it all backed up on an EHD and is saving his sd cards.

I have them on my ehd, and on cds. And the ones I print are on the off line photo site. Yes, heaven forbid something were to happen.

I guess I'm old fashioned. I upload to Wallgreens and have them make my prints. Then I have the actual paper prints, plus the pics on my computer. I figure I'm covered if something happens to the computer because I will have my paper prints. Now if the house burns down and I loose both the paper prints and my computer melts, then I'm in a pickle. I do have my pics stored at Wallgreens, but I don't know how long they stay there.

I have mine on an EHD and also on two separate WD Passport pocket drives. Once in a blue moon I burn them on to a DVD and put it off site, but I have to admit that I haven't burned one in a while.

Yes, you need to back them up to CD/DVD cause at some point your hard-drive will fail. Another option is online back-up like Carbonite. You definitely need a back-up though. Now that you mention it, so do I and it's about that time again.

I ran out of room on my hard drive so now I have a lot of pix only on EHD - I back those up to another EHD, plus I make photo cd backups and I upload to Snapfish.com. That should give me 4 copies of every picture.

I have a internal hard drive 320G that I bought from Best Buy that I have my pictures on. I have alot on Walgreens and Shutterfly site as well.

I have mine uploaded on Shutterfly (where I do most of my online printing) as well as backing them up onto disks.

I have all of mine on flashdrives. Usally Office Depot has 4GB for $9.99 and that holds quite a few.. I usually try to put all the photos from either a certain time (vacation or holiday) or if I can do one whole year on one flashdrive. If you got Office Depot and they have a speical but are out of stock, make sure to ask them to go to the back or give you a rain check. Everytime I have done that, they just give me another one and honor the price.

I have all my pics on an External Hard Drive. I recently bought a passport that is almost as big as the EHD and copy them there and keep in a fire box. My SIL says that over time, CD's can deteriorate.

I have a 250G external hard drive, of which 70G have been used to save my photos. My camera is a 10.1 megapixel, so it takes huge size photos. I had an earlier computer crash on me, of which I had none of my photos saved. I have since learned.