Thread: Where to put my rare picture collection?

I have been tracking and collecting photos of my family over the past 30 years. The oldest picture I've found dates to 1931. I have scanned them all into my computer and I've fixed and corrected many of them using various programs. The problem now is storage. What is the best way of storing scanned photos?

After a lengthy search, I believe that storing them on DVDs appears to be the best and safest solution. I have not delved into online storage yet. Do you have any suggestions?

DVDs are a fairly good all-round backup choice, but there are a number of things to beware of. First, DVDs are nowhere near as reliable as many people believe. They can degrade quite significantly and with alarming speed, to the point where the data on the disc can't be read. This can be minimised by buying top-quality discs, although this in itself is tricky because it's hard to tell what the good discs are - buying the most expensive doesn't guarantee quality and because manufacturers tend to buy from one of the big Chinese or Taiwanese pressing plants and rebrand them, it's difficult to know even whether one batch of discs is as good as another from the same maker.

Storage is important, too¬store them in cool, dry conditions away from light sources and any other sources of damage. Make several copies and store them in several places, and refresh them every few months (check the copies and make new ones). This may seem like a hassle but it's worth doing if the data is irreplaceable.

You may wish to consider CDs rather than DVDs. Since photos are smaller files than music, say, you may not need the storage capacity of DVDs for your collection. A CD can store around 700MB while a DVD stores some six times this. CDs tend to be more reliable because the data on them is less densely packed, but the above caveats still apply.

Online backup is also a good idea - pick a service from a reliable well-known name and you shouldn't go far wrong. It's normally quite cheap for up to around 5GB of data, which is slightly more than one DVD. Do bear in mind that if something happens to the company, such as it going bust, you may lose your data, so this should not be your only backup (read the contract and terms before signing up to a service to find out what may happen in such situations). Also bear in mind that it'll take a while to upload your files to the online backup service - several hours is not out of the question.

Finally there are hard disks. A good external hard disk need only cost around £40 these days and it will store much more than several DVDs. Hard disks fail, too, so if you choose this method you should again make a couple of copies and keep them in different places, checking them every few months and refreshing if necessary. In our experience, hard disk backups are easier and more reliable than DVDs. For valuable files we recommend using more than one kind of backup.