River Dog
Always looking
You could stick a wifi NAS server in a friendly neighbour's house and you reciprocate. Technically, it's offsite.
Aristophanes
Well-known
I keep all my digital photos and videos on 2 separate drives locally, and have a master, redundant backup as well through the MacOS Time Machine. I currently use separate hard drives for all, but a looking into:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/
All my film photography is scanned, negs sleeved archivally, photos in traditional albums (lousy ones tossed), larger ones death with appropriately. The filing cabinet is metal and somewhat fire resistant. Best I can do. Digital backups then become the last line of defense.
Lately I've become a big fan of photo books, especially for digital prints because the book's restricted size obviates large prints. Photobooks lend the,selves to a narrative, can be of fantastic quality, and are likely to be read through more than individual photos in years past when I am gone. Printed on acid-free, archival quality stock, they are the best deal in keeping memories and transferring them inter-generationally IMO. They can also be stored faithfully as PDF's.
Digital files and photo books are stored offsite in 2 ISO formats: JPEG and PDF. They are the only formats I trust to be around in 50 years in a recognizable, accessible mode. They have international and widespread commercial buy-in. I see no point in keeping RAW and TIFF's of such large sizes once editing is done. RAW and TIFF stay local, but not online. It's an economy and bandwidth thing at the expense of fidelity. Life is full of tradeoffs.
Everything digital goes into Aperture (Mac). Archiving is done chronologically and Aperture has a plug-in straight to Phanfare. Once a Project or Album is completed and local backup done, it's uploaded. I do this about every 3 days. Because I use a photo-specific archival solution, I can organize the presentation for public or family viewing, and organize it to closely mimic what I have in Aperture chronologically. The exacts same is possible in LR.
I use Phanfare for offsite storage because of the excellent video storage and they (Carbonite) use Amazon S3 servers (Dropbox and SmugMug amongst many others also use Amazon S3). Calling it 'the Cloud" is falling into the conventional wisdom trap. They are digital archives using the one feature digitization that makes digital economically viable; effortless copying and storage redundancies turned into commodity. Yes you have to have some faith in a corporate entity to maintain the system and its integrity, but that's how economies work. It's $100/year. Pocket change.
Frankly, the dedicated photo archiving sites probably have the best solutions. They know photos. They are file format familiar and their corporate focus is on preserving memories not just bits. I think there is value i that. And they take responsibility under contract for the back-end. More time for me to photograph.
I hope that contributes to the discussion.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/
All my film photography is scanned, negs sleeved archivally, photos in traditional albums (lousy ones tossed), larger ones death with appropriately. The filing cabinet is metal and somewhat fire resistant. Best I can do. Digital backups then become the last line of defense.
Lately I've become a big fan of photo books, especially for digital prints because the book's restricted size obviates large prints. Photobooks lend the,selves to a narrative, can be of fantastic quality, and are likely to be read through more than individual photos in years past when I am gone. Printed on acid-free, archival quality stock, they are the best deal in keeping memories and transferring them inter-generationally IMO. They can also be stored faithfully as PDF's.
Digital files and photo books are stored offsite in 2 ISO formats: JPEG and PDF. They are the only formats I trust to be around in 50 years in a recognizable, accessible mode. They have international and widespread commercial buy-in. I see no point in keeping RAW and TIFF's of such large sizes once editing is done. RAW and TIFF stay local, but not online. It's an economy and bandwidth thing at the expense of fidelity. Life is full of tradeoffs.
Everything digital goes into Aperture (Mac). Archiving is done chronologically and Aperture has a plug-in straight to Phanfare. Once a Project or Album is completed and local backup done, it's uploaded. I do this about every 3 days. Because I use a photo-specific archival solution, I can organize the presentation for public or family viewing, and organize it to closely mimic what I have in Aperture chronologically. The exacts same is possible in LR.
I use Phanfare for offsite storage because of the excellent video storage and they (Carbonite) use Amazon S3 servers (Dropbox and SmugMug amongst many others also use Amazon S3). Calling it 'the Cloud" is falling into the conventional wisdom trap. They are digital archives using the one feature digitization that makes digital economically viable; effortless copying and storage redundancies turned into commodity. Yes you have to have some faith in a corporate entity to maintain the system and its integrity, but that's how economies work. It's $100/year. Pocket change.
Frankly, the dedicated photo archiving sites probably have the best solutions. They know photos. They are file format familiar and their corporate focus is on preserving memories not just bits. I think there is value i that. And they take responsibility under contract for the back-end. More time for me to photograph.
I hope that contributes to the discussion.
sol33
Established
The problem with simplistic cloud services like Phanfare is that you are no longer in a position to control the access to your images. A rouge employee of the software vendor or the cloud provider, a hacker or even a judge in a foreign country may all access your images without your consent and/or knowledge. This is not an issue for family photos, but I imagine it may be an issue for a professional photographer.