Preserving Your Navy Photos

[Gatordev]

In all seriousness, Thumbdrives are your best bet and they are CHEAP these days compared with what they used to be. I remember a few years back seeing 256MB drives for 40 bucks whereas nowadays you can get a 1GB drive for 30 or so. Go for it.

Thumbdrives start to become very limiting pretty fast. I have all kinds of media, not just pics (and no, not just pr0n), and I've far exceeded even an 8 GB thumbdrive. I actually just bought a RAID 0/1 enclosure and plan to move everything to that (both personal data as well as media). Sure it's a HD w/ movable parts, but in RAID 1, everything is mirrored.

 

[Pcola04/30]

Myphotoalbum.com......no complaints so far. I dont even want to guess how many gigs worth of pictures friends and I have on that sight.

 

[phrogpilot73]

I like Gatordev's idea of a RAID enclosure, saw a nice one on TigerDirect that allowed hot swapping and different size drives. I would also recommend Xdrive.com. You get 5 gigs for free, but can pay for more. It's an online hard drive, and you can upload whatever files you want. They do regular backups of their servers, so your data is relatively safe.

 

[JIMC5499]

If you want to archive your pictures long term you need to put them on to a CD or DVD. Thumbdrives and memory cards are nice, but they have limitations on the number of times they can be written to. I haven't done too much withe pictures, but I have blueprints and diagrams that were written to CDs in 1996 and are still readable with no problems. I'm not saying that thumbdrives and memory cards won't get you through a deployment or even a few years, I'm referring to long-term storage.

 

[Schnugg]

I have seen CDs start to peel and flake...on the writeable side. So that would not be my long term permanent storage solution.

The number of times you can write to a flash drive is in the millions...I would not worry about that point of failure on a good drive (ie. SanDisk).

 

[HeyJoe]

If you want to archive your pictures long term you need to put them on to a CD or DVD. Thumbdrives and memory cards are nice, but they have limitations on the number of times they can be written to. I haven't done too much withe pictures, but I have blueprints and diagrams that were written to CDs in 1996 and are still readable with no problems. I'm not saying that thumbdrives and memory cards won't get you through a deployment or even a few years, I'm referring to long-term storage.

Even they aren't perfect as they can become scratched easily and crack if mishandled. They, too, can lose their bits of info over time. I know one photographer who uses CF cards once and stores them. A little pricey, but he wants to save his images. So, there's nothing that's ideal and, consequently, I recommend mitigating your risk by using several methods.

 

[CaptainRon]

My brother just posted an album on google's picasa web albums and I was able to download the entire album with one click, for free.

More proof that google is the best thing on the planet.

 

[BACONATOR]

Google = TITS!

Maps = better than google maps plus secondary sites which use maps to allow you to determine distances of run routes

search engine = best out there

Scholar = filter out amateur opinions on technical subjects and random porn returns on your search

Calendar = better than outlook

Gmail = best email site out there with best spam filter

photo/document sharing = awesome integrated with all other google functions

translator = thing that allows me to translate things that people send me in other languages while sending them simple phrases back in same language which makes me appear smarter than I am = COOL!