Photo storage

AnthonyRail · 4 Jan 2020

Looking for a cheap way of storing pictures and videos in order to create more storage space on the families Ipads as they are starting to be slow as lack of memory space.

I'm thinking a hard drive connected to home network. Something that can be accessed from a number of devices and tv etc. Just move all pictures to that.

But I have absolutely no idea what I need to get or what I'm talking about.

Advice would be well recieved. Thanks

RailUK Forums

Bevan Price · 4 Jan 2020

A few comments.
1. Do not rely on just a single device to store all your photos. If it fails, you risk losing them all.
2. Do not make things over-complicated.
3. I would suggest an external hard drive which you can connect to your ipad (USB lead, for example). Buy the largest size you can afford. And when you can afford, buy another, and have back-up copies of all your photos on each of them -- just in case one fails.
4. In the long term, hard drives are usually a more reliable form of storage than USB memory sticks, etc. And "cheap" may not always mean "reliable".

nlogax · 4 Jan 2020

Multiple archives. Have your home archive sitting on a NAS. Synology or Buffalo produce decent options (mine is a Buffalo Linkstation) - and then maybe consider an online backup on top of that. I use Google Photos, for anything taken from my phone I use the free option for unlimited photos at a fairly decent quality, and I pay a few quid a month to store DSLR images at original quality too. You can check out what that would practically mean here;

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Goo...ts-the-difference-and-should-you-care_id93938

"What happens to your pictures in Google Photos when you choose "High quality," instead of "Original?""

Other online backup options are of course available.. Dropbox, MS OneDrive etc. To be honest there are plenty of ways of doing what you describe, the above just works best for me and is pretty seamless. Others here will have equally decent suggestions.

ComUtoR · 4 Jan 2020

You can get yourself a home 'cloud drive' which is what you describe. A portable hard drive that is connected to your home network. I don't have much experience with them and they are known to be a little buggy.

There are plenty of online cloud storage options that give free storage. Google, Amazon, OneDrive, Dropbox etc etc

AnthonyRail · 5 Jan 2020

That's the advice I was after. Thxs guys

cactustwirly · 5 Jan 2020

Or get a Flickr pro account, to upload your photos to

D365 · 5 Jan 2020

For my Apple devices I use iCloud and iCloud Photos, not sure how easy it is to set up a shared photo solution though. However I wouldn't want to rely 100% on cloud storage, especially if that becomes my only copy of my photo library.

DaleCooper · 5 Jan 2020

This might sound old fashioned but for extra security I copy photos on to DVD+R.

Puffing Devil · 5 Jan 2020

I have a large drive on my PC, a backup drive on the PC, a backup server elsewhere in the house, Backblaze running as a cloud backup on the PC and my photos auto uploaded into Google Photos. You can never have too many copies of key files.

dgl · 5 Jan 2020

I would advise that if you go the NAS route to get one that can have 2 hard drives in a mirrored array, then if one fails you have not lost anything, even better if the hard drives are different lot numbers or even different brands as one of my lecturers at college had a problem with a business she was giving support to loosing both mirrored tape backups due to a faulty batch.

jthjth · 5 Jan 2020

If you have Amazon prime you get free photo storage. There is an iPad/iPhone app.
If you store to iCloud you can configure it such that lower resolution versions are held on the device, the higher res version being downloaded on demand.
iCloud lets you share folders with others.
OneDrive lets you have quite a lot of storage for not very much money. It also has an app to upload your pictures. Again you can share photos, files etc, and view them via a web browser.
Filling your iPad with photos will not slow it down. You only get problems once you have more photos than available free storage. It is a common misconception that computers slow down as the storage fills up.
Assuming you have a decent Internet connection, use two or three cloud services (I use iCloud, OneDrive and the Amazon service). It is highly unlikely that all will go pop simultaneously. They all duplicate data across the planet in multiple data centres. In my opinion, a NAS drive is the worst solution. Hard disks will fail at some point. Even SSD drives have a finite life time. NAS drives with redundant disks still have the controller hardware as a single point of failure. Home storage is also vulnerable to theft, fire, or some other disaster. Backup to DVD or CD is a bad idea. Home writeable disks have a poor long term life span. It’s highly unlikely that you could even buy the hardware to read them in the next few years. The most important thing with all cloud services is you make sure someone else knows how to log in, in the event that something bad happens to you.

najaB · 5 Jan 2020

AnthonyRail said:
Looking for a cheap way of storing pictures and videos in order to create more storage space on the families Ipads as they are starting to be slow as lack of memory space.

Put them in the cloud. No point maintaining your own spinning rust when you can get someone else to do it for you.

D365 · 5 Jan 2020

DaleCooper said:
This might sound old fashioned but for extra security I copy photos on to DVD+R.

I used to burn backup DVDs also (this was in the 00s), but since the cost of flash drives etc. has plummeted in the last decade, I certainly haven't had the need.

Which reminds me that I really ought to dig out those old DVD archives and make sure I haven't misplaced any of my files over the years!

jthjth said:
If you have Amazon prime you get free photo storage. There is an iPad/iPhone app.
If you store to iCloud you can configure it such that lower resolution versions are held on the device, the higher res version being downloaded on demand.
iCloud lets you share folders with others.

iCloud is definitely a no-brainer for personal storage if you use Apple devices. The "on demand hi-res" feature works very well. Good to hear that folder sharing is straightforward.

I have Amazon Prime also (student perks) but haven't looked at their photo solution.

OneDrive lets you have quite a lot of storage for not very much money. It also has an app to upload your pictures. Again you can share photos, files etc, and view them via a web browser.

Again I haven't used OneDrive for photo storage but it's great for files. My experiences with OneNote have soured this recently but that's another story.

Filling your iPad with photos will not slow it down. You only get problems once you have more photos than available free storage. It is a common misconception that computers slow down as the storage fills up.

I'd have to disagree with this, it's good practice to keep 10% of your storage free on a computer. iPad/iPhone might be slightly different but it does cause problems when they're filled, especially when it comes to installing iOS updates.

Assuming you have a decent Internet connection, use two or three cloud services (I use iCloud, OneDrive and the Amazon service). It is highly unlikely that all will go pop simultaneously. They all duplicate data across the planet in multiple data centres. In my opinion, a NAS drive is the worst solution. Hard disks will fail at some point. Even SSD drives have a finite life time. NAS drives with redundant disks still have the controller hardware as a single point of failure. Home storage is also vulnerable to theft, fire, or some other disaster. Backup to DVD or CD is a bad idea. Home writeable disks have a poor long term life span. It’s highly unlikely that you could even buy the hardware to read them in the next few years. The most important thing with all cloud services is you make sure someone else knows how to log in, in the event that something bad happens to you.

Personally, I wouldn't rely solely on cloud storage. As I wrote above, flash drives (and hard drives/SSDs) are dirt cheap now, I'd always want to keep an on-site backup of all my files. But, I'll admit, I have a very specific method for keeping backups.

najaB said:
Put them in the cloud. No point maintaining your own spinning rust when you can get someone else to do it for you.

I'd hardly call a 2TB HDD "rust"; I'm still in awe of how affordable they have become.

But I think I've rambled on enough for now.

jthjth · 5 Jan 2020

Never ever rely on a USB stick for backup or long term storage. To transport files from A to B, where they are still on A yes. A non trivial number of people have brought me dead USB sticks, looking rather pale, stating all their work of months was on it and they had no other backup. Many were students with important course work lost. Modern cloud storage, with more than one provider, is the way forwards. Cautionary tale: someone in the USA had all their life’s work on Google storage. For some reason they deleted his account and would not reinstate it. He even went to their HQ. Hence the reason for more than one supplier. It’s so easy to be made a “non person” by a large supplier with no practical source of redress.

Puffing Devil · 5 Jan 2020

najaB said:
Put them in the cloud. No point maintaining your own spinning rust when you can get someone else to do it for you.

Far quicker to pull your own files from a local server than do a complete restore from a Cloud provider. Multiple backups on different media is key, especially with nasty encryption extortionists lurking.

najaB · 5 Jan 2020

D365 said:
I'd hardly call a 2TB HDD "rust"; I'm still in awe of how affordable they have become.

It is rust - the platters are covered in metal oxides.

Lucan · 6 Jan 2020

najaB said:
Put them in the cloud. No point maintaining your own spinning rust when you can get someone else to do it for you.

One good point for maintaining your own spinning rust is that some cloud providers have vanished and taken the users' data down with them. Others have started chaging money for a previously free service, hoping that inertia will carry their users into subscribing.

My son works for a cloud provider. The guys working there are somewhat cynical about the whole cloud concept and he has a T shirt with "TCIOSEC" on it ("The cloud is only someone else's computer"). It makes his company obscene amounts of money though. Don't get me wrong, they do take security and reliability very seriously. They also use spinning rust BTW, and also some very long strips of it on reels.

It is odd that "cloud" seems to have become a new word for "storage", like some commenters here talking about having your own "cloud". I am not sure that some millenials know what a computer file is.

jon0844 · 6 Jan 2020

I use the cloud all the time, given I work with so many different phones, a Chromebook as main on-the-move computer and so on.

It is so convenient to have access to all my files/photos/video anywhere and everywhere, but I am only too well aware that things could change in an instant.

Google is receiving a lot of bad press of late, for a multitude of reasons. Of course most people don't care if a service is free, but businesses are experiencing issues with paid-for accounts, and even consumers (I use Google One) have had ups and downs. Then there's the amount of Google services killed, or not supported.

Oh and then there's the political issues where, in theory, a Government could make changes to the Internet almost overnight in the interest of national security. I can firmly believe Trump could do such a thing, especially with the FCC in his pocket, and what's to say post Brexit it couldn't happen here?

Russia and China seem to want to go down this route.

Anyway, I've singled out Google but the same could apply to any cloud based service. At best, you might find that one day they jack up the prices and now it gets very expensive to host your content.

Will I stop using Google? of course not, but I do have many 'vital' files in other locations and there's no harm in the old-school physical storage as a backup. First and foremost, the cloud is most convenient and I expect more and more people will go down this route as time goes on.

najaB · 6 Jan 2020

Lucan said:
One good point for maintaining your own spinning rust is that some cloud providers have vanished and taken the users' data down with them.

Stick with the big three (Google, Amazon or Microsoft) and you'll probably be okay.

Puffing Devil · 6 Jan 2020

najaB said:
Stick with the big three (Google, Amazon or Microsoft) and you'll probably be okay.

Hope is not a backup strategy.

jthjth · 6 Jan 2020

Puffing Devil said:
Hope is not a backup strategy.

There is no such thing as a 100% guaranteed backup strategy. All you can do is move the odds in your favour. Using *more than one* cloud supplier is one way of doing this. Yes, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, but it is someone else’s computer*s*. A big cloud provider has huge amounts of redundant hardware spread over geographically different areas. They also have lots of employees. You can’t hope to replicate this sort of redundancy on your own. Huge numbers of major businesses run both their websites, backends, core business etc on the cloud. If the major suppliers go pop we’ve got more problems than not being able to see your photos.

nlogax · 6 Jan 2020

jthjth said:
In my opinion, a NAS drive is the worst solution. Hard disks will fail at some point. Even SSD drives have a finite life time. NAS drives with redundant disks still have the controller hardware as a single point of failure.

I'm just your average consumer-grade NAS user and have been for the best part of a decade, but I've yet to experience a single issue. RAID1 is fine for my requirements, and daily email reports give me a view of disk health just in case. Helps that the most important stuff is also backed up elsewhere. Added bonuses of using a NAS that I've used include running an iTunes server and using DLNA to stream video files to the TV, laptops and iPad. It's been incredibly useful over the years.

If you want to go for higher-end storage, enterprise-class NAS can be a 'fun' option. A friend of mine stores about a dozen TB of files on a repurposed NetApp which sits in his garage. His electricity bills are just comedic.

dgl · 6 Jan 2020

As for NAS I have probably been luck in the fact that my NAS has been running for going on 10 years with the original hard drives and I most certinaly have other drives from that era that still work fine with no errors. Will probably upgrade the NAS to 1Tb drives at some point though.
Also remember a NAS works whether you have an internet connection or not, and will be generally much faster to read/write too, esp. if both NAS and PC are on 1Gbps ethernet connections.

Puffing Devil · 6 Jan 2020

jthjth said:
There is no such thing as a 100% guaranteed backup strategy. All you can do is move the odds in your favour. Using *more than one* cloud supplier is one way of doing this. Yes, the cloud is just someone else’s computer, but it is someone else’s computer*s*. A big cloud provider has huge amounts of redundant hardware spread over geographically different areas. They also have lots of employees. You can’t hope to replicate this sort of redundancy on your own. Huge numbers of major businesses run both their websites, backends, core business etc on the cloud. If the major suppliers go pop we’ve got more problems than not being able to see your photos.

My comment was aimed very much at the "probably" - if you're serious about securing your data you need to remove as many risk factors as you can - within your time, budget and competence.

I'm wondering how many people have tried to restore from a backup? It's easy to assume that your data is safe, when in fact the copies are corrupt and or/not properly written.

I was saved last year by versioned cloud backups of an SSD on a work machine that was slowly and invisibly corrupting files - the corrupted files were being written to a local backup drive and only the versioned copies in the cloud were recoverable. Multiple media, multiple locations, multiple mechanisms.

DarloRich · 6 Jan 2020

I use:

Flickr
Amazon cloud storage ( free if you have a prime account and split by category/subject to mirror the internal hard drive )
External hard drives ( they are split by category/subject to mirror the internal hard drive)
Internal hard drive storage

I am thinking of moving away from the internal hard drive entirely so may look at my own cloud drive at home or go to a second commercial supplier. The main pita is the time to upload all of my files.

najaB · 6 Jan 2020

Puffing Devil said:
Hope is not a backup strategy.

Who said anything about hope? No backup strategy is 100% guaranteed, but the likelihood of you losing your data when it's stored with any of the big three is much lower than if you try to manage your own storage.

Puffing Devil · 6 Jan 2020

najaB said:
Who said anything about hope? No backup strategy is 100% guaranteed, but the likelihood of you losing your data when it's stored with any of the big three is much lower than if you try to manage your own storage.

Only if you're backing up correctly, verifying those backups and have a versioning strategy.

najaB · 6 Jan 2020

Puffing Devil said:
Only if you're backing up correctly, verifying those backups and have a versioning strategy.

Regardless of if you are doing any of those, the overall likelihood of data loss is greater using a single drive in your own premises than if you are using Azure, AWS or Google cloud. That is just a simple fact, I don't get why you're being so obstinate about it.

malc-c · 6 Jan 2020

I use a NAS on our home network for back up images of the PC's and a media share (video, films, music etc). The device has two hard drives in a RAID array, which basically means that if one drive fails the data is still retained and gets remapped to the new drive when its fitted, so has a little redundancy.

The only drawback is that whilst it's all well and good having on-site backups should hardware fail, in the event of a fire then any such device is just as vulnerable as any PC etc. But Off-site storage is expensive, or takes a lot of time as most internet services have poor upload speeds compared to downloads.

If you do opt for a NAS unit, make sure you install server grade drives (or ones marketed as NAS drives) as they will be running 24/7/365 and most cheap drives sometimes can't take that.

ajs1981 · 6 Jan 2020

Puffing Devil said:
Multiple backups on different media is key, especially with nasty encryption extortionists lurking.

Related to this is making sure that, when possible, the backup locations are not permanently connected to each other. Encryption viruses can spread through connections. Equally an incorrectly run delete command can do the same. There is a famous story, I don't know if it's true, of a company having it's backup storage linked to the main system and someone ran a command that is equivalent to delete all and deleted their main system and backup.

Photo storage

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