# Safest storage medium?



## MrChips (Jun 19, 2013)

Hi. 

Ive tried different backup options: USB sticks, USB flash sticks and hardrives but Ive jet to find a backup option that can store videos and photos for many years. 
What would be the safest storage medium to use? 

Thanks for answering.


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

Multiple mediums,_ all stored in different locations_.


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## Light Guru (Jun 19, 2013)

MrChips said:


> I&#8217;ve tried different backup options: USB sticks, USB flash sticks and hardrives but I&#8217;ve jet to find a backup option that can store videos and photos for many years.
> What would be the safest storage medium to use?
> 
> Thanks for answering.



There is no solution that is guaranteed to last for years. 



480sparky said:


> Multiple mediums,_ all stored in different locations_.



Exactly Multiple backups, in multiple locations.


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

Light Guru said:


> There is no solution that is guaranteed to last for years. ........




Whoever invents a digital storage method that is truly reliable will be able to buy Bill Gates many times over.


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## KmH (Jun 19, 2013)

MrChips said:


> Hi.
> 
> *Safest storage medium?*


For archival longevity? Film negatives.

Perhaps you can better define 'safest'.


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## SCraig (Jun 19, 2013)

robertwatcher said:


> ... Those disks of my professional wedding and portrait work, cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars and all fit into a *$75 2GB hard drive*.



Presumably you mean a 2TB (terrabyte) hard drive.


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## runnah (Jun 19, 2013)

Cloud based storage solutions.


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## Derrel (Jun 19, 2013)

Bonus points for those who know where this came from. The best protection is on flash drives or camera memory cards, "*hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar kept under Funk & Wagnall's front porch.*"

(As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

Derrel said:


> Bonus points for those who know where this came from. The best protection is on flash drives or camera memory cards, "*hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar kept under Funk & Wagnall's front porch.*"
> 
> (As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)



Johnny Carson.  And it was a *No. 2 jar*.

I'll take a D4, please.


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## Derrel (Jun 19, 2013)

I could have sworn I heard "mayonnaise jar" on multiple occasions. Man...I sure miss that show Sparky.


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## jwbryson1 (Jun 19, 2013)

G-Technology 4TB G-SPEED Q External Hard Drive Array 0G01792 B&H


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## runnah (Jun 19, 2013)

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. To help ensure data durability, Amazon S3 PUT and PUT Object copy operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy.
Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If Amazon S3 detects data corruption, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.
Amazon S3's standard storage is:


Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement

Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year

Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities


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## SCraig (Jun 19, 2013)

Derrel said:


> (As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)


It's reaching the point where CD-ROM media just isn't feasible though.  I could only get about 36 RAW files from my D7000 on a 650mb CD and for those with higher-resolution cameras it would be even worse.  The D800 guys would only get about 18 images on a CD.


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## amolitor (Jun 19, 2013)

What I do is arrange to have no data that I care very much about.


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## Derrel (Jun 19, 2013)

If I shoot 700 frames of landscape shots in a full 12-hour day, there are probably only six that make the cut as portfolio-grade images. That means I could get three days' worth of images (RAW) onto one CD-ROM image.


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

Derrel said:


> I could have sworn I heard "mayonnaise jar" on multiple occasions. Man...I sure miss that show Sparky.



You did.  It was a *No. 2 mayonnaise jar*.


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## SCraig (Jun 19, 2013)

Derrel said:


> If I shoot 700 frames of landscape shots in a full 12-hour day, there are probably only six that make the cut as portfolio-grade images. That means I could get three days' worth of images (RAW) onto one CD-ROM image.



I don't cull images once they get home.  I do delete a lot from the camera but not after they get home.   If they get that far they get saved, so in your situation I would have 700 images to write to 19 CD's.


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## runnah (Jun 19, 2013)

You guys and your CD are high.

I chalk it up to you guys being scared of anything that you can't hold on your hands.


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

runnah said:


> You guys and your CD are high.
> 
> I chalk it up to you guys being scared of anything that you can't hold on your hands.



I make a half-dozen 80x120" glossy prints of every shot I take and store them in 6 locations.


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## amolitor (Jun 19, 2013)

Actually I use a fractally encoded system of microdots tattooed on my junk for the best of my pictures.


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## runnah (Jun 19, 2013)

480sparky said:


> runnah said:
> 
> 
> > You guys and your CD are high.
> ...



Do you have them shipped to the four corners of the globe, the exact location only known by a third party who keeps the location in a safety deposit box that only two strangers have the keys for?


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## 480sparky (Jun 19, 2013)

runnah said:


> 480sparky said:
> 
> 
> > runnah said:
> ...



No.  I have NASA rocket them into space.  A near-perfect vacuum at a degree or two above Absolute Zero is the best storage place in the cosmos.


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## runnah (Jun 19, 2013)

480sparky said:


> runnah said:
> 
> 
> > 480sparky said:
> ...



Still not a safe as cloud storage. 

'cause aliens.


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## JDFlood (Jun 19, 2013)

5 1/4" floppy disks?  Oh, that's right, it would take about 40 of them to store one D800 NEF file... Maybe not. JD



Cloud storage is only as safe as the hardware and the bozos who run it. Sorry I have four rotating sets off hard drives with one always stored off site. I trust no one except myself.


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