<p>I have digital pictures stored all over the place…on my laptop, my phone, my iPad. I am looking for a secure, inexpensive place that I can store them all together somewhere outside of any physical media in my house or on my devices, in case of a fire or theft or something like that. </p>
<p>I do backup my iPad to the “iCloud” but that’s only a portion of the photos.</p>
<p>I know there are sites that allow you to do this, but I’m a little overwhelmed with the options. Any advice?</p>
<p>We use carbonite to back up everything up. I am not a techie, but recently had a computer die and had to get a new one. Was able to restore easily.</p>
<p>I recommend you make actual prints of the ones you really like or treasure. One thing I’ve learned about the digital revolution is that the final storage medium will never be invented. Every few years however you are storing them now will become obsolete, making your pictures difficult to retrieve. Today’s nifty new photo storage technology will be tomorrow’s 8-track tape system soon enough.</p>
<p>I use smugmug.com. It’s easy to organize photos and to share, to download, and to print if you want to. It’s nice to know that in case of natural disaster, fire, etc, my kids’ baby pictures won’t be lost.
[Photo</a> Sharing. Your Photos Look Better Here. | SmugMug](<a href=“http://www.smugmug.com/]Photo”>http://www.smugmug.com/)</p>
<p>I just ordered my 2nd or 3rd “project” from Shutterfly. Bought a photobook and just did holiday cards. They offer free unlimited storage without changing original resolution and promise to keep your photos “forever.” I haven’t used them for mass storage but I might.</p>
<p>I have a lot of photos on photobucket, facebook, and google.</p>
<p>The issues that I have are security and offsite storage. I don’t want to put my files on a server that belongs to someone else because of privacy issues. I also want secure, offsite storage. One way to do that would be with an encrypted hard drive where you work or at another offsite location where you control access.</p>
<p>I’m sure for some this isn’t ideal, but I have everything (and I do mean everything) from DH & I dating through S3’s 17th b’day this summer on an external HD both in the fireproof lockbox here at the house and and identical copy at my mom’s. Once a year I update both. When it comes to the point that the ‘medium’ changes to whatever new technology I’ll simply transfer them to the new technology and move on. What I have actually started as negatives (have those), went to CD’s (still have those), and were eventually transferred to the external HD. I’ve never felt the need to keep everything I own on the ‘cloud’. Like BCEagle I have privacy issues. I feel pretty exposed as it is and don’t wish to help it along.</p>
<p>I upload all of my pictures to Google’s Picasa. I can keep them private or share them with anyone I want to or make them public. Picasa is at my favorite price point – free.</p>
<p>I got an external hard drive, and copy my entire computer onto it after every major vacation or holiday (to make sure the photos get saved), then my H keeps the external drive at his office, which is guarded and sprinklered. This saves not just all my photos, but all our documents also, since I scan them and save them as pdf’s.</p>
<p>I had taken a bunch of pictures of extended family on a digital camera several years ago and a nephew wanted the pictures so I gave him the SD card and he sucked them all down on his laptop. I then thought about the risks in doing that as there were some family pictures on the SD card too and those were as vulnerable as was his security practices. I don’t want family pictures floating around on the internet.</p>
<p>There are new articles on Google Administrators abusing their access and looking at the private emails and other information on users. Similar to Best Buy Geek Squad employees looking at files on the computers that they work on or reporters getting emails and picture off of mobile phones of celebrities.</p>
<p>As far as privacy settings on websites goes: the saying is that all non-trivial software has bugs. All you need is a security hole in the site that you’re using for your personal information to become public.</p>
<p>And what happens if you put really important family pictures on a hard drive, secure it with encrypted this and encrypted that, and then you die. Family members will never have access to the pictures unless you happened to print some off during your lifetime. If your practice is to print off pictures then the reason to keep them encrypted on a hard drive diminishes. The better practice is to keep them on the cloud. Unless you are celebrity, no administrator is going to commit a crime in order to view your family pictures. At death, online accounts can be transferred with access to the accounts to one’s heirs like any other property.</p>
<p>The encrypted drive is a backup for your files. Your primary is at home. Our kids have my keys memorized as they have to go into my systems from time to time. I have an encrypted masterfile with access information and financial records and they have access to that file.</p>
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<p>You’re assuming that administrators are rational.</p>
<p>I have to take a secure coding software engineering course by January (I have to take these ever couple of years). I get to see various approaches used by hackers to gain unauthorized access to systems and that includes cloud systems.</p>
<p>My daughter has a paid account at Flickr (24.95/year). I use Carbonite (for everything, not just photos) at $55/year. I <em>also</em> have mirrored drives, back up my phone once a week to my hard drives, and have an external hard drive.</p>
<p>I also regularly go through the photos and create small books on a particular topic (dogs, bike trips, Portland, a trip, whatever) from my photos. I use mypublisher.com and shutterfly, whichever has the better discount (or Groupon). I don’t worry about making the books fancy–I just put a date range on the cover, with a thematic name (“Italy 2011”), slam the photos in, and I’m done with it. The books are way better than a bunch of prints. And easier.</p>
<p>I have found that external hard drives go surprisingly fast even if they are not used that often. So, for ShawWife who takes a gazillion photos as prep for her artwork (she’s a painter and sometime installation artist/sculptor), we use an external drive and an online backup. I looked at Mozy but backblazes was easier for Macs at the time. Carbonite didn’t really work for what we wanted. Amazon S3 could work.</p>
<p>I am concerned about privacy, but my concerns are much greater regarding other information that is contained on my computers. So the hard drives on my laptops are encrypted, the passwords are stored online in an encrypted service (they can’t see what I set as passwords), and the online backup is encrypted. One of our clients asked us to install serious security and so, among other things, we now change passwords every X months.</p>
<p>I also use webmail rather than Apple Mail when on hotel sites as apparently it is trivial to read what people send/receive on public or quasi-public emails sent via Mail or Outlook or equivalent. </p>
<p>The Shawbridge family is going to scan in 20+ years of photos soon. Any suggestions for doing this?</p>
<p>I don’t encrypt my external hard drive. There’s a risk to everything, and since it’s our backup file, I believe it should in fact be available to any family member who wants to access it. Where my husband works, it would not be at risk of being stolen unless someone wanted something a heck of lot more important than photos of our vacations.</p>
<p>Let’s face it - there is no medium that is eternal.</p>
<p>Our external hard drives hold pictures only, are kept in a locked firebox at home with an identical copy at my mom’s. Neither are encrypted. When the boys are older and settled in a home of their own if they wish to have one that has the entire family history, or just select files, I’ll happily create one for them. </p>
<p>Shaw, about ten years ago we moved everything from negatives to digital. I had an excellent scanner, as I’m sure you do with Shawwife’s work, however it’s exceptionally time consuming. I had my local Ritz Camera do it in batches and thought it was very reasonable. There are places you can do it for less online but I wasn’t about to ship off my negatives to a company I had no history with.</p>
<p>Stuff on magnetic media hasn’t been much of a problem - keep files on an external drive at work. The problems have been the “8s” of the kids - hi 8 magnetic, some in NTSC and others in PAL, super 8 film, all of which I don’t have something to play them on. Saddest are the 16mm that my dad took in the '50s onwards - the reels have basically crumbled into pieces of film a few inches long. The kodachromes, ektachromes, and velvias from the 70s and 80s exist but with nothing to view them on, at least at home.</p>
That’s my concern as well. I don’t want my family’s photos in an unsecured location on the internet where I have no control over them.</p>
<p>However, in this age of Facebook and people dumping their personal lives in the internet, some people don’t seem to care about privacy in this area.</p>
<p>If the ‘cloud’ location permits sharing the photos then it’s not encrypted and therefore not secure but if the location is for backup purposes some of the services encrypt the data before it’s sent and stored and therefore it’s secure. In this case whoever needs to retrieve them needs to know the ‘key’ though.</p>
<p>I’m sure that the NSA has better things to do than to check out your photos and financial records but the way things are going, you may be able to buy a Knights Corner in a few years and decrypt stuff that can’t be easily decrypted today.</p>