Monday, August 11, 2008

Storage

I've taken loads of photos lately. I mean shedloads. First we had two weeks holiday in Zakynthos, and then a family wedding at the weekend. Probably 400-500 photos in all in 3 weeks, plus well over an hour of video.

Even once I've deleted all the crud, there'll still be a lot of stuff left. Currently I stick all these files on an internal hard drive on one of our two PC's and - madly, the one I use least, which means whenever I want to access them I have to either use that older PC, or switch a second one on.

Either way it's a nuisance, and I'm also increasing nervous as that drive is now some years old and I don't back it up regularly....OK, hardly at all....err, I did once - honest.

The time has come I think to get an external HDD - there's loads about at reasonable prices - 500GB for 50 quid sort of stuff, so there's no reason not to. The last thing I want is to lose almost 10G of photos plus all the video I've done over the years just because a drive fails, or I forget to back up.

And then you back up the back up - just in case, and so ad infinitum.

I'd ideally like a network storage drive so I can access it from either of my PC's, whichever is switched on, but they are a bit more expensive - and you need to know a bit about networks I'd guess. I wouldn't trust a manual to tell me how to do it.

Some stuff I upload to Flickr or Photobox, both superb sites in their own right, but it can be tedious uploading lots of large files to these sort of sites. How did we ever manage before broadband?

I use the rather excellent Picasa to view the photo's by the way.

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