Talking Tech | Preserving your digital memories
- Cheap backups: External hard drives, thumb drives
- There are also affordable online backup services
- Video storage is more complicated
The images were striking.
Homes on the East Coast washed away by Hurricane Sandy. People in tears, clutching faded photographs, among their only remaining possessions.
If that doesn't move you to get serious about safekeeping your lifetime of memories, what will?
The digital era offers tools never imaginable before — including one-click access to a lifetime of family photos.
Here is a primer on how to back up your photos and save them online, where they can live forever and be accessible in good times and bad.
Scanning
The first step for those old wedding and childhood analog photos is to scan them and save them to a digital format.
Most consumer printers come with scanners these days, starting as low as $100, so that's an easy but incredibly time-consuming step.
Two faster solutions: ScanMyPhotos.com, a California-based retailer, offers a $245 flat fee to scan up to 2,000 photos. You buy a prepaid mailer box at its website, fill it with your photos, and get a DVD (and your photos) with scans of all your images.
If $245 is too much, consider stopping into your local FedEx Office location (there are more than 1,800) and check out the Sony PictureStation kiosk. For $5, you can do self-service scans of up to 100 photos on a CD. (Expect the process to take about an hour, as you slip photos in and out of the scanner, but it does move quicker than doing it at home.)
Storing the photos
With your scans in place, import the photos into your computer, and back them up.
You could make multiple copies of the disks and spread them to loved ones. Or you could opt for external hard drives (around $100 for 1 terabyte) or little ($10-$20) thumb drives instead, and add your complete photo and video collection from your computer.
"The key is not to keep (the backups) in the house," says Mitch Goldstone, the president of ScanMyPhotos.com, which scans an average of 250,000 pictures daily. "Get them off site, at a friend's or relative's house, in a safety deposit box."
Online photo services
The easiest way to get your photos offsite is by using an online photo service — saving them to the cloud. Most services have free options, but as you put more and more photos up there, it will either get costly, or unmanageable.
You can choose a pure photo site or cloud storage — which lets you add music and other documents.
If you want to view and share photos, a photo site is your best bet. But throwing every photograph you've ever taken onto Facebook, the most popular photo-sharing site, would only annoy all your friends and make the photos hard to retrieve. Facebook lowers the resolution of your photos, making this the poorest of choices for backup.
Online photo services SmugMug and Phanfare, for a price, offer unlimited backup and full-resolution downloads, without ads for photo gifts. They also let you organize photos by categories (Thanksgiving, Christmas, summer vacation in Maine) and download the complete gallery. By comparison, sites Flickr and Shutterfly let you get your photos back at full resolution one image at a time; 500px.com won't let you download the original at all.
SmugMug starts at $40 a year to upload unlimited photos; $60 if videos are included. Phanfare starts at $99 yearly for unlimited backup and full-resolution downloads. (Fine-print ads tout $29 yearly Phanfare subscriptions, but that's for low-res images.)
Online backup
If you have more than just photos, and need lots of space, look at a pure online backup service, like Carbonite or CrashPlan.
Carbonite, which owns Phanfare, backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive. It's easy, especially if you use Windows computers. But for $59 a year, it only updates additions to your photo collection on your computer's main C hard drive. For Carbonite to also grab photos from an external hard drive, you'll have to pay $99. And if you use Apple computers, Carbonite won't back up your external hard drive unless you pay the $225 annual business rate.
Competing cloud backup site CrashPlan costs $49.99 yearly, and it doesn't care whether your data is on the C drive or an external hard drive. It picks up data from both, without you having to pay extra.
Cloud storage
For folks who don't need automatic backup, but instead want to take a more active approach, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive let you manually store files online, share and instantly access them. All offer free options — 2 GB of free storage for Dropbox, 5 GB for Google and 7 GB for SkyDrive. But you'll want more. Dropbox is $99 yearly for 100 GB. Google charges $30 yearly for 25 GB or $60 for 100 GB. And SkyDrive is $10 yearly for another 20 GB of storage or $50 for 100 GB.
There are desktop uploaders and mobile apps to make the transfer and access process quicker.
Bottom line.The hard drive or flash drive option is the cheapest and easiest, but not the safest. Drives can fail. Online services are more expensive, but more secure. With more of us switching back and forth between our computers, phones and tablets, such services are the best way to get access to our data from wherever we are.
What about video?
Backing up video online is tougher than photos, due to the large size of video files and limited options.
Often, external hard drives are the only viable and affordable option for video backup. Online options for video, due to the size of the files, are limited. Here's a couple:
•Online services SmugMug and Phanfare offer unlimited video backup, starting at $80 and $99 yearly. However, it will take a good deal of time to upload your large video files.
•Pure video sites such as Vimeo and YouTube might be the better way to go. Vimeo offers free downloads, but not in high definition. Video Plus costs $59.99 yearly, and you get full HD downloads and faster uploads. YouTube has no paid option. The free service recently added a hidden feature in its Video Manager section — downloads of MP4 files of your originals.