Google drive

[Frank Petronio]

If you don't need to retrieve old client raw files or obscure jobs from years ago, there is a lot to be said for deleting old junk, physical and digital. I know that I might throw away something potentially precious but the sheer quantity of images we accumulate means that no reasonable descendant will ever have the time to rummage through it all.... perhaps with key wording and meta data, plus smarter search engines and face recognition the data could be mined but I rather have some editorial control over my legacy.

My Father-in-law left thousands of Kodachrome slides behind. Most are incredibly boring but I know there is also some fantastic stuff in there but the thought of wading into it fills me with dread. Same for the stacks of old family photos dating back to the 1930s... I don't know who most of the people are now.

Had they edited their collections down, properly labelled them, and left us 100 of the best of the best, it would have been so much better - we'd probably have enlargements hanging on the wall and more of a connection with the past. Instead they all sit in boxes in the basement or attic, decaying.

Professionally it makes sense to put a time limit for storage into the contract, I don't want to dig for something from 20 years ago.

[Kirk Gittings]

Two things. On going stock sales make me want to keep all the old commercial files accessible. Also I have an agreement with UNM to take my archives when I can't handle it anymore. Family stuff is all stored separately.

[cdholden]

Two things. On going stock sales make me want to keep all the old commercial files accessible. Also I have an agreement with UNM to take my archives when I can't handle it anymore. Family stuff is all stored separately.

Kirk,
Do you also have one of the heads of UNM's Computer Sciences department ready to take over forum moderation when you "can't handle it anymore"?

Chris

[Kirk Gittings]

No. One of you hosers is going to have to step up.

[Frank Petronio]

Me! Haha

As a secondary backup strategy, it isn't a bad idea to take your best 100-200 images and save them as large 2048-pixel jpgs and put them on every free portfolio type site - Flickr, 500px, forum galleries, etc. as an emergency fail-safe. While you wouldn't make fine prints from them, they would be enough to suffice as a portfolio for future work after a disaster - and it doesn't hurt your search engine rankings....

[cdholden]

No. He said hoser.
His replacement will be Canadian, eh?

[Kirk Gittings]

Yeah. I think we could use a hoser or two on the moderation team. We need the international representation and POV.

[David A. Goldfarb]

I agree with paulr on this one. Aside from the copyright questions, who wants to be uploading and downloading that much data all the time? Even if the space is free, the bandwidth tends not to be. As for offsite backup, what I do is when I upgrade my main backup drive, I use the former backup drive as a working drive, and the former working drive becomes an offsite backup drive, which I leave in storage, so if I ever had a fire or something, I wouldn't lose all my work.

[Drew Bedo]

There are draw-backs to every mode of backup. I have digital backup in multiple external hard drives with CD backup as well. Another form of backup is the negatives and transparencies that are in a safety deposit box.

There is not one perfect backup modality that all eliminates risk of loss, costs little and retains my privacy. I do what I can with what I have and recognize that everything in life is transient . . . some things more ephemeral than others.

[Leigh]

As our Terms of Service make clear, 'what belongs to you stays yours.'

Let's put this in perspective, in the context of modern computer usage.

You own your files.
But you give g**gle unlimited rights to use them however it wishes.
When you upload files, regardless of what they are, you're giving them away, period.

I expect if you dig into their T&C you'll find that the license you give them persists forever, even if you remove the content.

By definition, they make copies of everything you submit, in accordance with normal computer security guidelines.
That means that even if you remove the files, they still have copies of them and can continue to use them.

- Leigh