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I have a family member dying from cancer who has asked me for some help.
He has 40GB of photos he wants to backup so hits family will have access in years to come. Essentially a permanent record.
My first suggestion (before finding out how many images he had) was to put up a basic website and index everything. To be blunt, the work needed to do that will take longer than he has.
He wondered about DVD's and I said it was dying technology, plus they are prone to damage. He also asked about the cloud; I said possibly but if the host company goes belly-up then he could lose everything. My suggestion was two SSD's. Keep one at home and the other in a safe deposit box. I said to get USB as it will likely be around the longest.
Am I missing something? Anyone got a better idea?
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With a safe deposit box available, I might go with multiple approaches...
Burn a DVD (dying or not, they'll be readable for a while yet)....
Include a couple different USB flash drives.
Include an SATA hard drive.
Include an SSD.
Have someone in the family responsible to pull them all and re-archive on whatever the "current" tech is in five years.
Just my opinion...
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Well, as this is the first generation of "digital photo only" mentality, to make certain that photos live on in the future I'd choose the most important ones to him and have multiple prints (real prints, not photo printer prints, but film prints) made and distributed to those important to him.
And then do the same with the digital photos. A USB flash drive will live a long time. 64GB flash drives are $30 or less; and you would / could easily distribute those to a number of key relatives.
But physical photos have the best chance to survive for decades to come.
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Flash technology supposedly leak charge over time, so USB thumb drive and SSD may not be the best long term solutions.
I would go with DVDs. Multiple copies on different brands.
Also an old school magnetic hard drive - external with USB connector might be OK. The lowest available capacity. I personally have pulled a few 5 year old drives out of storage and not had problems.
How about uploading to Facebook? People can access that and it should be good for a few years.
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Can you burn the library to one or two blurry discs? That would be reasonably cost effective to make additional copies for family members and has the advantage of multiple copies in case one fails.
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Sadly, archival quality prints will still last longer than any purely digital media.
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Aperture does a pretty nice job of creating web pages.
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Two pronged approach...
Analog: Use iPhoto and have some professionally printed albums made.
And digital: Get several 64GB flash drives, put a copy on each flash drive and give the flash drives to various members of his family.
