The time I spent 3 years digitizing my dad's old photo albums

I scanned every single print from 1978 to 2005, over 2,000 photos, and stored them on a hard drive. Last week the drive failed and I lost half of them because I never backed up. My sister says cloud storage is a scam, but I'm thinking maybe local backups aren't enough. What do you all do to keep your memories safe for real?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_elliot1mo ago

Find a friend or relative who's good with computers and ask them to burn everything to Blu-ray discs too. Hard drives and cloud services both fail eventually, but a disc in a drawer or safe deposit box will outlast all of us if you take care of it.

paul_taylor211mo ago

Tbh I read somewhere that the 3-2-1 rule is the gold standard for backups, three copies on two different types of media with one offsite. Ngl your sister might be right to worry about cloud scams but Google Photos or iCloud can be the offsite part while you keep a second hard drive in a drawer.

tessa_murray1mo ago

Respectfully gotta disagree with @the_elliot on the disc thing, those things scratch or degrade way faster than people think. Cloud storage isn't a scam, just pick a big reputable one like Google or Amazon and you're good - your sister probably had a bad experience with some random startup service that went under.