Long lost photos
I was very happy yesterday, when an e-mail from VG Nett Fotoalbum (a Norwegian online photo service) arrived in my inbox, telling me that I had several albums quarantined and that they would be deleted if I did not take action and paid for hosting.
I had long forgotten about this, and was very happy to find that I had several albums stored on that site, which I was sure I had lost in a hard disk crash a couple of years back. Awesome!
So I paid the 90 NOK for 6 months of hosting and got all my albums out of the quarantine 
There were photos from a car trip I made through the eastern parts of Norway in 2004, my trip to India in 2005, my cousins wedding in 2005 and from my brothers confirmation in 2006. As well as a couple of other random pictures which I am happy to have back in my posession
This event has gotten me thinking that I really should find a proper online storage service for my photos – or perhaps a proper network backup system is in order. However, I really don’t feel like stuffing more computer and network equipment into my apartment. But are online services reliable enough?
How do you backup your photos and other files that are precious to you? Got any good tips for me?
5 Responses to “Long lost photos”
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Home backups won’t save you in the event of fire, earthquakes or nuclear blasts, so you need offsite backups! I’m using Flickr for backup of pictures ($24.95 a year for unlimited backup!). I’ve used Jungledisk and Mozy for other stuff, but not 100% happy with either..
That’s the thing. Paying several thousand NOK for a NAS box only saves you from hard drive crash. I am a Flickr subscriber, but I would like to have my pictures unmodified somewhere. Dropbox might be an alternative, but then again I don’t want all the photos that I backup to automatically also appear on my work computer. But yes, Flickr is a good candidate.
Cross-backup your files with your family’s remote hardware. Unless you’re the only one connected, that is ;]
I don’t know about your feelings about Microsoft but Live SkyDrive gives you 25 GB backupspace in an old abandoned (possibly haunted) mine somewhere in Bolivia. I am currently testing out MS’ “cloud”-framework, Live Mesh, which will give you something similar. I have also set up Mesh so that I can easily remote to the desktop of any of my computers that are connected. The reason I started testing Mesh out is that you can develop applications that will save any application data to the cloud so it does’nt matter on what computer you use it from.
Something tells me SkyDrive is not too Linux friendly?
I am currently using DropBox and also testing Ubuntu One, but mainly for synching files between computers.
Considering paying for the services if I find it to be a good way to backup pictures etc.
Live Mesh sounds cool, btw!