Carla_Boots Posted October 24, 2013 Posted October 24, 2013 (edited) This is how I always backed up my digital photos: burn them on one brand of DVD-R(Verbatim, for example), then burn again on a different brand of DVD-R(Sony or TDK), then copy all of them to a WD external hard drive. I keep them in separate places. On top of that, I also back them up on a cloud server. Yes, I know that sounds very paranoid, but as the "official" keeper of family photos, I have photos dating all the way back to 1940. It took me two and half years to scan carefully, one at a time. I could have sent them out and had them done commercially, but I seriously had doubt that they would look at EACH photo carefully before scanning them. At last count, there are almost 50,000 photos. Now that I have a new BD-R burner, I figured I might as well make another copy on BD-R. My first batch consists of 11,000 digital photos. It sure took a long time to burn them, as there are 11,000 files. I'm wondering if I should place them in a zipped or RAR file so they burn as one single file? Which is better for data integrity in the long run? Thanks! Edited October 24, 2013 by Carla_Boots
LIGHTNING UK! Posted October 24, 2013 Posted October 24, 2013 With that many files (and massive antivirus overhead as it scans each file), I'd probably make an image first on a different hdd to where the photos are stored - that'll be a lot quicker than reading/writing to the same hdd. You could do something like create recovery data (par2 files etc) for the files, or do as you said and zip/rar them up with built in recovery data - I know WinRAR lets you do that.
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