iCloud How do you keep your old photos on physical media from dieing?

[Samtb]

What do people do with old photos on memory sticks and SD cards they want to keep? What format should they be transferred to? Is the cloud the best place to store them? I worry that the SD cards and memory sticks will eventually die and the photos will become unrecoverable.

 

[WebHead]

My long-term plan (for a different type of media) is to back up to both external HD and BD-R. Pansonic BD-Rs will last decades, and the HDs will last several years if not in regular use - just scan them for errors once or twice annually.

If you use the cloud, go with a big name from MAGA. Smaller operators could die and take your files with them.

 

[Eric Idle]

My long-term plan (for a different type of media) is to back up to both external HD and BD-R. Pansonic BD-Rs will last decades, and the HDs will last several years if not in regular use - just scan them for errors once or twice annually.

If you use the cloud, go with a big name from MAGA. Smaller operators could die and take your files with them.

Data dies on disks over time. That's not a long term solution.

 

[WebHead]

Data dies on disks over time. That's not a long term solution.

I did specify time limits in each case. And BD-R is pretty long-term (if it uses the non-organic dye).

Maybe I should also have mentioned M-disc. It's expensive but if you don't have too much data it could be an option.

 

[Ben J.]

I've collected everything over the years, from RAW files to digitized slides and family albums, in Lightroom and I use LR to develop, organize and create collections. All is backed up in several places. I'm now in the process of exporting collections from LR to my Google Drive as jpgs of about 2-3MB each. Then I share the link to this library with friends and family and encourage them to download parts or all of it. The small size of the jgps makes this quite doable with thousands of photos. People can also easily view them on mobiles or whatever. This is my strategy, for now, for trying to let the library live for a long time. Hopefully long after I'm gone.

 

[swandy]

I use Apple Photos - hence the automatic backup into iCloud Photo Library. I also back up my Photos library onto two separate external hard drives. JPEGs, TIFF and possibly Adobe DNG files are safer "long term" alternatives to RAW files because there is no guarantee that your camera's RAW format will always be supported by software. As was pointed out, part of the issue is whether your backup file location will be readable long term - either because of deterioration or because the file structure is no longer supported.
BTW - you are probably better off asking this type of question in a dedicated Photography forum. I use DPReview a lot and there are several other photography forums you can search for.

 

[seggy]

Cloud (really, two clouds) or hybrid storage (e.g. having the stuff sitting on a Synology at home that gets backed up to the cloud) is probably the way to go at this point.

There are cloud-hosted services for consumers and smb's which allow you to sync the contents of multiple consumer-level cloud services.

While cloud offers resiliency at scale, it also offers human incompetence at scale. So while it may be statistically much more reliable than your hard drive sitting at home, there's every possibility that a chain of human ineptitude could take out multiple tenants and you becoming one of the 'only a few customers were affected by this incident' casualty.