The A - Z Of Digital Storage Options
What types of family media do you have sitting around? We’ve seen many clients come in who have a shoe-box full of printed photos, or an old scrapbook from yesteryear, or maybe several VHS tapes from the 90’s. Although it’s nice to have these photos and videos in this way, it’s hard to share them online with your loved ones. And, if you’ve read our other posts, you may know that those original files may lose some of their quality year after year - meaning they won’t last forever. We at PhotoBerry recommend converting these photos and videos to digital formats so that you can store them in a variety of ways for future generations.
So let’s say you just used PhotoBerry to digitize your family photos and videos! Now what? You can keep them on the USB or DVD that PhotoBerry provides, and you could opt to use other digital storage methods, too. Let’s look at several storage options, listed below. We’ll provide commentary on some pros and cons related to each.
(Note - we do not look at how much GB of storage you will need - we’ll revisit that in a different blog post article. Also, the data are as of June 2020.)
Part A: Different Physical Ways to store digital files
These options below refer to physical hardware devices that can be purchased to store photos and videos.
SD Cards (and Micro SD)
These cards are typically used for consumer electronics like cameras or tablets. Using Flash Memory, these can be very cheap and have an estimated shelf life of 10-12 years. As of this writing, you can get SD cards with up to 1TB of storage space. It’s possible to use these as a way to store your photos and videos, but with such a small size they can be easily lost, or left in a pocket and thrown in the washing machine (and ruined!). You also may need a ‘dongle’ or external connector add-on to be able to connect the SD card to your laptop, if it doesn’t have an SD card slot already. (Most do not have Micro SD Card slots.) Another issue is formatting - if you migrate between Microsoft PC and Mac computers, make sure your SD Card is formatted to handle both systems, otherwise one computer may not recognize it. Oh, and often the SD Cards have a little “LOCK” toggle - if you try to read the data in your computer and nothing shows up, make sure that that toggle is unlocked!
USB Drives (Flash drive / Thumbdrive)
Similar to SD Cards, these also use a memory storage type called Flash Memory, leveraging similar benefits, like cheap cost, small form factor, and good longevity. One bonus to USB drives is that most laptops have a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 slot. If yours does not, you’d need a way to connect your USB drive to the laptop. For both USB Drives and SD cards, you’ll have to keep them in dry, cool areas to increase their longevity.
External Hard Drives (HDD / SSD)
HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive, and SSD stands for Solid State Drive. These use two different types of technologies, and generally speaking, SSD’s are much better. Hard Disk Drives use magnetic storage technology, and the way they save data is by writing information to a spinning disk with a little ‘head’ - which also then later can read that data. Suffice to say these drives have many moving parts that can fail, making their lifespan range between 2-7 years. Solid State Drives use Flash Memory technology and generally last 10-12 years. In addition to lasting longer, Flash Memory has the advantage of no moving parts and much faster read/write speeds.
DVD Disk
DVD’s are a great way to store videos - they are small and can store a lot of data. If stored in DVD cases out of sunlight and in a cool, dry environment, they are estimated to last at least 5 years, and some estimates say they’ll last more than 25 years. It’s harder to get the data off of the DVD than it is all other media types - but you CAN share the DVD itself with your friends and family members, so that kind of makes up for it.
Other consumer electronics (Laptops, iPads, Smart-Phones, etc)
Generally, we recommend not purchasing and using one of these if the sole function is to act as a photo/video storage device. Not only would the cost be much higher than the other options, but there are so many working parts in these devices that the average lifespan stays low: around 2-4 years. These devices will most likely use flash storage memory, which is good, but they aren’t built specifically as long-term storage devices. Some older laptops use Hard Disk Drives as well, further limiting the device’s longevity.
Part B: Cloud-Based and Online Storage methods
These options below refer to online options that allow consumers to store files and content on the internet.
Google Photos, Apple Photos, Amazon Photos, Apple Photos (iCloud)
These types of photo/video storing systems usually come as Apps that are installed on your phone or tablet. With the exception of Apple, you will be able to download these Apps on either iPhones or Android phones, and sometimes they come with companion apps for your computer. All of these are great options, and it really depends on which app ecosystem you prefer. At PhotoBerry, two of the cofounders recommend Google Photos - and the other two recommend Apple Photos, so you can’t go wrong! Most of the time, as you take photos and videos on your phone, the app will auto-upload them to the cloud storage (as long as you still have space). For media that you don’t capture on your phone, you can manually upload photos and videos as well, but this can be difficult depending on how you go about doing this.Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox.com, Box.com, Sync.com
These tools are generally used to store more than just photos and videos - they act as File storage systems for all types of content, saving the data to the cloud. These tools work well among all hardware platforms, and generally they have a Desktop program that runs on computers to keep your files in sync on your local computer hard drive as well as their cloud back-up. These are often a good choice for folks who want the flexibility of having things backed up online but not have to worry about manually managing those backups very much. The issue here is getting your photos and your videos from your phone into these software tools, it can be a chore.
Flickr, Imgur, 500px
These websites are geared toward sharing photos externally to people who you don’t know, which can be a great way to showcase portfolios, photography work, content or artistic skill, etc. They aren’t great at storing much other than photos and videos, and often there are limitations on how many you can upload, and what size of file. Most of the time you can keep your media private, if desired, as well. Generally these are not recommended to be used as a main source of media backup! Of note is Flickr’s option that for $60 a year you get “unlimited” photo storage, so that might be a compelling option if you have thousands and thousands of photos. Imgur has no paid options and allows unlimited storage, but does cap the quality/size of the photos you upload. 500px has a cap of 7 free images uploaded per week, or if you want to pay, the max you can upload per week is 1000 images at a time for a 3TB cap, and no videos can be uploaded.
Author’s rating and notes
Here’s a photo showing how one of our PhotoBerry founders rated all the options listed above.
As a reminder, all of the notes above are the opinion of the author. Also, these ratings are also only opinions. PhotoBerry is not liable for any decisions made by any person or party due to information provided here. Any action you take based upon the information on this website is strictly at your own risk.
Final Comments
One best practice is to utilize more than one way to store your digital files. This ensures that if you lose one digital copy, you still have the other! (If you drop your USB drive into a lake then you still have your backup copy saved somewhere else!)
At PhotoBerry, when we convert photos and videos into digital files, we typically provide a USB Flash Drive and/or a DVD (for video files only). For USB files we provide you, we recommend that you back up those files in multiple ways according to your preferences. For DVDs we provide you, we recommend that you keep them stored in dry, cool climates and avoid getting them scratched. More articles to come on how best to store your memories!
At the time of this writing, one of our cofounders really likes using an External Hard Drive (SSD) to keep all photos and videos stored as a backup. Every once in awhile they’ll download all the photos from the cloud (Google Photos) and bulk upload them via computer to the hard drive. If they received a USB containing digital copies of scanned photos, they would connect that to their laptop and upload them all to Google Photos on the internet and then to the External Hard drive as well.
The important piece is to keep your memories safe.
Make sure to reach out to us soon so we can help you on your journey to back-up all your content.
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Notes:
The number of photos and videos that you can store per 1 GB of memory will vary greatly depending on many factors. If you have questions about how much memory (storage space) you’ll need for a particular project or for the long run, feel free to reach out to us so that we can help calculate it out for you. And we’ll make a blog post in the future about this very topic.
Editor’s note: you may see the words digital storage, memory, and data capacity in this article, which all roughly refer to the same thing: how much space is available for you to save your digital files.
Sources:
Lunt, B. (2011) “How Long Is Long-Term Data Storage?” - Retrieved June 23 2020 from http://www.imaging.org/site/PDFS/Reporter/Articles/REP26_3_4_ARCH2011_Lunt.pdf
