digital photo archiving

Brighton's West Pier in 2001, put through a Lightroom filter in 2012

I have digital photos dating back to 2001 when I first began borrowing an Olympus compact from work over weekends. Earlier this week I began looking through them. Most are of Brighton - streets, the seafront, piers, graffiti. Over the years I faithfully backed them up to CD but now, with this format quickly becoming dormant - an 'idle format' if you will - I've been wondering what to do with them next. The new retina-display MacBook Pro's no longer offer a CD/DVD drive and while I have no need to upgrade just yet it has dawned on me that everything I have backed up on CD/DVD will need to find a new home.

For the time being I'm making use of Amazon's Cloud Drive storage. The first 5GB's are free. After that there's a £6 annual fee for 20GB, £16 for 50GB and up to £64 for 200GB. I've been using the desktop uploader for a couple of weeks and it's been working perfectly so far. I only became aware this week that Dropbox actually uses Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) too. I've been using Dropbox for years but the cost of extra storage is prohibitive compared with Amazon's.

It's tempting to see Flickr as a backup for digital photos and video - certainly in the early days it was one of the reasons why I signed up to the site. Unfortunately it's nothing of the kind; downloading your content is not an option within the site itself. As I've mentioned before, you can pay for services to download your photos but my problem is many of the photos I uploaded over dial-up internet six or seven years ago were resized - either during the upload process itself or by me beforehand just to make the process quicker and less expensive.

Then I was wondering if I could edit these old photos and produce a Blurb book from them. Losing the digital files then wouldn't be so much of a problem. Trouble is, most of them are not particularly interesting. Back then I simply wandered the streets clicking merrily away and if the shot was in focus it was a job well done. If you've never produced your own Blurb book I can heartily recommend it - the quality is superb (compared to other services I've seen) and there is something far more interesting about thumbing through the pages of a book you've produced from your photographs than a simple photo album.

For the record I have a lot of photos stored on CBA Digital portable external hard drives. Much as I can recommend these (and have never had problems with them) I feel better knowing that my images are backed up in more than one place. But trying to come up with a way of archiving them where they're going to be safe forever is futile in this day and age. Which makes me wonder whether the Blurb option might just be the way to go...