On Apr 10, 2015, at 11:53 AM, Travis O <enoster@hotmail.com> wrote: > Hello! > > I take a lot of pictures of plants. Way too many. > > And then to backup the pics, hardware (cds/zip drives) or a cloud? > For some reason on this issue, I guess I'm a Luddite. I just don't trust the cloud. I like having my own personal copies of things. There are already stories starting to pop up about how some cloud storage locations had a power failure or catastrophic hardware failure or some other problem, and permanently lost some people's files or data. Of course that can happen with your own personally stored files as well. But then there's the question of always having sufficient Internet access at a high enough speed to get what you want whenever you want it. (I really don't get this concept of *paying* for music or video, but then never keeping a copy, whether on your hard drive or on a disk, that you own and have possession of.) In any case, I've looked a little into backup/longterm storage of photograph files and it seems that burning them onto blu-ray disks seems to be the best of the current technologies for doing this. There are even a few companies that specialize in this, such as Digistor <http://www.digistor.com/>. It seems that the actual material used to stored the 1's and 0's in blu-ray disks happens to have physical and chemical properties that naturally hold the data for very long periods of time, compared to the material used for DVD or CD disks or any magnetic material like that used in hard drives. Plus, the capacities in GB per disk are much larger. I think I read somewhere that properly stored blu-ray disks can easily store data for a century without loss of data. (And maybe by then, there will be technology that can store data for even longer periods of time?) I've also read that solid state/flash memory storage is also only on the order of ten years or so. Maybe that has gotten bett er. --Lee