Third Party Hosting Update

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
I have paid $123.98 for a years subscription to the re modeled Photobucket -

Expert Plan
2TB
$10.33
PER MONTH

*billed annually
Approximately 400,000 photos

AdFree
Image Hosting
Unlimited Sharing
Display Anywhere

That, hopefully , retains my 20,000 images for another year. I would rather pay than trust a free site like Postimage who have proved their mendacity by changing the image code and dumping millions of hosted photos worldwide. Can we trust Photobucket now ? Likely not but maybe they are the lesser of two evils in this case. I guess if the sub stops being paid annually the lot go anyway.
 

aricooperdavis

Moderator
rhychydwr1 said:
Would it be cheaper to back them up on an external hard drive?

That would complicate sharing them online though, or embedding them in places like this forum. If you have any web hosting then you could look into something like Lychee so then you'd just pay the price of your monthly hosting (which is almost certainly cheaper than photobucket). Downside is it requires some technical know-how.
 

Tseralo

Active member
Please tell me you have them backed up locally as well? These sites have a history of just closing their doors when they run out of cash.

Personally I store all my images in lightroom with the catalogs backed up to another drive locally and amazon S3. To share images I just host them on my site but I don?t host as as many as you.
 

ZombieCake

Well-known member
A 2TB hard drive starts around ?60 these days. I keep two separate back ups.  I suppose convenience of access is a factor for cloud storage as well.
Incidentally there's only (I think) 3 actual makers left of the spinning discs of rust variety: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.  They're often re-packaged - I've a Samsung branded drive that's actually Seagate inside. 
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
I do back them up on a hard drive but that is not at all the issue. Its having them hosted on forums like this. I use several forums and sometimes a forum only " hosts" images itself as attachments or lower res. images you have to click to enlarge. Even worse is links to somewhere else which I rarely can be bothered to follow. I have some huge research projects elsewhere which would be ruined if the images were lost. Years of work gone. Dont forget even here my Reservoir Hole thread had over 100,000 views possibly the most on any caving thread in the world. So please don't get sidetracked by the back up scenario. Its all about retaining them on work online. I accept that nothing in life is certain but Photobucket have back-tracked on their original ridiculous pricing set up to arrive at this compromise which I think a sensible market strategy.  I would consider Photobucket somewhat less of a risk than free  or low cost sites for hosting images. Nothing is forever, this forum, Photobucket, me or anything on line. Ultimately only print will survive for decades with any degree of certainty and its a shame that some caving clubs have resorted to on line publications. In any case I now have 49 Photobox photo books which most likely will last longer than anything on here.
 

Inferus

New member
Have you just answered your own question?
No online site/storage is guaranteed to be future proof, things change, as do links.. Keep multiple digital backups (stick, hard drive, CD, cloud...)  Trust nobody.

Hosting on your own site is possibly best in the short term but to be morbid, what if you get seriously ill or worse die, could very quickly disappear.. So much information could potentially vanish,  yes, things like Way Back Machine exist but that doesn't include everything..

The move to digital is great and generally cheap in the short term, however, hard copies should be created/kept for the long term.. Digital copies of old, long out of print and hard to come by journals is brilliant for example.
 

Bob Mehew

Well-known member
ZombieCake said:
A 2TB hard drive starts around ?60 these days. I keep two separate back ups.  I suppose convenience of access is a factor for cloud storage as well.

There are two major considerations here, one is do you want a back up of everything at every moment and the other is how low a risk is acceptable.

If you want a reliable back up at all times then you need a set up which copies the data across multiple drives, usually 4 is recommended.  It is known as RAID, see https://getprostorage.com/blog/understanding-raid-storage/ for a description.

I am much more relaxed.  I back up to an external hard drive every day or so.  I then back up that external hard drive every week to a drive in another computer located in a different room.  (That is to minimise the risk of water leak damage impacting both computers plus the external drive.) 

In fact I have two drives in the other computer called E and F.  I back up E to F and then back up the external drive to E.  That way if there is a virus, I have an up to two week old copy on F which hopefully is not infected when the infection is discovered on my machine or possibly on the external drive or worse on E.

If you want to further lower the risk, then backing up to a drive away from your home is the next step.  (That covers the risk of a fire in your house or worse an earthquake.)  I know of friends who back up to a drive at their children's home, others use Goggle's My Drive or equivalent.  I did investigate putting a drive in my detached garage but hard drives do require reasonable temperature and humidity which won't be achieved mid winter.  It also assumes you have a reasonable internet connection and can tolerate shifting large quantities of data when you get home after a two week holiday with tens of GB of photos. 

As has been mentioned you also need to ensure your drives are by different manufacturers, are preferably of different ages and are replaced every few years so as to further reduce the risk of failure. 

No doubt I have missed a few other risk minimisation actions (like readability of files - any one remember .sam?).  But what stops me is the thought of when I drop dead, what will happen to all the material?  I sense my family will just chuck it away once they have pulled out those bits they want.  The British Caving Library currently only takes paper based material and I don't have a laser jet printer (and archival paper) to print out all the material I thought might be of interest to other cavers in decades to come.

But as TOR says the key thing for him is getting a link from his images to the sites where he displays them. That sounds like setting up one's own web site. 

Whilst I accept a paper base is likely to have a better shelf life, I am not so sure about photo images, I fear ink jet printed images may fade over the decades.  Certainly it has already been noted that hand written minutes of recent origin are already degrading due to poor paper and ink quailty.
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
I think I am really only interested in what happens during my own life time. If I am not here to care why worry ? I do have a huge local photo archive which I have left in my will to the local Heritage Centre. Going to on line sources who makes sure that their log in passwords are available to next of kin if they die suddenly ? I have horror stories of stuff dumped by relatives once they have gone.  All my deceased mate's 30 years of diving research went that way. He was very secretive and nothing went on line . We never traced his big marine artifact collection either.
 

ZombieCake

Well-known member
Ultimately only print will survive for decades with any degree of certainty and its a shame that some caving clubs have resorted to on line publications.

One school of thought it that we're heading into a digital dark age as, compared to when film was king, not as much is being printed and anything electronic is ephemeral.  Paper is best!
Inkjet prints can last a very long time if properly stored.  Here's some info from Canon (mainly as I have a Canon Printer, I guess others are similar) https://www.canon-europe.com/printers/inkjet/pixma/quality-with-speed/
I personally wouldn't touch any 3rd party 'compatible' inks or cheap paper with a barge pole though.
Light, moisture, and environmental factors e.g. oxidation are the biggest issues.
In terms of storage RAID is good, but can give a false sense of security if it's your ONLY means of storage as what you have is resilience and not back-up.  RAID plus a back up drive, or a main disk plus RAID back up is good.  On it's own it only gives you a brief 'get out of jail free card' (unless you striped the data (RAID 0) for speed in which case you're 100% stuffed if a drive fails).  The failed drive data has to be re-built from data from the surviving drives, e.g. copied across from the 'mirrored' drive in a RAID 1 set up.  Think the about post was talking about RAID 5 or 6.  Question is that if they were all bought at the same time, how long are the other drives going to last?
 

Bob Mehew

Well-known member
I suggest an extract from the web page says it all

"The ChromaLife100+ inks offer enhancements in colour reproduction and deeper blacks for more vivid photos. Prints can last over 200 years in the photo album, approx. 40-years on display behind glass (light fastness) and 10-years without the glass (gas fastness)."

I presume that assumes your photo album paper back and plastic cover is also of archival quality and not some cheap rubbish filled with organic molecules containing chlorine just waiting to turn into hydrochloric acid. 
 

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
How long will printed images last in a Photobox hard cover book on best quality paper ?






Returning to the original top of thread topic. Third party hosting is purely for the " enjoyment " of others on a forum like this. So it's costing me ?96 so you lot ( and others ) can see my miserable attempt at photography. The other forums I use are basically research and recording. Having ones own website was mentioned. It will not work as you have to follow endless links to the image and frankly I cannot be bothered. Cost wise I doubt there is a lot in it. Mr O. Doc has a fine website but I rarely look at it. In any case I think he has had trouble with it.
 

ZombieCake

Well-known member
I suggest an extract from the web page says it all

"The ChromaLife100+ inks offer enhancements in colour reproduction and deeper blacks for more vivid photos. Prints can last over 200 years in the photo album, approx. 40-years on display behind glass (light fastness) and 10-years without the glass (gas fastness)."
Bob, I should say that these, I think, relate to the premium inks offered by various makers.  The increase of time behind glass is because glass cuts out UV rays and the physical barrier reduces oxidation. The normal maker branded ink stuff that Argos and Curry's etc. may not be so good, so wouldn't want to lull anyone into a false sense of security.  Still, who knows with care they might be alright, and perhaps we've all been conned by marketing....
I've a Pixma Pro 100s and it's very nice and it has the extra inks for monochrome. Like other Canon and Epson etc. printers you need to get the inks from a few suppliers which is a bit of a faff.
Absolutely spot on re:storage of media and the conditions they need. 
 

2xw

Active member
If you want archival images on proper paper it's worth noting that it can often be cheaper to get a proper printer to do it rather than buying printer/ink/paper yourself.
 
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