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I've been a frequent user to Flickr but only recently splurged for the Pro account to increase my photostream. It's great to be able to use Flickr as an offsite backup for my digital photos but now I am starting to get into the more advanced features of the service.
I've got plenty of photos of family and family events and I would like to share them with specific family members - hence the Flickr "group" feature. Create a Flickr group, specify who can join, and voila! Family members can now view and upload their own photos.
But I've quickly come to the realization that a group is not useful unless it has the same collection and set functionality as your regular photostream. I'd like to create a family group for all my relatives to view - and within it create sets of different family events. I'd also like to organize all my family events by year in a collection.
Anyone at Flickr listening?
I've come across several friends and family who have come to me in dire need of some backup help. For whatever reason their hard drives had conked out - some either giving errors during use, or not being able to load Windows at all. In most cases the hard drives were somewhat recoverable . In a day and age where digital picture taking is the norm and 50+ pictures per event is not uncommon, one has to realize that digital files are more susceptible to becoming nothing than are film negatives. I quickly came to that conclusion when the drive where I store my photos on ... along with 200gb of other data went on the blitz. Fortunately that hard drive was part of a mirrored hard drive RAID array and the other drive was holding an exact copy of that data for me.
I quickly realized that those photos from as far back as 1999 were irreplaceable - even if they were taken with a digital brick of a camera called a Kodak DC210 with it's whopping 1megapixel capacity. It was then I started to find an acceptable solution for backing up my precious data.
Websites that offer offsite storage solutions were either too-expensive or at the risk of disappearing tomorrow. External USB hard drives are good but those drives too are prone to errors (as with any hard drive) especially if you get one based on a laptop (2.5 inch) hard drive (I find laptop hard drives do not last as long as 3.5 inch desktop drives).
My final solution? The $24.95 a year Flickr Pro account at www.flickr.com. Those personal photos don't have to be made public to the world ... they can be marked as private if you choose to. Plus, you can give access to view those photos to other family members. Quite handy indeed.
I've always been a fan about external USB hard drive enclosures. Originally I used my ADS full-height enclosure for a DVD writer. USB was great for my Windows pc and Firewire was used for my Mac. I was able to move it among all my Windows-based PCs and the occasional use on my Mac. It was so simple and easy that I was able to swap out the original DVD writer for a dual layer DVD writer in no time. Instant usefulness.
Then enclosures became popular with desktop hard drives. It was great to use it as a central repository for files - important backups or just temporary storage. No need to map network hard drives to backup important files and try to remember where you put them a couple of weeks later.
Then I started using them to backup my important files while I wiped out my machines in order to reinstall Windows. This was a frequent practice for me because I often found a fresh install of Windows XP always performed faster and smoother especially with all the spyware, viruses, and trojans that went around. So beneficial, it was commonly becoming a 3-month cycle for me.
With the frequent re-installs of Windows I then found a benefit for Symantec's Norton Ghost. It was software that allowed me to create a complete image backup of my system and store it on a hard drive in a single file (not always). I would create my clean Windows XP install with all service packs and create the backup image. Then, I could initiate the clean process 3 months later. So convenient that it took my 5+ hr reinstall period for Windows XP (with service packs) to less then 30 minutes.
Then I came across an article on PC Magazine that mentioned a product called Maxtor OneTouch. The article immediately had me believe that this whole Norton Ghost process of imaging a system was captured in an external hardware product - complete with hard drive and automatic software! To me it sounded like the hardware would allow me to immediately create a ghost image of my system - and with the size of hard drives nowadays (a 1 terabyte drive can be had for about $200 CDN) - you could probably keep several different stages of backups on the hard drive.
I have yet to see this product in the familiar retail channels (ie. Future Shop, Best Buy, Costco, Sams Club) to try it out. So until then, your guess is as good as mine to whether it works the way i think it might.
