datastorage

Dubious storage solutions are not new, with reports of cheap components in hard drives and inaccurate storage capacities on memory cards and thumb drives. Unfortunately, that trend is increasing, according to German data recovery specialists CBL.

Back in February of this year, I began making a huge transition from the Drobo NAS system (now out of business) to the newer and far superior QNAP system. Back then I had just installed the two new NAS systems but had not moved any data.

Drobo, once a darling of the photography world, is officially no more. Following a filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year, the company was unable to emerge from that situation and is now in liquidation.

Data storage company Drobo has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in California's Northern Bankruptcy Court.

A new high-speed laser writing method claims that it can pack 500 terabytes (TB) of storage onto a single CD-sized glass disc. That equals somewhere in the neighborhood of 125,000,000 photos.

OWC has announced Copy That, an app with the sole purpose of making it easier to copy photos and videos from your iPhone to external storage. It gives you the ability to select what you want to copy, where you want to copy photos to, and how you want to copy them.

All digital data storage decays in one way or another. Depending on if your storage media, your digital photos may last just years or decades before "bit rot" destroys it. But Microsoft is working on something called Project Silica that could one day allow you to store your precious memories safely for 10,000 years by etching the data into glass.

When I first started in photography, there was no method to my data management madness. When shooting on location, I downloaded my cards onto my laptop and upon my return home I copied everything onto my computer. Every now and then I would make a backup on an external hard drive that I kept in my office.

I hate it when I see photographers writing articles like this. I always think, "why bother?… just let it go, this isn’t going to change anything." But here I am anyway, tapping away to release some of this pent up anger. And I don’t expect this to change anything for me, but I sincerely hope it can stop at least one other person making the same mistake I did: buying a Drobo.

If you're looking for a way to do ultra-fast photo backups on-the-go -- and you have deep wallets -- Samsung has announced a new portable solid state drive (SSD) for you. The new Samsung X5 is the fastest portable drive on the market, boasting a max write speed of a whopping 2.3 gigabytes per second.

Amazon is tightening its belt when it comes to its cloud data storage services. The company has just announced that its $60 a year plan for unlimited data storage is being abruptly discontinued. For that same rate, you'll now only be able to store 1TB of data.

It looks like Amazon has abruptly ended its $12 per year plan that provides unlimited photo storage, which included RAW files and was a fantastic deal for photographers looking for a backup solution.

If you back up your photos on optical disks or storage drives, there's a good chance your data won't last as long as you do due to things known as "disc rot" and "data rot". But what if you want to ensure that your precious photos live longer than you? Good news: a new "eternal" storage technology may be on the horizon.

Scientists have created nanostructured glass discs that can storage digital data for billions of years.

Amazon has just dropped a huge bomb on the file storage industry by announcing two new unlimited cloud storage subscription plans. One lets you store all the files your heart desires for just $60 a year, and the second is one that may be a very attractive backup option for photographers: unlimited photo storage for just $12 a year.

Remember the days when having a 1 terabyte hard drive was exciting? Well, Seagate has announced a new 3.5-inch drive that can hold 8 terabytes of your data, and with an affordable price tag to boot. It'll cost just $260, which means you're paying about 3 pennies per gigabyte.

Could memory cards and hard drives one day store massive numbers of digital photographs on DNA rather than chips and platters? Possibly, and scientists are trying to make that happen.

Last year, we reported that a group of researchers had successfully stored 700 terabytes of data on a single gram of DNA. The data being stored that time was a book written by one of the geneticists. Now, a new research effort has succeeded in storing something that's a bit more relevant to this blog: a photograph.

The number one reason for data loss is human error, and one of the other major reasons is the failure of storage mediums. When examining ways to store digital photos for a lifetime back in 2009, we noted that entrusting your data to the servers and engineers of major cloud companies (e.g. Amazon and its S3) was a better option than trying to back up your data yourself. Even though Amazon's S3 has long been an attractive option -- after all, many online photo sharing services use it for storing your data -- its pricing of around around $0.14/GB/month means that storing just a terabyte costs $100+/month.

That changes today with the introduction of Amazon Glacier. It's a new uber-low-cost storage service for people who just want a place to dump their data without having to worry about it. Pricing starts at a crazy-low $0.01/GB/month.

There's a good chance the digital photos you've stored on hard drives and DVDs won't outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn't suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between "1000 years" and "forever".