Digital Content Storage

I got a Seagate external hard drive for Christmas for my Mac.....apparently I have to actually plug it in for it to back up my digital content! LOL I'm getting there....it's only been....what? 9 months! I'll make Christmas 2010 my goal!

It sounds like you just want to keep pictures. What I do is email them to myself. My yahoo account has unlimited storage. So, I can access them from any computer that gets yahoo mail.

My bank - Wells Fargo - has Vsafe for saving important documents, etc. My insurance - State Farm - has a digital upload section that will let you upload all pertinent stuff for your house, like appraisals, warrantys, model, serial numbers, pictures.

We store everything on a removable hard drive that goes in a fire proof safe. All our pictures are also stored at Shutterfly.com just as a back up since they will never delete your stuff (een if you never purchase anything). I think it all depends on what you are comfortable with, I have never stored everything online (though it seems like an easy and accesible way to go incase anything ever happens to the removable hard drive). Hope this helps, sorry I dont have more info.

I have some of the same concerns. We have an external hard drive with all of our pictures on it, but it is giving us some difficulties and I'm not sure I'll be able to retrieve all of my photos. External drives can and do crash. Fortunately, I've got most of them on Shutterfly. I recently purchased flash drives to store and save all of my photos because some day I'm going to want to pass them down to my children (in addition to my actual photo albums). I'm betting that flash drives will still be around in 20 years but I'm not convinced that CD's will and an external hard drive will not last for 20 years. Plus flash drives will fit in my fire safe easily and they are relatively inexpensive. That's my two cents.

We use www.smugmug.com for all storage of our pictures - we probably have close to 100Gb of pictures by now. It does have an annual fee, however, they have proper software for both mass upload and download of pictures from the site. And it works great for sharing pics with friends and family.
As for videos, we upload these to www.vimeo.com - but that is mostly so we are able to share them with family.
As for the rest, my husband takes regular backup on external harddrives. We rotate the external harddrives so that every second backup is done on an ext. HDD that we keep at his work (in case of fire in our house) and the other is done on an ext HDD we have here at home.
If you decide to use ext HDD only for backup purposes, make sure you have at least 2 you can switch between - just in case one dies (as they tend to do over time), then you always have the second which may be a little older, but at least it is not all your data that is lost.
Good luck :-)

By 'storing digital content' I am assuming you are looking for just that... storage of it... and thereby, having it backed-up.

So, I would suggest saving everything on an external hard-drive.
Then you can do whatever you want with it... not having to use it ONLY exclusively with a certain website, like Snapfish etc.

Your photos are probably on your computer, your having loaded it on your computer from your camera. Right?
So then you need to save it and back-it up... like on an external hard-drive... in case your computer crashes or something.
Saving photos, in at least 2 places... like on your computer and an external hard-drive.. .is ideal. Then you always have back-up copies of it... for safety.

Some people, in addition to these methods, ALSO then save their photos on an off-site storage site, like Snapfish etc. Then that would be a 3rd way, to save all your photos.

The point is: do NOT only save all your photos on your computer's hard-drive... ALSO save it onto an EXTERNAL hard-drive, too. That is the safest, in case your computer crashes or whatever.

all the best,
Susan

Creative Memories has a great Digital Storage Program called Memory Manager. The best feature for me is that it is not web-based, therefore I don't have to be logged onto the web in order to view my pictures. Check out the digital section of my website to find our more information... www.mycmsite.com/aprildunhamfilson. Now I will tell you with any Storage program you have, you should back up those pictures on an external hard drive, memory card, CD, or USB drive. It is a good idea to do this with no matter what digital storage you decide to use. With the way technology goes, heaven forbid if we lose any of those cherished memories that we have.

I use Smugmug also, which I love. You can download the images back in their original size as well unlike Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc. There is an annual fee, but the site is so well organized that it's worth it to me. An external hard drive is also a good idea. I like having smugmug also because then I can access the pictures from anywhere that has internet. I don't HAVE to go to my home computer or harddrive. They have the ability to house videos also, but I didn't opt for that since it was more $. I've been using Vimeo for it. For documents, I just email them to myself on either yahoo or gmail since like someone previously noted, the storage there is pretty high or unlimited.

I like flickr but here is a link from what some other moms have mentioned as their favorite:

http://www.theskinnyscoop.com/question/q/1537?utm_campaig...

I'd get an external hard drive. That's what I have now but as someone else mentioned, you do have to have it hooked up to do a routine back up once in a while. I don't have it hooked up so I have to remind myself to back up my photos/documents. Also, when I first had my son, I would upload all my photos to Costco and then have them burn them on a CD for me and stored in a safe. You can do that too if you want. But I try to remember to upload photos to Costco as often as I can as a way to back up. I don't use the other sites you mention so I can't give you feedback on those. I know at one point, Kodak would say that I wasn't purchasing anything and because of it, I would have to order something to keep my account. (I think it was Kodak.) Just look for those clauses. Good luck.