# Storing those tiny SD memory cards?



## Ray Dunakin (Jan 6, 2008)

Now that I've had my digital camera for well over a year, I'm starting to accumulate a few of those tiny SD memory cards full of pics. I'd like to find some convenient way to store them, but so far I'm not having any luck via google. 


Does anyone know of a product for storing these things? Ideally, I'd like something along the lines of a file card with a little plastic pocket for the SD card to fit into, and plenty of space to write down what's on it.


(Before anyone asks, I'm NOT depending solely on these things for archiving my images. I also have them on my computer and on two external hard drives. But I'd like to save the images on the cards too, "just in case". When it comes to anything digital, I've found it's best to have as many options for recovery as possible.)


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## Mike Reilley (Jan 2, 2008)

I use poly pockets in a 3 ring binder. These things hold 8 1/2" x 11" papers inside a pocket made of clear flexible plastic...but you can slide CDs, DVDs....or SD cards in there with paper describing what's on your SDs. 


http://www.staples.com/Staples-Clea...4:SS949677


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## bottino (Feb 7, 2008)

Im told that these cards are not the best way for long term storage of our pictures. They are bubble memory, and it deteriorates over time. The pictures are best stored on CDs or DVDs. I finally have moved up to 2gig cards, so I don't have very many to deal with now. I found some small plastic containers used for fishing flies to work very well for 4-5 cards at at time. These cards are like stamps, I lose them right in front of me on my desk. 
Paul


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Ray

Along Mike's idea, how about the following?

Use the 4-pocket 3.5" Disk Storage pages, you should be able to get two SD cards per pocket or eight per page, and label each SD-Card with a unique ID.








Avery Disk Organizer Pages, Acid Free, 10/Pack (75222)[/b]

Then use the 8.5" x 11" page protectors interleaved between the SD-Card storage pages to hold the information about what's on each SD-Card.








Avery® Page-Size Sheet Protectors, Nonglare, 50/Pack (74204)[/b]


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## Richard Smith (Jan 2, 2008)

Small glassine envelopes as used by stamp collectors to preserve their stamps (also good for old photo negatives) can be marked with pen for identification and kept alphabetically in a 3x5 card file box. Compact and easy to retrieve.Each envelope can also be accompanied by a 3x5 file card if more description of contents is desired.


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## Dean Whipple (Jan 2, 2008)

Paul had the right idea......back them up on DVD's or CD's MUCH cheaper, safer, less prone to damage AND longer life...if you want you can even make additional copies and store them off sight....


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## Scottychaos (Jan 2, 2008)

wow..thats a first! 
I have never heard of anyone actually storing the cards! 
interesting..could work I suppose, seems needlessly expensive though.. 

normally the cards are meant to be temporary storage..most people only use one or two. 
you take the photos off the camera, to the computer, then wipe the card clean and keep shooting with the same card.. 
then backup photos to CD's or DVD's.. 

there is no need to buy and keep dozens of cards.. 

I have been shooting for 10 years with only one card!  

Scot


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

I would save to DVD, a lot cheaper... 

Greg


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## Scottychaos (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By Greg Elmassian on 14 Aug 2010 04:42 PM 
I would save to DVD, a lot cheaper... 

Greg 



and you can fit a looooooot of photos on one DVD! 
I shoot nearly everything fairly small, by todays standards, 1280x960 pixels, (I have never had a need for anything larger)

they average about 600k each in file size..
one DVD holds about 4.5 gig, thats 4,718,592k.
so lets see..if I did the math right..thats 7,800 photos on one DVD! 

thats 3 years worth of shooting for me..

most people shoot much larger files these days..(needlessly large IMO, but thats another topic)
but still, even if you are shooting 2,000k images, you can fit a huge amount of them on one DVD..


I burn one years worth of photos to one DVD, and store those as my archive. I havent re-backed up any old copies yet, (make a new copy of an old CD or DVD)
but I should start thinking about that.
probably when a DVD is 10 years old, I will copy it to another DVD, or if better storage comes along, I will someday use that.
but for now, CD's and DVD's are still the best way to go.

Scot


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## Ray Dunakin (Jan 6, 2008)

I don't see the point of storing anything on CD-R's, they are completely unreliable. I used to store files on them in the late 90's, and a year later they'd be unreadable. They are light-sensitive and extremely unstable, utterly useless for anything but short-term storage. I don't know if DVD's made on a home computer are any better. 

That's why I use hard drives as storage, with multiple backups since even they are prone to failure. I'd just like to have the SD cards as an extra precaution. Digital storage is still in the stone age, so I want as many potential recovery sources as possible.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Ahh.. I remember this... When most people make a recording, if the program completes, they assume it is good. 

You need to use quality media, and do a verify after recording. For critical recordings I use a free analysis program from Nero that reads EVERY sector and gives a quality report on each sector in graphic and text. Green, yellow, or Red for good, some read errors, and bad. 

I only archive disks that are all "green"... 

If you are really worried, every 5 or 10 years, make copies of your disks. 

Still cheaper and safer... flash memory is also not permanent, and it "wears out" over time and usage. 

You might look into how long flash is rated, most are rated 10 years, less than CD's and DVD's 

Cheap CD's and DVD's will go bad sooner than the 50 to 100 years claimed, also high humidity, temperature extremes, and UV exposure. 

Regards, Greg


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## caferacer (Jul 22, 2010)

Hi we store all our photos from the card to a lap top which is just for photos that we take with us on site we then delete off the laptop that what is no good and then record to dvd or hard drive and catalog as required it worked out easy for us to do it this way,our laptop has tons of space for recording data and it works for us ,my son in law is a mad keen shutter bug caferacer


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## nkelsey (Jan 4, 2008)

Store on hard drive, copy to external drive, copy to photo site like shutterfly, write to a GOOD DVD-r and put that somewhere away from the house, safe-deposit, etc. 
The voice of experience...... 
and if you do print them out, please DO NOT use "magnetic" albums, the ones with the lift up plastic, your photos will degrade.


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## Tom Bray (Jan 20, 2009)

Don't rely on hard drives to store your data long term, they are pretty unreliable. I have heard from some reliable sources that drives really are only good for about a year or so, after that you are on borrowed time. Notebook drives are about the worst there is. The older SCSI drives were actually pretty good but those aren't large enough to store anything meaningful anymore. If a disk can fail, I probably have managed to experience it, not always with adequate backups. 

Drive ratings are based on MTBF - mean time between failure. If you have a drive rated for 5 years MTBF you may get 5 or more years of use out of it. If you have 5 drives, you could have one fail every year and still be within the MTBF rating. 

Flash memory may be better than mechanical drives but they are only rated for about 10 years and I am not sure how they were able actually verify that claim since the technology seems to evolve every couple of years or so. 

Those network drives and USB backups are still drives. If you really have stuff that you need to keep, that shouldn't be the only place to store them. 

If you are going to save data to DVDs and CDRs I recommend using a good quality disks and don't burn them at 100X normal speed. I have found that burning important data at 2X or 4X is much more reliable and makes the disks more generally readable across a variety of machines. I also don't buy the cheapest burner either. Finally, always try reading a CD or DVD on another drive preferably in a different computer. If you care more about knowing if the data is correct you may want to make a zip file of the data and then burn that to the drive. The only down side to using a large zip file is that it may be harder to get the data off of a disk that is partially damaged if it is all one large file. 

Treat your archive DVDs or CDs the same way you would important documents, photos and negatives. Keep them out of the light and avoid temperature and humidity extremes. A safe deposit box is really not a bad idea since that will allow them to survive even if your house doesn't. They may become a very important for filing insurance if the worst happens. 

Be aware that the hundred year archival rating is based on archival storage of the disk which is in a low light, temperature, and humidity controlled environment. It doesn't include sitting in an uninsulated attic or out in the garage or on the dashboard of your car. 

What I almost always do is make two copies of anything that I really don't want loose. One copy stays on site, the other goes to the bank. For photos I usually back up the entire photo collection every 6 months to a year (not often enough - I know but there are copies on IPods and other computers) so the older photos have multiple backups that get refreshed every year. If a block of photos get damaged and I don't catch it right away, I can always go back to previous years backups to recover them. 

The cloud (web based storage) is a great place to archive photos but that means that you will be able to maintain your access to them over a number of years, which means maintaining subscriptions to the service. Moving to a new service could turn into a real nightmare. 

One last consideration is that once a DVD or CDR has been burned (I am not talking about erasable ones) a virus or other malicious software is going to be hard pressed to destroy it, especially if the disk is in a drive that can't write to the disk. 

Tom


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## Tom Bray (Jan 20, 2009)

One last thought about CDRs and DVDR disks. If you save your important data on them, you don't want to just toss them out when they go out of date. Make sure you have a shredder that can chop up the disks. I recently cleaned up a bunch of old disks, some over 15 years old - they all read fine and many of the backups had data I didn't want someone else looking at. I put our shredder to the test. 

It passed 

Tom


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## Ray Dunakin (Jan 6, 2008)

My main system for archiving photos and other digital files is multiple hard drives. I have my complete internal hard drive backed up on two separate external drives, and photos are also backed up onto a third external drive. It's not too likely that all of these drives will go bad at the same time. 

All the external drives are only turned on when I need to update the backups. The rest of the time they are powered off. Supposedly this will make them last a lot longer. 

Since the SD cards are not considered a good archival medium, I won't bother storing them. 

I did go ahead and buy some new CD-Rs, the highest rated, gold plated, archival quality I could find. I'll use these for additional backup of critical files. I still don't feel real trusting of CDs but I figure the technology must have improved since the last time I tried archiving anything on them back in the mid-90's. In any case, they aren't my sole backup, just another layer of protection. The one thing I have learned over the years is to have as many independent backups as possible.


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## Greg Elmassian (Jan 3, 2008)

Again, download the free "diskspeed" utility from Nero, and run it on your cd's after burning them... you can be sure that you have a disk that is 100%. 

Regards, Geg


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## Tom Bray (Jan 20, 2009)

One of the reasons I don't like disk drives as a backup is that they are Read / Write devices. I have been involved, and under a lot of pressure at the time, in attempting to restore a system from backup disks. More than once the first backup and then the second one got destroyed because the real problem was the computer itself or operator error, not the disk drives. I had tools available to recover the drives but it was pretty ugly during the event. 

I have also lived through "mirrored" drives that managed to mirror the disaster onto both drives. 

So there are really to parts of the discussion. Is the backup device worthy of being a backup. The second is how fragile is the backup if the humans doing the restore screw up. 

CDs and DVDs don't suffer from this malady, or at least it requires physical damage to trash them. 

Tom


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## Ray Dunakin (Jan 6, 2008)

I agree. 

There are really NO good long term solutions for storing data. There is no such thing as a "file and forget" storage media. Even IF a CD or DVD lasts as long as the manufacturer claims (and that's a big if), you'd still have to replace them every few years just to be safe, and to insure compatibility with current hardware. 

This where film still holds an advantage over digital. You can shoot film, store the negative with a reasonable degree of care (a dry, dark place), and it will last for many decades. You can get prints made from it decades later too, without any real "incompatibility" problems. And if a photo or negative ever becomes damaged, usually the image is not completely lost as with digital. 

Digital photography is still in the Stone Age and will remain there until someone invents a truly permanent, "file and forget" storage medium for digital files.


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## Dave F (Jan 2, 2008)

I never store images on those cards for more than a day or two. I'll dump my files to my hard drive at my first opportunity. About once every six months I edit, and backup my files on a DVD, then delete most (if not all) from my hard drive. 

I also use a 5 terrabyte external hard drive to backup most of my files as well.


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