Our roles as personal and family historians is to collect, restore, explain, share and archive all the varied artifacts of our ancestors' lives. Fair summary?
The things we collect might be hard copy objects like photographs, old school yearbooks, 16mm film, audio recordings, and letters and cards. Or it might be new material like stories we hear and record on audio or video, or stories we write. It might be our research on our ancestry and all the census and immigration records we locate.
These days, our job as family historians (self appointed though we may be!) includes digitizing the material and making it available to the rest of the family. The question then arises: what is the best way to store and share all this stuff? Well, keep reading because I am about to tell you.
In this blog, I am going to give family historians some ideas for archiving their treasures and I will tell you about the newest, biggest, most generous, most vivid place to store documents, images and videos for free!
Storing Family History Files Locally
The choices for storing and sharing your digitized family history research are now legion: First of all, there is the hard drive of your computer – probably where all the stuff is right now. But in addition to your Mac or PC hard drive, you need a dedicated, external hard drive - powered or portable - for all of your ancestry files. They are as cheap as chips – around $150 for 2 TB.
Some people like to back up their files to flash drives. They are getting big (e.g. 500 GB) and much cheaper than before (around $.10 per GB) and if you don't have a ton of material – no video for example - they could be an option.
How Much Storage Do You Need Anyway?
Well, that's a bit like asking how big your barn should be – depends on how many horses you have! But as a guide: 1 GB of storage will cover around 1 minute of uncompressed HD video; 5 minutes of uncompressed standard definition video; 20 large digital images; or 200,000 pages of text (and a partridge in a pear tree).
If you have a good deal of family history video, you are going to need to start thinking in the terabytes (remember, one thousand MBs = 1 GB; and one thousand GBs = 1TB). A one TB drive will hold around 80 hours of uncompressed SD video and 20 hours of good quality HD video. You can compress video so that you fit more in (e.g. MP4s) - but that is not your best archive option.
Storing Family History Files Online
Things really start to pop when you choose online storage options. For example, you could create your own blog or website; the internet service provider you choose effectively gives you storage space on their server (e.g. for the modest price of its web hosting, “Go Daddy” give you 40GB of space). If you have a web host, you can “ftp” transfer your files to your storage there – none of which needs to be actually displayed on your web page.
You could of course just send the files around to the cousins directly using one of the email-enabled ftp services like “HighTail” which specialize in dispatching large files. The basic account is free allowing you to send 100MB files and give you 2GB of free storage, and the unlimited storage allows you to send files up to 500GB. Then, slightly more cumbersome, there is Dropbox which allows you to upload up to 2GB for free - folks can then log in and download.
And let's not forget Microsoft and Apple: Microsoft will let you backup 7 GB for free with their “SkyDrive” and Apple gives you 5 GB for free with its “iCloud”. Then there are the real pros like “Amazon Web Services” which has a huge online storage service business (e.g. it handles all the Netflix movies). Its cheapest and most limited option - “glacier storage” - costs just 1 cent per month per gigabyte!
My Friend Flickr
Now, I could go on and talk about other services like Cubby, Sharefile, Egnyte, Opendrive and a host of others all well worth exploring. But for all of my personal family history stuff, I am currently in love with Flickr. Why Flickr?
A Flickr free account can have up to 1000 photos and videos. With an average photo size of 2-3MB, that is about 2-3GB worth of storage.
You are allowed to: Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo; Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each; Video playback of up to 3 minutes each; Upload and download in full original quality.
FlickrPro is $5 per month and offers unlimited storage!
Not really a complete backup service I'll grant you, and a bit limited for video, but virtually unlimited for documents and images. And, Flickr now has a gorgeous new display.
As family historians, we will continue to try out different storage options, always remembering to keep multiple copies, on multiple disks and drives, in multiple places. But right now, everyone one of us can take advantage of Flickr's new found generosity.
Disclaimer: I have no connection or affiliation with Yahoo or Flickr - except as a (free and paying) consumer of their online services.