Pizza place in Saigon, Vietnam. I thought putting old shutters on the ceiling was brilliant.

Dawn, you must have a million pictures. You always go with the theme.

A different kind of ceiling, with a storm that passed us by on Thursday.

The Long Room - Trinity College.

A Chihuly creation near the ceiling at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh.

Igmd_gaz my sister just went the other day to the Biltmore Estate to see some Chihuly displays in their gardens. I will see if it is OK for me to post one of her pictures. This is one at night with the lights on them.

Dolly, not quite a million, but I do have thousands. Can't recall where we were, but one time I took 1200 in one day. I never go anywhere without my camera as I love taking photos and am a picture taking fool!

Dawn - I certainly don't have the number of photos that you have but now that I have a new cell phone I find that I'm taking more pictures. How do you keep track of yours - do you use a photo hosting site? Is there one that you'd recommend? I think I need to start organizing my photos before I accumulate too many.

Maire

I used to use Photobucket until they started charging an outrageous fee for using their hosting site. That made me realize I didn't want to depend on an online site that might disappear one day or hold my photos hostage for whatever reason. I now organize my photos in folders on my computer. Each one is dated and has a name to remind me of what is in the folders. As I accumulate new folders, I back them up to a flash drive in case my computer ever crashes. I currently have all of my photos on my laptop, tablet and flash drive so I think I'm covered.

Because I have so many photos, every now and then I go through and delete duplicates or ones of poor quality to keep the number down.

If you have them all in one place or house you may not be as safe as you think. I lost all of my computers, most of my tablets and most of the flash drives. Including the big backup drives. I had backups online on cloud storage so I thought I had that. Only to discover that my folders had disappeared, no idea how or why.

Raven, my flash drive is usually on my key fob, so it's generally wherever I am. No system is foolproof, because there is always something unexpected that could happen. I suppose two flash drives - keep one with me and one somewhere else as additional backup might be prudent, but I figure we can only do so much and then it starts to become overwhelming trying to keep track of it all.

The storage failure people are most likely to experience is a failure of the hardware storage devices themselves, whether onboard a PC as internal storage (hard drive or SSD) or external devices.

For files considered very important, making more than one extra copy is a good practice. For an easy start, it's a good idea to make mutual backups of key folders from one household PC to another. Let each be a mirror of the other when it comes to important files. But that's not enough. External storage devices are cheap these days. That includes all forms - SD cards, thumb drives, and USB hard drives. For really important files, I think having two external backups is not excessive. Take one out of the house and put it elsewhere - mine is in my safe deposit box. Update the backup copies regularly.

Dawn and Elmer - Thanks for the info.

Dawn, what kind of flash drive do you have that would hold thousands of pictures? Mine are backed up in icloud. I have used Carbonite to back up but it's a little expensive. ( I think it's about $89 a year now.)

1 photo in RAW format (best normal quality, not normally used by other than serious amateurs) = 25 MB (megabytes). 1000 of these would be 25 GB. (gigabytes). A 256 GB thumb drive (that would therefore hold 10,000 photo files in RAW format) can be found for $50 or less. A 500 GB USB external drive, that would hold maybe 20,000 photos in RAW format, about the same amount.

If your photos are in jpg (compressed, lossy) format, they're maybe 5 MB. You could put 50,000 on a 256 GB thumb drive.

SD cards are a bit more expensive but not much. I just bought a couple of 256 GB SD cards for about $40 each..

Any major brand, Sandisk, PNY, Patriot for thumb drives or SD cards, WD or Seagate or Toshiba for hard drives, would be fine. In fact, $50 should buy you a 1 TB (terabyte, 1000 GB) external drive, so take the numbers for 256 and multiply by 4 for capacity.