ramblings of a wandering nerdan aimless amble on a winding road

I went to a presentation by Hitachi last week about storage. As with most organisations around the globe, storage continues to be a problem, and for us, email archiving is a gigantic mess that seems too expensive to fix.

But skipping that problem, the presentation was pretty interesting and the content archiving solution they had was neat and something you knew if you had an unlimited budget you’d be pretty keen to implement.

But who has an unlimited budget?

These types of systems are interesting, probably great, bullet proof and all the rest, but unless your primary business is storage, it’s something you’ll probably never implement.

Well one of their examples was the Swiss Picture Bank. They guarantee your picture will be safe for 30 to 99 years.

I thought it was pretty cool. Now paying to store photos on the internet isn’t unique, and you may ask why pay when there are plenty out there that are free, but I guess there are two reasons. Firstly it’s not a sharing service, it’s a storage service and secondly, their guarantee which seems to stack up.

The Swiss Picture Bank is actually a trust that has funds that are dedicated to the running of this service. At a glance, the prices don’t seem too bad. You’d probably want to be selective, but out of 20000 pictures, how many of those are the ones you HAVE to keep? I’d guess only 5-10%? And at $80 for 2000 photos for 30 years, I think you’d struggle to find anything cheaper.

With 500gb USB HDDs now around the $120AUD mark, it’s easier enough to back up your own things, and I do, but using the bushfires as a worst case scenario, if the house burnt down I’d lose everything I didn’t have on my gallery.

They have a signup deal of first 100 photos free so I might give it a go and see what the usability is like. You may hear more..