That's a lot of pictures...

So, today I learned that we have about 229GB of digital photos from over the last 15 years.  Every year the pictures keep getting larger in size (I want more megapixels).  What do you do with all these photos?

Well, I have been storing them in various places around the house:

1. There is a directory on the desktop computer where we unload (offload, upload, I don't know) the cameras to.  We have a directory for each year and we plop the digital media we create into there as time moves on.
2. Then I run Microsoft SyncToy every now and then to backup the camera photos (and a bunch of other stuff like documents and such) to a NAS I have sitting in another room of the house.  The sync is one way, so no pictures will ever be deleted from the NAS.  I tried to schedule SyncToy to run on a schedule but I had no luck, no matter what I tried it won't see the NAS when it runs via Task Manager.  Time for a new computer anyway so I'll probably switch to using something else (see #4 below)
3. The NAS is 4TB in size, but really only 2TB of usable space since I have the two drives mirrored.  I've had the NAS for a couple years, lost one drive so far, ordered a replacement, told it to rebuild and we were back in business.  Not so sure will be able to find a replacement drive again so easily next time so might need a new (bigger) NAS.
4. About the time I lost the drive in the NAS, I figured it was time to back that up.  To I bought a 3TB external drive.  I use FreeFileSync to copy the NAS to the external drive once a month from the desktop computer (where everything came from).  I keep the 3TB drive near our grab bag so if we need to leave in a hurry it's near all those important papers we would want with us.  I have a calendar reminder to tell me to pull out the drive once a month, plug it in and sync the NAS to it.
5. In addition to all of that, my wife backs up the original directories that sit on the desktop computer to DVD ever so often, at that time deleting the older years files after she backs them up.  This way we only have the last few years of photos on the desktop computer.

I've been using Picasa to  index all the files.  I like the face recognition feature in it and it makes it easy to scroll through all those pictures files in various folders.  If we were better about tagging things it would also make it easier to find certain events.  But right now I know if I want a photo of person X, I can scroll through most of the pictures Picasa thinks they are in.

I only just learned I have 229GB because a bunch of those DVDs my wife made from so many years ago were not part of the above process.  So I just spent some time loading all those DVDs of photos onto the NAS.  My calendar reminder should pop-up in a couple weeks and tell me it's time to pull that 3TB drive out of the closet and back up the NAS again.  Then all the photos will be in at least two spots.  Not going to run picasa on all the photos I just copied off DVD, like I said, time for a new computer first. 

I also learned that I can't really keep up with a blog post a day when I had a very busy week at work.  We'll see how it goes moving forward.