Board Gamers Anonymous: Organizing Photos
We’re borrowing the category “Board Gamers Anonymous” from Banzinator, who hosts time on their Twitch channel for the community to come hang out while they tackle these board game adjacent tasks. Between Instagram, the podcast, and just capturing game play to share with friends, we’ve amassed A LOT of photos of board games. We’re pretty sure it’s all mostly backed up somewhere…. But we’d like to actually know where, and be able to find them!
The first step is to dump everything into one place. For that we are using an 5TB external hard drive. We chose a WD My Passport. Ours came from Best Buy, and there’s nothing too special about it. We chose it because the size seemed sufficient, it was on sale, and we had a gift card. Storage gets cheaper by the day, but we still wanted to avoid anything too sketchy. We don’t want to put our files at risk just because we were chasing a deal.
The second step is to organize what’s been dumped onto the hard drive. We could do this manually, but… let’s be honest, we’d probably give up and just play games instead. That’s why we are using Eagle. This software will help you sort your files, with far more features than the average operating system. Our favorite feature is that it can find duplicates if you’re trying to import the same file twice. As of writing, a lifetime license is only $30. Well worth the cost in time saved! And Eagle has many ways to organize our files, so we can use whatever system works best for us.
Lastly, we need everything backed up. At the moment, we are achieving this with copies stored on alternate drives. Our goal is to select an online storage platform, and get ever-closer to adhering to the 3-2-1 rule for our data. We’re planning to go with pCloud’s Lifetime plan. It’s a bit of a risk, because “lifetime” only extends as long as a company lasts. And, for purely photos, Amazon Prime is happy to back them all up, unlimited and at full resolution. But, we’d like to be able to store other sorts of files and will break even on cost in a few years. After all, we plan to be taking pictures of games for many years to come.