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Paul, it may need you though, as Dave says a trial to start with to test the ftp side of things with 4 - 5 of us, then roll it out.

Reflecting more on this if Dave is able to set it up it's going to be easier than sending DVD's of images to myself. Although we should do this as well so we have a central physical collection as it were.

Dave, I'll PM you my email address.

NJR

I've been told that memory sticks are a far better way of storing data as they dont deteriate
in the same way DVD's, hard drives etc do. Anyone know if that's correct. I have a collection of about 5000 negitive photographs and a few hundred colour slides of aircraft mostly in and around the London area dating back to the early 1960's. Added to that is the database of Irish Av sites I'm working on. Plus all the hard copy items books, maps, registers and so on. I too am concerned as to what to do with my "collection" when the time comes, as my wife has the same idea (Skip) on how to get rid of it.
I would be very happy to donate any and all of my collection with no strings attached. I would
need to know what would be the best way to go about this and the approiate method of storing
for ease of access. Sadly I have no suitable computer skills that would be of any help in this
great endeavour, but if I can help any other way please ask and I will see what I can do.

Hugo.

Thanks guys, I'll watch this space with growing interest. I do backup my important docs on DVD and memory stick. Even so I recently had some work done on my computer and I thought
I had everything covered only to realise I've probably lost about nine months of e-mails I thought I had saved along with hundreds of jpeg's. My hard drive was downloaded onto another hard drive in order to do the work on mine. But what we didn't realise was there were many hidden viruses on my drive which my AVG? anti virus system did not detect and the Norton on the new drive did. Instead of digging out the infected files, it killed whole folders which are still showing as a named folders on the slave drive, but not allowing access. I was wondering if there is any way possible to retrieve these folders. Anyway, Good luck with the project.
PS I now have full up to date Norton on my computer.

Hugo.

I now have a "trial" version of a collaborative system ready to be evaluated... Will run it past Noel first to see if it is a potentially workable solution... If so I`ll make a copy available to a few other volunteer testers for feedback and suggestions.

Cheers
Dave

Hugoj_air said ... there were many hidden viruses on my drive which my AVG? anti virus system did not detect and the Norton on the new drive did. Instead of digging out the infected files, it killed whole folders which are still showing as a named folders on the slave drive, but not allowing access. PS I now have full up to date Norton on my computer.

Something very wrong here AVG rarely gets bad reviews whereas Symantec (Norton) is notorious for doing unspeakable things to your PC, including making it run at a snail's pace. One review I found mentioned having AVG and Norton running together is a recipe for disaster. Avira and Kaspersky seems to be a very popular choice at the moment, but all AV progs seem to have their ups and downs.

Norton went downhill rapidly when swallowed up by Symantec. It is extremely difficult to remove from your PC, such that various authors have produced 'Norton Removal Tools'.
Newsgroup alt.comp.anti-virus has few good words about it generally referring to the product as Norton Bloatware.

Memory Sticks - I've had a few problems with these over the years - on several occasions XP reports that the stick needs formatting! Inserting it into my Win98SE laptop reveals all is well and the files are intact.

Computers were meant to make life easier.

Graham

Thanks Graham and Peter,

Carnaby wrote:

Something very wrong here AVG rarely gets bad reviews whereas Symantec (Norton) is notorious for doing unspeakable things to your PC, including making it run at a snail's pace. One review I found mentioned having AVG and Norton running together is a recipe for disaster. Avira and Kaspersky seems to be a very popular choice at the moment, but all AV progs seem to have their ups and downs.

PNK wrote:

Like most software it is a leapfrog game. Good one year, bad the next. It's rather like changing gas suppliers!

Seven years ago I started with Norton and after a couple of years I experienced the slow/snails pace you mention Graham. I tried to go with a higher grade of Norton, but found it impossible to download online so when I upgraded to XP in 2004 I was advised to go with AVG, which I did and all seemed well until the computer started to show signs of strain, not allowing access to some files, blocking log on to one of my forum's and other nigglesome happenings. Than a friend suggested he could help, he found 97 embedded viruses. Maybe I didn't keep it updated enough. The rest is history
(see previous post).
Peter, I hope I've managed to get Norton in a good year, but I doubt it. The impression you get is they build in problems forceing you to into expensive upgrades of their products.
One good thing my friend passed on to me is Mail Washer. It allows you to open mail in an enclosed enviroment without causing possible problems on your hard drive. You can safely
delete any you dont like and it "learns" to recognise those and deletes them as they come in.

Hugo.