If my house were to catch fire, what material possession would I try to save in the mad dash of getting everyone to safety? My film and digital photo negatives. They are my one and only precious possession that is truly irreplaceable. Since much of my film archive dates back 30 years or more, I've begun a project to get all the important film negatives copied to high resolution digital format. Up to now, I'd thought digital archiving on DVD made everything bulletproof. Wrong. Very wrong. DVDs, it turns out, can have even shorter shelf lives than film if you're not careful. I'd been buying DVDs without any regard at all for brand or format (my burner handles 'em all), thinking any differences in the media were trivial, blithely assuming that once burned, a DVD will last forever. Here're the facts. If you value your photos as much as I do, and if, like me, most of your photo library is steadily becoming more digital than film (most pictures not even printed), I think the article above will save you future grief if you've been as naive as I have about what to store them on. Mark Baird Alameda CA
You might want to thiink about storing your file and photos on a outside servrer service as a backup, you can access from any remote computer. Thanks for the insight.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hwalker911 @ Jun 2 2007, 03:11 AM) [snapback]453828[/snapback]</div> Yep. For any data that is REALLY important, you want multiple backups, using different technologies, in different physical locations. An outside server is an excellent choice for one of them. A backup on a local HD plus a backup on a remote server creates a very low liklihood of losing both at once. Then storage on CDs or DVDs for daily use isolates the archival copies from the vagaries of constant access. Note: in addition to the difference in quality between different brands and types of optical storage media, is the fact that optical media can fail catastrophically, due to delamination, regardless of its type or quality. It's an excellent choice for purchasing content that, in a pinch, can be purchased again if it is damaged. But a poor choice for long-term archiving of irreplacable material.
Airport kid, When I back up my photos, I have a firesafe that holds a few HDs. I back everything onto the HD & put it back in the firesafe. that way if something does happen, you'll stll have them somewhere. Also buying Gold DVDs helps too as they last longer
I decided quite a while ago that optical disks are a great distribution medium, and a lousy storage medium. I have a mixture of portable and semi-portable hard drives. Although I have not set up off-home storage, that is the obvious next step. I considered internet storage, but between it's slow connection, unknown security arrangements, and vulnerability due to business failings, have rejected it.
Internet-based storage works okay if you encrypt everything locally, using a real crypto package like pgp/gpg or openssl, before shoveling the blobs up to the storage. That way it's opaque to them when, not if, they have some internal compromises. . I keep asking my librarian friends about the "archival problem", and they keep evading the question... . _H*
There are dangers with any archiving strategy... you've just got to do the best risk mitigation you can afford (or want to pay for). My school had a decent strategy set up for their e-mail systems, and yet it still failed a few years ago - the server hardware failed, their primary backups failed, the secondary offsite backups failed, and the tertiary tape backups took over 2 weeks to restore all the information onto the servers, effecting not only the students, but a ton of researchers applying for grants. And on top of all that, there were still a few days worth of e-mail that was lost forever.
