Where will your digital photos be in 80 years ???

[surgiblade]

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Question for members:

 

Where will your digital photos be in 80 years ?

 

Had recent hard drive crash- told cannot recover data- told that a hard drive lasts 3.5-5.5 years.

 

Can back up onto CDs.

 

While thrilled with R8/DMR, am taking christmas pictures on film.

 

Back-up suggestions welcome !

 

Mike

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[Guest stnami]

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[Guest Olof]

At the MOMA ?

[marknorton]

You are correct, in addition to death and taxes, the only other thing which is certain in life is that the hard drive you are storing your images on will fail at some point and you will lose everything. That's a certainty, what's not certain is when.

 

Backing up to CD is a waste of time; the only sensible thing to backup to is another hard drive which is physically separate from your PC to reduce the risks of it burning/being stolen at the same time, though if you are in a tornado/earthquake region, you might want to increase the distance still further.

 

I backup my entire system once a month to a network attached RAID storage box with incrementals every night; three previous generations + current maintained, so that I can go back to any day in the last three months.

 

My golden rule? "One strike and you're out". A single error from a hard drive and it gets replaced.

[Shootist]

I agree with Mark Norton.

What I do (if that means anything)

I have a separate drive in my main desktop to store images on, that way I don't have to back them up when I do a image of my main drive that holds the operating system, win XP Pro, and a partition on that drive to hold all my programs (by the way I'm using Acronis True Image 9 to do the imaging but have both TI 10 & 11 but see no need to install them).

Then I have a 250GB external Western Digital My Book USB2 hard drive that I synchronize my image folders to, that way if I delete any files from my main PC they get deleted from the external all at the same time the new images are being copied to the external drive. This external drive is only connected to the main PC when I'm doing the copying of image files. That way I should expect that drive to last longer then if it was connected all the time and spinning.

I then have 2 other computers on my home LAN that have multiple hard drive in them. In each one of these other PC's I have 1 250GB hard drive specifically setup to store images on. I then use that same synchronizing program to copy ALL my image files to them, without deleting any (That way I do have a copy of ALL the images I have shot throughout the year).

Then what I willl do at or near years end is go through all the images on one of those other PC's and delete what I feel is not need or wanted anymore. I then compare the image folders on the other PC's to the one on my main PC and see what I have save on the other PC's that I deleted on my main PC. I then make a choice whether to keep the deleted image or not.

 

BackUp, BackUp and BackUp

 

Never saw the need to put them on CD or DVD but that may change in the future.

[stunsworth]

Where will your digital photos be in 80 years ?

 

The same place as the film photos. Landfill.

[Photoskeptic]

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Unfortunately, I have to agree with Steve.

[erl]

The same place as the film photos. Landfill.

 

. . . . and so shall we all!

[andybarton]

The same place as the film photos. Landfill.

 

I agree, and I'm not sure whether I care or not.

[tom0511]

 

Back-up suggestions welcome !

 

Mike

 

Back up for film? Seems to be pretty much work to duplicate film.

 

Frienkly how difficult is it to copy a 400 Gig Hard drive every 2 years? How expensive is it to get three hard-drives and keep two backups?

 

IMO that backup "problem" is mostly a question of us people who are just to lazy to make a backup.

By the way I have some 20 year old slides and they do not look perfect after such time. Film is no guarantee, and its harder to backup.

 

Just my opinion,

Tom

[mitchell]

In 2057 the hard drive that I put in a bottle and threw into Eggemoggin Reach will be washing ashore on Montauk Point after 50 years of oceanic drift. A jogger who happens to be a movie director picks it up. He's a tech head and downloads my images. Somehow, fifty years of drift have changed them. In some ineffable way, they have become transformative. After the first public showing they become the basis of a new world wide religion. There are T-shirts with my likeness on them.

 

Well, actually, really...I'm with Steve on this.

 

Mitchell

[ptomsu]

Today:

Using a RAID 1T Hard Drive in mirrored way (2T where 1 Tera is mirrored automatically to the second Tera) - most practical solution, will serve me the next 3-5 years for all my work. If 1T HD dies, I simply replace it and it will be automatically backed up by the 2nd. Could of course be also done with smaller HDs.

 

Mid Term Future - 5-10 years: will do similar things with the storage options appropriate.

 

More than 15 years ahead: will see

 

More than 25 years ahead: do not care! not sure if I will be able to operate a computer by then and if I am not who else might be interested in my photos? And if they are they will find ways to conserve them :-)))

[mwalker649]

Anyone use one of these? I'm thinking about one.

 

Data Robotics, Inc. | Products

[Guest stnami]

....and get rid of what you don't need and that is .... 97% .....................enjoy the purge...............then it all doesn't matter

[wparsonsgisnet]

Mike, I keep my images on 3 external drives, one off-site (in the detached garage in a fireproof box). All images are on-line.

 

I do not use RAID arrays -- as the only user I don't need a general solution. Instead of this automatic solution, I use discipline.

 

I use "Second Copy" as the "mirroring" software -- inexpensive and handy. After the first "mirror" it makes incrementals. So a new project gets a new directory; it's first mirroring will be a full backup under this software.

 

All my external drives are on a UPS. I buy LaCie refurb drives. Nice drives. When they die, the disk is always ok -- I buy an external case and the drive is up again. $60 at MicroCenter. Therefore, by buying a refurb, I make LaCie pay the cost of the repair.

 

As it happens, for my video work I keep the original (pair) of tapes and two copies of the final DVD originals (one in the same box in the garage). [Hint: it you're doing video work, cameras into the $4k range have DV drives that miswrite on occasion. Running a firewire cable into a DVCAM editing deck makes a second original tape.]

 

Storage: 3 TB and counting. Pretty cost efficient.

 

Disclaimer: this is probably only an echo of several postings above.

[erl]

Danger! Philosophical opinion ahead:

 

Seems there are two common views being expressed here. Maybe more. On the one hand there is the desire to archive safely/permanently, on the other, is an opinion of who cares or needs it!

 

Well, it is (I believe) intrinsic in our nature to seek, know and preserve. The knowledge we haver today has its roots in the past, only because someone preserved some information. Maybe it wasn't even important to them, but to us it is vital. So far, I think the Egyptians, and other of their ilk have done it best. Our problem is reading and interpreting the messages they have left. Obvious we are using different O.S. from their computers.

 

The point (one of them) being that our images, along with a whole lot of other data, is vital to the future. How to store that data is up to us to decide. How to read and interpret it is up to future gurus. In the mean time, I hope I can store, and use, my data successfully for the duration of my life. May others enjoy/benefit from it after me. . . . . and maybe just a small acknowledgement that I did it would be great.

 

Philosophy over.

[sdai]

It really boils down to who you are, what you do and how much the OTHERS think your pictures are worth ... in my case, backing up is purely wasting more money, more energy and more time.

[carstenw]

Anyone use one of these? I'm thinking about one.

 

Data Robotics, Inc. | Products

Thanks for pointing this out. I will buy one soon, and will buy another when external SATA II or gigabit network drives become available.

 

To be honest, a product like this should have been on the market ages ago. A decent storage software engineer could make all the decisions that the Drobo makes in a heartbeat, yet no one has tried to make something as low-maintenance and drop-dead simple as this, apart from Apple, in the past. Perhaps Apple should buy them and make the iDrive

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[mwalker649]

Thanks for pointing this out. I will buy one soon, and will buy another when external SATA II or gigabit network drives become available.

 

To be honest, a product like this should have been on the market ages ago. A decent storage software engineer could make all the decisions that the Drobo makes in a heartbeat, yet no one has tried to make something as low-maintenance and drop-dead simple as this, apart from Apple, in the past. Perhaps Apple should buy them and make the iDrive

 

Its what I've been looking for, something I don't have to think about......

 

I agree that 3% of your photos are worth archiving but if your a working photographer (I'm not) having your work backed up is good business. If you say you only take pictures for your personal leisure and you don't care if they are in the landfill 80 years from now..come on, aren't you a little disingenuous? Most of you show your Art to others and look for approval or a reaction, right? And maybe you might like to be appreciated years after your gone?? ...if you do, backing up your work is something you will do....I don't really buy the "I don't care I do it for myself" bit...

[Guest tummydoc]

I'm sure there are a few folks in and around New Orleans who could tell you that negatives aren't immune to destruction. As would people whose houses burnt-down, or whose parents stored their childhood photos along with the negatives in a cardboard box in the attic, cellar or garage where they were destroyed by temperature, humidity or rodents, or accidentally carried out to the trash. Negligence is negligence and ignorance is ignorance regardless of the media. If the photos matter, you do what you have to to keep them safe.