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

[dalippe]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

The issue of how seriously to take the need for backups need not involve your concern about where your photos will be in 80 years. If you care where your photos will be next month or next year, then you need to pay reasonable attention to backup because hard disks crash all of the time. If you keep all of your photos on one hard drive with no backup, there is a substantial chance you will lose them while you are alive and still actively pursuing photography.

 

As for the next 80 years, it is pretty certain no one outside my family will be interested in my photographs 80 years hence, but I expect (and hope) that they will have value to my descendants. I would love an extensive photographic library of my ancestors and their adventures, not to mention myself when I was very young. If you have fertile children, and if part of your library of photos consists of photographs of your family, then I think they will have value to somebody for a long time to come.

 

My personal backup plan is pretty basic: 3 hard drives. One master drive stores the photos. One backup drive attached to the computer with a backup program running every night. The other drive sitting in a cabinet in my office at work. The latter two drives get swapped every few weeks when I remember to do it. The backup program keeps 5 days worth of copies of the master drive so I can always go back a few days. I haven't bothered with incremental yet--- more complication is more that can go wrong in an emergency. We'll have to see if that remains a tenable strategy as my library grows (I am currently using 2TB drives for the backups but they keep five copies of everything, not just my photos).

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[elansprint72]

In five years time we will think of hard drives with a motor and thingies whizzing around just like we think of 5 inch floppy disks now.

 

32 gB memory sticks are on the streets now.

[Insomniac]

I think all our backups will be done to the net, with WiFi enabled cameras from anywhere! So you'll have a backup before you even come home with unlimited storage capacities. No need to carry laptops around or portable storage solutions. The net will be everywhere. Just the other day I have seen a SD-card advertised that included a WiFi-chip.

 

(Excuse my english)

[jrc]

Fortunately, I am seriously amateur (as opposed to being a serious amateur) so I don't have to worry about things like off-site back-up. Frankly, if something happens to the site, I won't be sweating the photographs.

 

The new Mac Leopard OS has a back-up provision that backs up whatever you want, automatically, to separate drives, and I understand there can be more than one. Sounds almost like an automated RAID that you don't have to be a computer genius to understand. I don't know the details yet, because there have been a few tiny compatibility problems that I've been waiting for them to sort out, but it could be the best solution for the Mac users among us.

 

I've always wondered about on-line backup. I know it's available, but have never looked into it. That seems like a good solution, except that it might be awfully slow. Is that the problem?

 

If there's such a thing as archival DVDs, that might also be a solution. The idea wouldn't be to work from them, but simply to back up. But among all the hype in the world, how do you tell if a DVD is truly archival? We know that some aren't, but which ones would admit that? (Yes! We guarantee 95% reliability!)

 

JC

[Bo_Lorentzen]

While I do care - I tend to agree with the "don't care" group generally speaking - simply because I suspect that very few of my pictures will have any meaningful message to anyone in 50 years.

 

That said. using LaCie and G-Technologies Raid mirrored disks. but have been looking at the new Buffalo NAS Network attached storage for possible being easier to setup. though the storage is a bit smallish. In addition a copy is made for a offsite drive.

 

Now it anyone really want to see my pictures in 50 years and have a appropiate OS to open and view JPEGS and Photoshop files... well chances are something will survive. (smile)

 

Im actually becoming pretty fascinated by ZenFolio.com which let me create a folder structure. and it is possible to do a download of everything if required - keeping the folder structure... this means that if required I can scrape my favorite files off the server. They are also working on offering a for purchase hardcopy of everything uploaded.. this is very meaningful to me. naturally I hope ZenFolio will be around in 10 years. (smile)

 

Bo