As a photographer, I know of one particularly scary horror story: a crashed hard drive, photos not backed up anywhere, photos gone...forever. In the past, we had been meticulous to the point of obsession about the care and archiving of our negatives. We had to be; they were our bread and butter. We don't use negatives much any more, but instead we have digital files. And I'm afraid too many of us have become complacent about how we consider their long-term care. Any good computer you buy these days will have at least a half-terabyte (500 Gb) of hard drive space, so it's easy to save our photos there with little concern to running out of room for them. But room isn't the issue. Just ask anyone who has lived through that crashed hard drive horror story.
So, let's talk about some good digital archiving strategies. In the not-so-distant past, we commonly burned our files to CD's (and later, DVD's) to store them. They stacked pretty easily on our bookshelves. But even back in the day there were suspicions about the long-term stability of this media. And -- have you looked at new computers these days? Solid-state is the state-of-the-art, due to greater speed and efficiency; this means no more optical drives for CD's (unless you buy additional hardware. Blech!) So I don't look at this media as a good solution any more.
Besides, they don't have a lot of capacity. A CD only holds around 750 Mb of data, a DVD around 3Gb. Your typical thumb drive? Easily 8, 16, 32 Gb's. I recently saw a 64Gb thumb drive on Amazon for around $30! I use these all the time to upload everything from entire folders to my Keynote programs. They're especially good if you need to share those files, too, since the USB port is universal. So yes, these are good solutions. But.....
They are not the best alternative, mainly because the very quality that makes them so convenient also makes them vulnerable: if they're easy to carry around, they're easy to lose. What you'll find every photographer relying on are external hard drives. They're stable, have high capacity, and can easily be transported. Plus, they're fairly inexpensive. I use several. As a Mac guy, I have a large (1Tb) external HD dedicated to Time Machine, which keeps my computer's entire content continually backed up. Additionally, I use portable HD's to upload all my photos, Keynote programs, Word documents and other data in a way that makes it easy for me to retrieve them later on when I need to work with them. Since I know that all my important data is redundantly stored (on thumb drives, on Time Machine, and on portable HD's) I can confidently delete them off of my computer's hard drive and not take up space there.
Yeah, it would definitely be a drag if my computer hard drive crashed. Those are never inexpensive events. But losing my data? Never. I sleep well at night.
Your thoughts? Let's archive them here!
dhutt@dmddigitalphoto.com
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