Vincent Oberle’s blog
About photo backups
Now that I have a digital camera, I will implement following backup strategy.
First all photos will be on my laptop hard drive. I will make regular CDR backups, and when I run out of space on my hard drive, I will make a second CDR copy.
At this stage all photos will be in double, either on hard drive + CDR, or on two CDRs. I will keep one copy of the CD at some other place, by my parents.
Later, when I get a “media center” type of computer with a lot of storage space, all photos will be also stored there, in addition to CDR. Not at the beginning, but later I will add RAID support for additional security.
The Flickr account will also play a backup role, even if I won’t have all my photos there.
Of course, we are looking at conserving photos for a very long time, and any of these digital solutions is risky: CDR get old and unreadable, hard drives crash, web services disappear, file formats change, etc. So my main and best backup solution will still to make regular paper print. Like with plain old film photography finally.
February 16th, 2005 18:00
I took A LOT of digital pictures for years now. Here is my experience in the field of backuping them.
- First on life expectancy. I can still perfectly read 5 year old cdrs. Here the media quality is important. Don’t forget to perform a binary comparison between original data and the backup copy though. And of course a backup copy is a “backup copy” : keep it on a safe place and never use it.
5 years can seem quite short, but my strategy is to copy my backups when a new medium is avalaible. So all my precious cdr have been copied on dvdr. Moreover it’s more pratical.
Now, concerning your printings. Well if you give your digital pics to some professional lab, you’re right : its the best way to enjoy your pictures for years. The machines used are the same which are use for “analog” pictures (mainly from Kodak and Fuji).
If you print them yourself, this is another story. Selfprinted pictures don’t stand time very well ! And if you expose them to the sun… expect them to have a new hue within days. I experienced that.
That said this underlying the importance of having a proper backup strategy is a good thing. With the democratization of digital cameras, a lot of “non-geek” people will experience harddrive failures and live personal drama when loosing all their familly albums.