How are you archiving your digital images?

A friend of mine who has been a professional photographer since the 60's was telling me about the impermanence of digital imagery. Disks degrade, HDs fail, and data becomes incompatible eventually. He was railing against digicams, and insisted that film was the way to go, since it doesn't tend to degrade over time.

Well, like everyone else, I just upload my pics to photobucket or wherever, and leave them there. Will they be there forever? Who knows.

I see offers for free prints all over the place. Maybe I should take advantage and buy some hard copy prints of my favorite digital images. Even if i just put them in a shoebox, at least they will be findable 30 yrs from now.

His recommendation was EZprints.com. I haven't ordered from them yet, but I plan on checking them out just from the recommendation alone. They even specialize in panorama prints.

When my mom passed away last year I was able to find pictures of her for the obit and make some collage because I knew where the boxes of pics were. If they were hidden online in various sites I might have not even found them all.

Still, I think digital photography is pretty awesome, and I plan on taking more pics. I'm just going to invest in some hard copy prints for posterity.

greenlight said:

...film was the way to go, since it doesn't tend to degrade over time.

Click to expand...

film does degrade with time - either the colors fade, or negatives, slides, etc. can be "eaten" by humidity, etc.

If you go digital, I'd say keep at least 3 copies of the same file in different locations and media if you're really serious about preserving things long-term.

I use Smugmug.com... $29 flat per year...

unlimited uploads (i've upped several gigs already)
you can freely download full resolution pictures

There is a download limit - something like 6 gigs or a burst of 9 for one
month or something, anyway, it meets my needs

I keep my pictures along with other data on two hard drives and on several DVDs that are kept in various locations. I'm particular about the blank DVDs and DVD burners I use and I run a quality scan on the burned DVDs.

Apparently prints will fade over time. Epson and other printer manufacturers have special printers that use pigment ink which prolongs the life of pictures. Epson says the pigment ink pictures will last 100 or 200 years depending on how they are stored.

i put them in my computer

but hey, if you are really really protective of your photo collection, i think DVD r will be the way to go. or blu-ray(but effing expensive)

I make two sets of DVDs each time I do a backup (every couple of months) one is for casual viewing, the other is kept in a plastic case, ductaped and labelled not to use, for archival only. If I ever have a problem (still none luckily) I would untape the boxed one, make a verified copy and ducttape it again. The DVDs are stored in different places around the house.


Pablo

Your professional photographer friend sounds like he's stuck in an analog mindset. Analog originals can never be copied perfectly, thus you need to choose your base media with care.

Digital media, on the other hand, is easily copied with each copy being identical to the original. With digital media, you can cheaply make numerous copies and store them in separate places. You can also periodically replicate new copies with ease.

Regular maintenance appears to be the trick with digital archives. Formats do change, although with computing now leaving its infancy, I don't think that hardware and software will go extinct as regularly as it used to.

I think that you have to weigh how important each photo is to you. Personally, I would print photos of special events (weddings, birthdays, other sentimental moments) if I wanted more assurance of them lasting longer. Right now, I have digital photos on one hard drive installed on my computer, and a duplicate set on an external HDD. Also keep "finished" photo sets on DVD. Digital archives can be accessed, edited, transferred more easily than film, so they win for ease of access. However, film prints can be stored if you want in special binders/paper (I think they are non-acidic or something, never used them myself) and put in a fireproof safe. You can put a hard drive in a fireproof safe, but there's nothing to stop the HDD from eventually failing on you.

If you are going for a digital medium, you might want to look into a RAID array (decide which level is best for you, and remember RAID doesn't help if you accidentally delete a photo). For DVD storage, you can get some programs that acheive the same thing as RAID, effectively manually creating the stripes for you. Forget what the program is called, I'll have to hunt for it again (think I found the link on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org).

Either way, if your photos are super important, just store in both formats. Sure it will cost more, but for that rare, truly great photo, it will be worth it.

Film and prints also require attention as much as digital images/storage if you hope to preserve them for years.
They are hard to catalog, store, and are limited in size and their handling.
Cost and convenience are the pluses for digital photography for acquiring those shots...but long term storage requires redundency and upkeep.

With anything valuable in a digital format, I have at least triple copies.
1 set on a current HDD in use, 1 set on an external HDD for magnetic backup storage, and burned copies on CDR and now DVD-R media. Select the best media.
Unfortunately, these discs break down with age and must be duplicated.

Back in the day, I used DLT which only held 100-400 MB per tape. Talk about slow!

Don't rely on just one storage solution. Online subscription storage is another avenue, but untested in the long term (decades).

Make it a routine to back up/synch your copies of archived images.

Usually, When I'm home, I do CF card to Desktop hard drive (I've got about a terabyte of RAID HD space on it)... If there are any particularly good photos, I immediately also burn them to CD.

If I'm on 'photo safari', I do the same to my laptop plus definitely burn CDs every night of the day's photos, (good or bad). If there are any that I think might be salable, I often burn duplicate CDs and/or to an external HD (if I'm traveling 'heavy') and then store them separately.
Really really good ones, I also retire the CF card until I get back home and put it on the Desktop too.

Soon as I have enough to fill a DVD I burn a DVD to backup the CDs.

That's just for the RAW files. My workflow usually goes: RAW images are processed in the 'camera specific' software (Nikon Capture or Dimage Viewer depending on which camera) and converted to TIF : I call this pre-process. I save my pre-processed files to another CD or DVD depending upon how many there are at the end of the day.

Then, when I finish pre-processing a batch, I (eventually) do the final touchup, cropping, editing etc. in PS.

When I finish a project I back it up further to an external HD and burn CDs and/or DVDs of the finished products.

Sometimes when I'm in an organizing mood, I'll also burn DVDs of various 'themes' rather than 'projects that tend to be based on time and place, rather than subject.

So, Most of my halfway decent and better photos have 3-4-5 or more backups.

And when technology eventually changes so that CDs & DVDs will have no common devices that will read them and current HDs will be completely obsolete, I'll transfer any that I consider worth keeping to whatever the new technology is.

I have a few 'online' but not particularly for backup purposes.... But I am getting to the point that I need to buy a big HD or three and back-up everything and store it in the safety deposit box or somewhere else secure.

While I admire the skill of a great 'film only' photographer.... (And I do believe that to be a really good film photographer requires a lot more effort, practice, money and dedication than it takes to be a really good digital photographer) ... But their attitudes about Digital seem to be about half ignorance (of the digital technology, not photography in general) and half pure snobishness.

Plus I think that a lot of them are overly defensive because less talented and less skilled photographers can achieve nearly as good results as they can for a lot less time and money, so they (the professionals) are losing business.

IMHO, I think in 20 years (maybe much sooner), digital technology will exceed the physical abilities of film, and the only people shooting film will be people who do it for love of the medium, not for profit or for results.

If you have photos stored on just one medium, that's asking for trouble. If you print and seal important photos and keep your digital pics on a HDD, optical media, and remote servers, you'll be better off. None of these is foolproof, but if you have many copies in several formats and check them often, Murphy might be nice to you.

I think the best media for long-term data preservation is stone tablets. Of course, they're extremely difficult to copy, bulky, heavy, and can't store much information, but there are stone carvings that have retained their data for thousands of years - and the only extra "hardware" you need is eyes (or fingers).

eluminator said:

I keep my pictures along with other data on two hard drives and on several DVDs that are kept in various locations. I'm particular about the blank DVDs and DVD burners I use and I run a quality scan on the burned DVDs.

Apparently prints will fade over time. Epson and other printer manufacturers have special printers that use pigment ink which prolongs the life of pictures. Epson says the pigment ink pictures will last 100 or 200 years depending on how they are stored.

Click to expand...

Everything I've read has said that those time quotes are based on "ideal laboratory conditions.' Real world tests, that I've seen documentation of, show fading in a year +-

Lately I've been storing my digital photos backed up on 4 different hard drives (2 different computers, and 2 seperate external drives).

For the stuff that's really important I store it in 2 different formats, JPeg and either BMP or RAW. So for each picture, there's actually 2 seperate files/formats of that same pic.

That's enough redundancy to make me feel safe. Each person has to figure out how paranoid they want to be

Take care of your data, and it will stay around. We currently have no technology to permanently store data. Your best bet (that's easy) is to use quality media (TY, basically), and make new copies every couple of years, including having a copy away from your home.

I would not recommend RAID, because it's not good for backup. RAID is for when downtime is your problem, backup is for when data loss is your problem. It's not just deleting files: Filesystems have bugs, and do break, just not often. RAID seems to be good at propagating such problems, even nice hardware implementations, though (I have high hopes for EXT4, mind you). RAID also has a habit of hiding bad disks from you, when they aren't toally dead (you can usually check on them--it's a psychological thing more than a technical one).

File-level parity is cool, but not useful for this. Quickpar is the most common program used. Google "parchive", the name of the 'real' command-line app, and the project that houses the file specs. Realistically, I don't think it offers benefits over standard DVD ECC, though (if the file is bad, you likely just won't be able to read it, rather than being allowed to read corrupt data). Multiple DVDs and copying them every now and then is going to be a much better way.

If you primarily use uncompressed images, you may want to compress them and have multiple backups (RAR and 7z are both good, zip tends to be crap).

I have a few 'online' but not particularly for backup purposes.... But I am getting to the point that I need to buy a big HD or three and back-up everything and store it in the safety deposit box or somewhere else secure.

Click to expand...

Use good optical media. An HDD that sits for years w/o use could be ornery when you try to use it (or even just getting a little use every few months or whatever). We don't have anything perfect, but good DVDs are the best backup medium we've got, hands-down.

Datasaurusrex: multiple copies with the original format is the best way to go, as changing formats can be lossy (JPG->BMP no, but then BMP->JPG again is), and if you originally made them as JPG, it also wastes space (if made as RAW or BMP, the best comprimise is PNG).

I suggest you simply burn your digital images onto a CD-R. Not all CD-Rs are equal. The MAM-A CD-R (A stands for Archive) is a good choice. It uses a proprietary phythalocyanine dye formula. The gold version has a rated shelf life of 250 years, the silver version 100 years.

I take a couple of hundred digipics each month of the Powernoodle Juniors and Mrs. Powernoodle. Each month I burn 3 copies on CD-R, and store one of the copies away from the Powernoodle Compound. Print the best ones. Also have an external HD for additional backup, but havent started using it yet. Plan is to make new copies of these CDs every X number of years, which starts the degradation clock over.

I would like a true permanent storage solution.

cheers

Multiple copies on 6 or 7 hard drives in 3 machines. DVDs burned a few times a year. I just put them up on yahoo about a month ago, I would definately put them on some storage site. An external HDD which gets put off site.

I think it's very important to keep at least one off site backup. You can have the good backups at your location, but if something happens fire, severe weather, etc. you might be SOL.

Store, backing up and archiving your photos can be a task.

I have over 25,000 digital photos.
and Gigs and Gigs of home movies.

I have all of them on a data drive in my desktop.
They are then backed up to an external hard drive every day.
It has a one touch backup feature, or I can have it set to backup at certain times.
I figure the odds of both drives failing at the same time is rather low,
so I think it serves the purpose well.

~John

Don't forget different locations.....

ie, copies at work, friends, relatives, preferably in different countries !!!

Possibly also take dvd's of JPG's on holiday with you, I do this with all my computer data, just in case.

Then I can access it, either abroad, or when I get back, if I need to.

PW protected of course...

I currently do worse than I recommend for my customers and just put my digipics onto an external drive when I duplicate my laptop drive.

I take a lot of regular 35 mm film pictures, and my digital pics aren't such a treasure to me. Not yet. But I'm getting tired of trying to find decent 35mm development that's not just going to digitally scan then print my pics.

For my customers doing digital photography I recommend storing stuff onto dual drives in this RAID-1 enclosure. It's 1394 (FireWire) and USB. It's the least expensive I've found that still retains enough of the failsafe benefits of the big boys. (Real hardware RAID, master drive is maintained through power outages, hot-swappable drive trays, the drives are SATA and if the enclosure croaks you can put the master SATA drive by itself into a regular SATA enclosure and use it that way while you wait for the RAID enclosure to be repaired; lots of great failsafe's.)

Buy 3 trays. Keep 2 in the drive at all times but swap 2 & 3 every coupla weeks. Keep the spare offsite as a backup.

With RAID-1 (drive mirroring) you don't get to roll back to a previous savepoint, so it certainly doesn't keep you safe from data corruption. That's a separate issue to deal with, like with one of the Retrospect backup software packages or just use the swapping scenario above if you can live without what you've stored in the timeframe between the drive swaps.

In addition to keeping all of my pics on the primary hard drive on my PC, I also back them on on two external HDD's, and one of these days I'll get around to backing all of them up on CDR. At first I'll keep CDR copies in my house and outside in my shop, but eventually I'll keep copies at my parents house too.

-Keith