Archiving memory cards?

johnfreed0

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I'm reasonably new to digital; about 2 years total. I have done and still do silver work but I'm trying to get my head around some of the differences. The one bothering me today is memory cards.



I have 2 16gb cards which provide around 1000 exposures. For one used to 10 shots to the roll or 2 sheets to the holder this is an astronomical number. I download my shots to my computer as soon as possible and back them up as well. Coming from many decades of film, though, I'm reluctant to erase the cards and reuse them. It feels like burning negatives.



Given that a 32gb card costs around $10 I was considering physically archiving the chips and buying new when one gets filled up. Am I showing my prehistoric bones here or is this something other paranoids do?

Thanks in advance for any replies,

JR
 
I'm reasonably new to digital; about 2 years total. I have done and still do silver work but I'm trying to get my head around some of the differences. The one bothering me today is memory cards.

Greetings from another paranoid.

I have 2 16gb cards which provide around 1000 exposures. For one used to 10 shots to the roll or 2 sheets to the holder this is an astronomical number. I download my shots to my computer as soon as possible and back them up as well. Coming from many decades of film, though, I'm reluctant to erase the cards and reuse them. It feels like burning negatives.



Given that a 32gb card costs around $10 I was considering physically archiving the chips and buying new when one gets filled up. Am I showing my prehistoric bones here or is this something other paranoids do?

Thanks in advance for any replies,

JR
 
I think your math works out quite nicely. I see no reason to offload the memory cards now that the price of SD memory cards has dropped to such a low level.
 
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No harm in doing that; SD cards are incredibly robust and can take a lot of damage before data is lost. Why not store them at another location so that you have extra resilience.
 
Yes and yes.
Yes your film days have influenced your thinking. I have not used film in a long time but habits from my film days still show up in my digital photography.
Yes. And No Some of us do keep mem cards of photography events that we really really want to keep.
Don’t just keep mem cards make several back ups reuse cards from events that are not that important to you.
Edit.
Just had a look at expected life span of mem cards. Some say 10 years of use. Ummmm I personally think I would review the images every couple of years, maybe making copies as needed.
Hope this helps
 
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That seems like far too much effort for me. If you have grandfather, father, son backups on some reasonably recent media devices I think that should be suffient.

There is also a danger that hardware changes as well. We don't tend to see the rate of change being as fast but there are some old standards that have been superceeded. CDs are pretty much dead, floppy disks are gone, CF cards are on their way out now, for example, the old style of SD card I could see going the same way with micro SD taking over. I could see a future where small physical storage media is pretty much non-existant as device connectivity gets easier. You could end up with a few hundred SD cards and no method of reading them.
 
While I understand that he cards are cheap, I reformat mine as soon as I download the pictures and pop them back into my camera. I put the digital files on the internal hard drive in my PC and then, after some thinning out, I copy them to an external hard drive.

The other popular strategy - that I didn't see mentioned - is cloud storage, essentially using someone else's computer (ok, a server) that is accessed via the web. This is where my inner Luddite comes out, I've got no interest in using that.

And while obsolescence can be an issue, it will be a while yet. There is some test equipment in my lab that stores screen-shots on floppies, I have a USB floppy drive to read them with. I'm pretty confident that your memory cards will be usable for a long time even as legacy products.
 
While there's nothing wrong I guess with your method, from a financial standpoint it seems wasteful. If my math is correct there are (32) 32gb cards per 1tb. A 2tb external drive can be had for roughly $60. Using your $10/card cost, that would mean you're paying (64Ă—$10=$640) for an equal amount of storage. Even a 1tb external SSD can be had for roughly half what you're paying for an equal amount of storage on SD cards.
 
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While I understand that he cards are cheap, I reformat mine as soon as I download the pictures and pop them back into my camera. I put the digital files on the internal hard drive in my PC and then, after some thinning out, I copy them to an external hard drive.

The other popular strategy - that I didn't see mentioned - is cloud storage, essentially using someone else's computer (ok, a server) that is accessed via the web. This is where my inner Luddite comes out, I've got no interest in using that.

And while obsolescence can be an issue, it will be a while yet. There is some test equipment in my lab that stores screen-shots on floppies, I have a USB floppy drive to read them with. I'm pretty confident that your memory cards will be usable for a long time even as legacy products.

The only problem with cloud storage is that you are relying on a commercial entity to store your precious data. While it is very unlikely that Google (for example) will go bust anytime soon, there have been incidents where people I know have lost their entire library due to a payment issue with the company that they were using; a banking mix up meant they hadn't paid their premium and the company (a very large one) just wiped there files; gone. I admit this is a rare thing but it is a risk none the less so I personally wouldn't rely 100% on these services for your archive.
 
The other problem people over look with cloud storage is you have to access it, for most people the lost of phone line is something they dont think about.
Having lost images, fortunately they were copies, on line I now use external hard drives
 
NEVER EVER use data cards or USB's for permanent storage. ALWAYS use 3 external hard drives and have them in 3 different locals or at least 2 of them. This advice is coming from another film shooter and someone who works in a professional lab who has seen many cards fail and has to do data recovery.

Get the images off the card and then re-format and shoot again, that is what those cards are made for. To use over and over.
 
Some questions that come to mind.
1. How do cloud services back up their servers. After all, that technology will become obsolete at some point. Do they transfer all the data to something new?
2. How long is it necessary to keep backed-up data, especially data that really has no real value. I mean, how many pictures of your family do you need to save? When will anyone ever look at them? Even you? I have loads of CD's and DVD's that now go back years. It's nice to have, But no one is really going to look at them. There are just too many.
3. When you die, who's going to pay for continued cloud storage? Certainly not your wife's next husband. Would even your children or are they busy saving their own pictures?
4. Wouldn't you be better off making some prints of some of the important and best pictures and giving them to friends and family members to enjoy now while you're alive so you can enjoy them admiring them? Is anyone appreciating them locked up in an old shoe box in the attic or in Google clouds?
 
? Is anyone appreciating them locked up in an old shoe box in the attic or in Google clouds?

It's possibly a little better now if you take the time to tag your images so future generations have a clue. I currently have boxes and boxes of old prints of family dating back to the 1800's, from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles (all of whom are desceased). As the oldest remaining member of the family I've been able to identify a few but without any identifying information to go on, the rest are pretty much lost. I still hang onto them for some strange reason but I doubt when I'm gone that my kids will. In answer to your question, it's most likely that future generations will appreciate them about as much as the current generation. They'll be stored away, until like my old prints they eventually fade away.
 
Smoke. You look like you were a freman or in that trade somehow from your avatar. Here's some photos I took on my cellphone when my men's club visited our fire department's training facility here in NJ. The other is a recent muscle car show we had here in our community done with a SOny P&S. Doing videos and putting them on Youtube give free storage service. Plus, your friends and families can have simple access. Alan Klein

The scuba video also stored on Youtube were scans of 30 year old Ektachrome slides. When my projector broke, I decided this would be a better way of presenting them with music etc. All these shows look great when I play them on my 75" UDHTV. Alan Klein

My next project is to make coffee table photo books. These too are the kind of things people will actually save and look at. Well, maybe. But certainly better chance of that than cloud storage.
 

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