Vintage photography...curious about other people's views

[Derrel]

I lost about a month of my son's babyhood due to a fatal HD crash...ever since, I have four copies of my digital archive, on two different hard drives, two DVD discs, with one set of the DVD's in locked storage apprx. 50 miles away from here. I consider CD's and / or DVD media to be better in some ways than hard disks because the data is stored in rather small quantities in a non-mechanical type format which is NOT erasable and NOT re-formattable, and which is not an enticing "device" that could be stolen to be re-used...the eggs are divided into many,many,many more baskets than on a large, high-vokume hard disk. I am not convinced of the idea that hard disks are "better than" CD or DVD media, I truly am NOT and that's why I backed up to CD-ROM in the early years, and then to premium FujiFilm-branded DVD-ROM, non-eraseable disc media soon after DVD burners hit the $400 mark.

Yes, burning DVD discs is kind of a PITA, but I have more faith in the ability of even a 100-count spindle of DVD media to be dropped three feet to hold 99% or more of the image files than say a 4-terabyte external drive dropped the same distance. DVD media can easily be stored in a controlled humidity environment in a fairly space-efficient manner, and discs can be indexed pretty easily, and I have faith that the basic DVD format will have hardware that will be readable for years to come. I look back 100 years or so to phonograph records of 78 RPM type...STILL playable, and the media has remained viable for a long, long, long time.

I think that one also needs to consider that one's most special and most prized images need to be curated much more carefully than say, one's general image production...there's a big diff between your children's birth images, or a child's first and sixth birthday pictures than say a bunch of perhaps 200 random snaps from an unmemorable trip to the lakeshore.

 

[jcdeboever]

I have data files mirrored on a server. Important or irreplaceable files are burned on a double sided blue ray disc and placed in cardboard jacket. Both are then stored in a fireproof safe. I have been using this method since the early 90's. Of course, I went from floppy, to tape, to CD, to DVD, to blue ray.

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