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Storing electronic media

Submitted by Art_Wannabe on June 6, 2009 - 8:21am. equipment

I'm putting this under equipment because the topic seems by necessity to be hardware focused and because it feels like it belongs here.

We're talking about issues that arise as you take more and more pictures. It's a story of good news and bad news. The good news is that we can easily store huge numbers of pictures. The bad news is that we can easily store huge numbers of pictures. If you take enough pictures, you'll probably have to devote some attention to how to store them. How do you prepare for hard drive failure? Fire? Lightening strike? Accidental erasure? Media decay and obsolescence (anyone still using 5 1/4" disks out there - and how about the "zip" drive)?

So far, pictures have gotten bigger, and the storage media have too. This forum is a place for us to share our solutions in this constantly evolving issue.

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Some surprising math

Submitted by Art_Wannabe on June 6, 2009 - 8:36am.

I've been backing pictures up on DVD lately, each of which hold about 4 gig of memory and each of which cost around a dollar. I'm also trying to have "just in case" back-up hard drives attached to my computer. In case of (another) hard drive failure, I'll have that external drive containing some of my valuable files.

Hmmm. The hard drive cost less than 100$ for 250 gig of memory, memory which would have cost about 85$ for the equivalent number of DVD's. Suddenly, the external hard drive looks like a viable option for archiving! It takes up less room than 85 DVD's, is around the same cost, and is easier to create and access! All you need is a usb port on your computer.

What do you think?

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Here's a link to a thread

Submitted by Art_Wannabe on June 6, 2009 - 8:40am.

Here's a link to some relevant postings from the "handling equipment problems" forum.

http://share.triangle.com/node/26706#comment-267608

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Some surprising math cont...

Submitted by Java55 on June 6, 2009 - 8:08pm.

Looks like a plan to me! In fact I might be looking for two external hard drives. Believe it or not my current old PC has only a 20 GIG hard drive so I am forced to store nearly everything that's not an application onto another medium, although I do keep some stuff on the computer for about 3 months for easy accessing when needed. Also if you have CDs from 2005 and older it helps to have another older computer around that has never accessed the internet to use as a storage and reading medium too so that images saved from 2005 and before onto CDs can still be read and select images copied onto 3.5 floppies for transfer back to the newer computer that has been accessing the internet. They changed the way CDs were formated sometime after mid-2005 but it did not take too long for me to figure out how to access them again after they put the final touches on the format change later on. Also to extend hard drive life it helps to turn off your computer when its not in use (a lot of background stuff goes on even when you're not using it actively and this tends to wear out hard drives), plus unplugging it also will save energy as well, plus you wont have to worry about voltage surges or spikes during thunderstorms either. Hope this info helps.

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