On 4 Sep 2003 05:26:44 -0700, (mono) wrote:
I like the external ones. Much easier to take from place to place. And the MAxtor gives you both USB and Firewire connections.
But doesn’t it worry you having so much data all on one hard drive?
Nope. HDDs are more reliable than CD and it isn’t the *only* place I store my files – the files are also on the original hard disk, and I still have the original negs and transparencies. Plus all recent files are temporarily backed up on CD. Soon, we’ll have a second disk, and that will mirror the first one. Then we plan two more disks for the other computer and we’ll end up with 400Gb as 2×200 mirrored Firewire drives for each computer, plus CDs of everything currently worked on, plus originals of everything on the computer HDD. And eventually, I suppose we’ll give DVD a try as well.
Thing is, like you’ve rightl;y pointed out, it’s important to have more than one copy of anything essential. However, if I had to have only one I’d rather it was on a HDD. 😉
What happens if/when the drive fails? You may recall I was looking at the Maxtor drives some time ago when you were about to buy one and I was also tempted by the 250gb you made me aware of. In the end I went for an external enclosure and a WD 120gb 7200 SE 8mb cache. It came in at £134, you won’t like it because it’s USB 😉 it has solved my backup problem for now and if I want more I can add drives through my swappable bay as they get cheaper. I got an email offer for a 120gb for £60 the other day, sold out by the time I got there:-( and I feel happier having the data distributed among several "potentially failing" hard drives rather than one biggie.
LOL! Nothing wrong with USB, just that I think FW is more reliable and faster in real terms. And FW2, when it’s common, will be even faster.
General comment:-
On the topic of failing media often cited as a reason for sticking with film my own experience is that I used to shoot almost exclusively on Agfachrome 50S when I wasn’t shooting almost exclusively on Kodachrome 25 or trying out early Fuji slide film or others (anyone remember Gratispool?) looking back at my slides the Agfa 50S have almost 100% faded, I don’t mean they’re clear I mean every single slide has faded somewhat. K25 has remained as good as I remember them and Fuji some faded some not so faded. They are however all viewable.
An interesting point here is that Kodachromes have been shown to last better than any other slide film. For a long time the only slide film I used was K25, 64 and 200.
With a good archive regime I see no reason why any film or digital image shouldn’t be readable in the future without the fading that has occurred with a film-only based system. The problem seems to be in managing the escalatng quantities of data. Five years from now when it may be prudent to change one’s archiving method the work involved will put many off so that six years from now when the media have failed it will be the digital format that will be blamed. Truth is that people most likely try to save far too much of what they shoot, which in turn on, a digital camera, is probably far more than would have been shot on film. When I look back at my own film images I doubt that there is much more than 10% that is really worth anything, either commercially or personally. I mean when am I ever going to sit down with the slide projector and sit through every slide that I’ve saved.
LOL! I have a "back catalogue" of fifteen years unarchived. Only since 1996 have I been properly archiving stuff. One day… 😉
Hard pruning at
the outset and even harder attention to getting the right image initially would make the archiving problem much more manageable. I don’t wish to be rude but there do seem to be a lot of people taking photos who seem to think that posterity is just going to be falling over itself to get hold of their archived images. But even if posterity IS knocking at your door then CD-R, DVD, HDD, etc., have all made it possible to ATTEMPT the perfect duplicate for archival storage. My faded slides weren’t in with a chance from the word go. Did that become a rant? Easily done isn’t it? For those whose archiving problem isn’t a photo one but graphic art then YMMV.
Understand. It does depend on storage of course. Did you know, for example, that slides/negs shouldn’t be stored in wooden boxes/cabinets because would gives off a chemical which attacks the emulsion?
As far as digital archiving goes, yes,prune comprehensively but then, to be safe, you need to store as uncompressed images which you recopy every ten years or so (minimum) because magnetic storage is prone to losing bits as well (plus see Eric’s comment about CD).
—
Hecate
(Fried computers a specialty)
