Computer Crush!

[konpikoulas]

I thought it was safe to have a second hard disk and back my photographs and documents up there. This until last month when my computer crashed! I took the second disk out and put it in one of my friends computer, in order to retrieve the back up files. But on my surprise the disk was not recognized at all! I thought that a year's work was completely lost... Fortunately this friend of mine is keen for computers and was able to retrieve the photos and the documends after a couple of days! The downside is that now I have to arrange all these files which are randomly placed and named by the retrieving programm. This will take me one month or so to execute.
So the bottom line is: back up the photographs in CDs and keep them safe like you've always did with your negatives and slides!!

 

[bmattock]

That's a fine idea! I used to keep all my scanned negs and digital photos on a single hard drive, then I did what you did and copied them to another drive (I used an external drive, but the same idea). I also copied them to another computer (because I'm a computer geek and have a bunch of them).

I started backing them up to CD-ROMs, but I quickly realized that it would take MANY CD-ROMs to back up all my photos. So, I finally got a DVD-ROM burner and that seems to be the way to go for now. The DVD burners are reasonably cheap now, but the blank media is still a bit dear. But prices will come down, they always do. A single DVD holds (I think) something like 4.7 gigabytes, compared to 800 megabytes for a CD.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks