Image Storage

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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Proper storage of digital images is in its infancy. With film we know to not store in glassines, not to have the glued seams of storage envelopes running against the center of negatives and a myriad of other things. But I still see folks storing digital images on a small hard disc and putting that hard disc in a safety deposit vault not knowing that hard discs that are not spun regularly have a higher rate of failure.

CD's and DVD's deteriorate with age; hard discs fail. I started storing my images on hard drives some time ago. But even in those early days I kept two identical discs in the office knowing that eventually one would fail and I would need the other to create the new safety duplicate back up. And a third disc was stored, not in the office, but at a relative's house, in case my house was destroyed by fire, theft, e.t.c..

Now I use a RAID system that automatically duplicates the stored files and has a few other advantages. But the important point is to duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. Something that is much more difficult with film. Having had acquaintances who lost film and prints in the New Orleans floods, the WTC bombing and a few smaller disasters, I actually think that the opinion expressed in these forums that film is the preferred safe storage material is bunk.

How are you storing your images? Are you satisfied with the system? What do you think would be the ideal storage system?

Thanks,

Bill
 
I have both 35mm and 120 negatives stored in glassines, and so far no problems. They still print just fine. Some of them date back to 1961. Transferring all the notes and information written on those tens of thousands of glassines would be a daunting task. So would scanning them for digital storage. At this point I'm just going to continue shooting film, making contact sheets, numbering the glassines to match the contact sheets, storing them together in 8x10 enlarging paper boxes, and not worry about it.
 
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Bill
I'm facing this issue personally since 1998 and professionally since.. ever I guess! I'm on IT Business for more than 24 years so far (one never knows...).
Storage always grows, as humans we keep gathering things along the way and this rules applies to film or digital (or film that needs/has to be digitize).

To make it short, the best approach IMHO is a RAID system like the one you mentioned associated with multiple NAS (Network Access Storage) disks (a Local Area Network is needed for this) so copies can be made "on the fly" and moved away and with the new Fiber to the home access offers from carriers (100 Mbps), buy external storage from a provider and store the more important information remotely.
For the film is a more costly process or use the above process after scanning/digitize.
I use the RAID & NAS methods and waiting the the 100 Mb/s HighSpeed from my carrier... some day.
 
Al Kaplan said:
I have both 35mm and 120 negatives stored in glassines, and so far no problems. They still print just fine. Some of them date back to 1961. Transferring all the notes and information written on those tens of thousands of glassines would be a daunting task. So would scanning them for digital storage. At this point I'm just going to continue shooting film, making contact sheets, numbering the glassines to match the contact sheets, storing them together in 8x10 enlarging paper boxes, and not worry about it.
Click to expand...

Al -

I have some negs that do show the effects of glue seams and glassine. How about taking your most valuable or most personally important negs and transferring them to a safer, acid free negative envelope and attaching the old glassine with the info to the outside of the new envelope?
 
I do a few things to backup my images:

1. I copy my image files to an external hard drive.

2. I also leave images on my SD cards, and just buy new cards when full.

3. I print some of the images at Walmart, and they're put in photo albums.

However, I don't have anything like off-site backups in a safety deposit box. But I'm just a hobbiest, so it's not worth the effort. :)

My dream for the ideal storage system would be something that is KNOWN to be archival. As far as I can tell, CDs, DVDs, HDs, etc, are non-archival and need to be re-copied periodically. I suppose prints are archival, in that you don't have to make an effort to keep the media up to date, but that's an expensive and bulky scheme for thousands of images.
 
All of my negs are kept in clear archival plastic sheets and stored in archival boxes. I also try to process my negs to archival standards (properly fixed and washed)

Digital it's a little more tricky, but luckily I shoot digital at the same pace as film, so there aren't tens of thousands of images a year that need to be stored. At the most basic level I have a small 2 drive RAID that holds everything. Duplictes of the really valuable shots are also stored on at least one other harddisk.

But frankly I don't trust harddisks, as far as I could throw one.

Ultimately the really important shots are also backed up to slow (cheap) memory cards, from a reputable manufacturer. At the moment I think SD and CF cards are the safest means for longterm storage.
 
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Bill, anyway I cut it I'm still looking at 30,000+ 35mm glassines plus the matching contact sheets. Even the thought of scanning that many contact sheets scares me. If somebody gives me an aproximate date and the name of a person or event I can find the contact sheets and negatives easily enough. The newspapers purge their files from time to time, as do many photographers, or else their files are in such disarray that locating an image is impossible.

I think that the supposed bugaboo of glassines affecting negatives is pretty much the same as the warnings we got about RC papers not being stable when they first hit the market back in the 1970's. It was new "technology" and nobody really knew just how stable they'd be long term. Kodak, Ilford, Agfa, etc. wanted to cover their butts. Once the word "they're not stable" gets out it becomes gospel, endlessly repeated. I have RC prints and contact sheets dating back over 30 years that look just fine. Of course they were stored in the dark. Framed and displayed in bright light they might not have held up as well.

We already know that those pretty silvery discs get corrupted after a few years, and will our grandchildren recognize an ancient hard drive for what it is? Or have whatever it takes to access the images? You and I won't be around to find out.
 
RAID .... someone is screaming out my name here!

I place the negatives in archival sheets along with a CD with an index print. I do not worry much about it all. Life is too short to worry about it.
 
Anyone who doesn't back up their digital files off-site is just as susceptible to flood/fire damage as someone storing one copy of negs/slides at home. Just because one is able to back up off-site. doesn't mean most people do.
This is the great equalizer that puts film and digital on equal footing.
I know I would never get around to backing up off-site, so storing digital files is much more of a hassle to me. If my basement floods or my house burns down I'm screwed either way!
 
As an exceptionally old dude, let me state that I used to share the somewhat casual attitude towards archiving of some of you. But, while not too many of us take self portraits, those files are our lives, our friends, our adventures, our self-portraits if you will. At some point you will want to put those photographs in order, guaranteed. It's a lot easier to bend over the file cabinet if you do it before you have arthritis.
 
Bill Pierce said:
Proper storage of digital images is in its infancy. With film we know to not store in glassines, not to have the glued seams of storage envelopes running against the center of negatives and a myriad of other things.
Click to expand...
Let's back up a bit, Bill...:)

I've been using glassines for quite some time. I prefer them because I can store an entire (cut) roll in each glassine. (Okay, I read this in David Vestal's book eons ago, but it worked for him...). And these sleeved rolls can be stored quite compactly, in the proverbial cool, dry place.

And, "glassines" can now be had in either the trad material (which I use) or more modern, allegedly PVC-free material as well (which I might look into at some point). The big deal, IMO, is that some method of storage is used.

As for digital storage for the scanned files from all this film, among other sources? Definitely still a work-in-progress: I just put in a 1TB network HD to back up all three Macs in the household (My G4 tower and PowerBook, and galfriend's G4 tower), and will likely use the remaining space for backing up some image files, but that task will eventually go a pair of large, server-class HDs with high MTBF ratings. But I tend to turn over any hard disk much older than three years as a matter of course; since I do freelance computer-tech work, I've seen way too many HDs under two years old suddenly croak, and the frequency of failure seems to be linked to the increased capacity of contemporary drives, although I don't have any hard evidence.


- Barrett
 
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I shoot auto racing at local tracks as a hobby. SD cards have become so cheap that I just use new ones each week and keep the old ones as my permanent archive. Same thing with personal work. Once full, I just stash the card. I can also save edits, .tiff files of Photoshop work or .xmp / text docs for cataloging. I can fit a heck of a lot of SD cards in a plastic box that gets thrown in the safe deposit at the end of the season.

I also download to hard drives as 'working' copies. Anything really choice, be it hobby or personal gets a copy sent offline to my web FTP server and if I really really love it, I keep another online through my email account.

I figure if all that goes boom at once, I had really bad luck or I got bigger problems than taking pictures.
 
What I really should be concerned about is getting my Kodachromes in order. The E2and E4 Ektachromes, along with the Anscochromes and Agfachromes are beyond salvation for the most part. So are the color negs more than maybe 10 or 15 years old, and I never did have a good filing system for any of it.
 
Hmmm, reading Al's comment, above, I think I'll go and have a check of my Agfachromes . . . .

The first films I developed myself were Agfachrome, because I thought the slightly lower temperature (was it 28C ?) would be easier to maintain at home than the hotter E6. Black-and-white came later, after I bought an enlarger to go alongside the slide-projector.
 
For digital:

Original copy on the primary data hard disk (separate from operating system)
First copy on another internal hard disk;
Second copy on an external hard disk on my desk;
Third copy on a 2.5" portable hard disk that stays with me all the time;
Fourth copy on DVD.

Plus a copy of my Lightroom catalog on my keychain thumb drive.
 
Prints.

An inkjet print done on premium paper will probably last longer than digital media if the print is stored decently. Inks and papers these days are right up there with silver gelatin in lifespan.

All storage materials--including negatives--are fragile and have finite lifespans.
 
FYI: Henry Wilhelm: "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides and Motion Pictures" It is over 700 pages double columned. The 2003 issue can be downloaded.
 
raid drives, dvd copies and i have been trying to print as of late (as much as i can) for digital.

film is slightly haphazard right now. binders with negs in sleeves accompanied by contact sheet.

now i have to go look up a "drobo"??
 
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