Scandalous, unjustified...

Some weird science on here.

"Bit rot" is a term that's become quite fashionable, but google for a real-world example of an image being corrupted and I bet you won't find one.

Home users should be fare more worried about catastrophic disk failure rather than degradation. THis is the case where some paranoia is justifiable. I back everything up constantly using Time Machine; and important images are copied onto two separate macs, each with their own automatic time Machine backup. Then I have another hard drive where I specifically store all images which is portable. Whenever I go away I make sure drives abd backups are in separate physical locations.
 
If I want an image to last, I shoot on black and white film. If I don't care, and there are a lot of ones, usually high school sports for our weekly papers, I shoot digital and archive on backup hard drives. And at my age, nearly 73, the whole exercise of what lasts is becoming moot. Now I have to decide what to do with the black and white negatives - books of them that take up a whole wall. That's another issue altogether.
 
ChrisPlatt said:
My images are important to me but not likely to anyone else once I'm gone.
There's no sense in obsessing about archiving them for posterity.
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it baffles me why any photographer would think that was actually true. your kids might care, and chances are likely that descendants further down will care even more when they do genealogical research. and the research value for non-family members also increases as well.

i think a bit of learning, some diligence, and a preservation strategy that expects some negligence is all it’d take to do a good job archiving the photos of even casual photographers.
 
I believe the major future constraint will not be data loss due to technical factors but an overwhelming amount of images with poor editing and poor indexing. A few choice images buried in hundred of thousands of non significant ones will be as lost as if totally non existent. Sure you can load those hundreds of thousands of files into Lightroom and search for the ones with flags or gold stars but no one is going to do that. Inf fact, we may never do that ourselves.

My life from birth to age 21 as well as my siblings and parents adventures are contained in 9 photo albums. Periodically people love to flip through them.

Our kids and grandchildren plus our family adventures are documented in some stacks of 8x10 prints. But those endless little envelopes and 36 small prints from the lab, folders and folders of pages of b&w negative strips, and untold boxes of 36 35mm slides have been thrown away in the realization no one could ever find the significant among all the insignificant. And there are duplicate hard drives of digital files that have the same problem. Plus there is not a significant delineation of my artistic work from family mementos. That is a far cry from my non photographer parents documentation of our youth.

One here mentioned expanding from 2 drives of 2T each to 2 3T drives. Even when kept up to date technically, who is going to flip through 6 terabytes of photo files? I see that as the problem.
 
I take photographs for me, not for future generations. Later gens would be stumped by the daily procession of food images, the inside of movie theaters, random garden test shots, and the occasional booty call.

But since my images are for me, I take the best care I can with the resources available. I keep multiple redundant backup harddrives along with working drives. As drive capacity increases, I migrate all working data to new drives and then the older drives become inactive storage.

Right now, my last 16 years of photography fits on two 8TB drives. Duplicate drives are stored with family.

I've long thought about printing, especially making photobooks with essays like Daido's Memories of a Dog, but I've just never got around to it. My only regular prints are from film!
 
Our local systems guy calls this "data rot" and claims that CD/DVD lasts much longer than the regular hard drives.

Personally, I'm now in the habit of buying a Best Buy portable drive once a year, copying almost all to it, labeling it, and storing it away.

For film photographs, I do keep all negatives and slides. Overall I've had good luck scanning 30-40 year old negatives and slides, but it seems like some, mostly Ektachrome, is prone to fading either to the cyan or magenta side.
 
I've got a two-prong approach--everything I have is on a computer which is backed up in the cloud. Every few months, I back up to a loose hard drive as well. Every couple of years the technology has advanced sufficiently that since they're dirt cheap now I buy another fresh hard drive and start the hard drive backup cycle again on the new drive.

So basically what I have is three copies of my recent work, and a drawer full of incremental copies up to the point where I stopped using each drive. A couple of these are always somewhere else. Having gotten burned once or twice by changing standards, I no longer back up on removable drives. I'm not convinced that CD drives will be available forever, and I don't want to be in the position some day of copying 1000 CDs over to a hard disk or losing everything.

I'm not worried about the long term future, though. When I die, I fully expect everything to be dumped in the trash, where it belongs. There's one group of negs that may end up in an archive because of their contents.
 
pepeguitarra said:
What is the cloud? Isn't it a group of large computers that save everything in larger disks?
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That's about it.

Except there are redundant "group(s) of large computers that save everything in larger disks", otherwise known as servers, at multiple locations. These redundant servers provide security and backup protection.

For instance, your account user name, password and billing information are kept on multiple, separate servers in different locations. Your data could be kept on yet another server. This way criminals have to attack multiple separate servers. If one server or location experiences a power failure, the other locations can take over. But some smaller firms may not offer this level of protection. Many cloud services encrypt your data. Of course, you can encrypt it yourself as well.
 
my unscientific and unproven backup methodology:

throughout the calendar year, every file i'm working on (usually just recently shot images) are on my main computer which is periodically backed up with time machine.

every january i take all my images for the previous year (usually just family pictures) and have a photobook printed. yes, i still believe in having a good old-fashioned "family album". this project usually takes a month to layout and have printed.

when i'm done working with the previous year's photos, i backup up all the images to a master archive 8tb hard drive as well as a handful of USB thumb drives. the archive drive goes back to my parents house where it's kept throughout the year and the thumb drives go in a ziploc bag and stored in the (relatively) fireproof safe in my house. right now I've got 12 years worth of pictures and home videos this way and i'm on my second hard drive. i figure this way i have all my work on one format with moving parts (hard drive) and one without moving parts (thumb drive) stored in 2 different homes.

note that i rarely ever go back to work on an image from a previous year. i know some of you probably retrieve older images to reprint or re-tweak which makes my method a little more cumbersome.

some of my early years are on small thumb drives because files were smaller and thumb drives weren't very big so it wouldn't be that difficult for me to take that year and recopy to newer larger drives if i was worried about them decaying and going bad.
 
I store my digital files on a 4TB drive on my computer, which in turns gets copied weekly on my 4x2TB NAS drive which finally gets backed up on Amazon Prime (free unlimited photo storage as long as you're an Amazon Prime subscriber)

I also backup my final edited pictures on 2 Flickr accounts (one private and one public)
 
Prints, and film, are just as susceptible to fire. Or more so - how many of you folks print multiple copies and keep physical copies in multiple places or in a large fire safe? As opposed to data storage in multiple locations, which is much smaller and easier to manage. Also, there is no cloud storage of prints or negatives.

All things are ephemeral. It's about risk mitigation as opposed to removal of all risk.
 
Change of color... I've certainly seen this on chromes. Sometimes I wonder if it happens with negatives. Anyone try Kodak Digital ROC (Restoral of Color). In the day, these were the geniuses about photographic color.

John, about images on Flickr deteriorating. Shouldn't, but I think I remember that some years ago management decided to downsample everyone's images. Created a furor. I might be thinking of the wrong company.

On the original question: I put image files on an external hard drive. Every three years, I buy a new one 2x the size of the last one, copy everything to the new drive, discard the old, and continue. Vendor warranty for hard drives is two-to-three years; I think they know something.
 
I try but I am not very good at this backup thing. I know I should but I jusdt keep procrastinating. But this year I bought three 4Tb hard drives, copied all my image files to each one, then gave one to each of the kids for Christmas.

I think I'll do that every couple of years or so. It makes them part of my backup strategy and gives me a motive to do it. If something drastic happens at least they have what I have up to a certain point in time.

Beyond that I just print. I much prefer to hold a print and look at it anyway and, short of a fire or flood, it will be there for the kids to hold as well. I put a few on the wall but even those get rotated around from time to time by my wife. Most of them just sit in files in the dark until I pull a few out to look at them.

EDIT - I do kind of feel sorry for them because up until just the last couple of years my labeling usually amounted to a date and maybe the camera I used. I have gotten a little better, but not much.
 
Pioneer said:
I try but I am not very good at this backup thing. I know I should but I jusdt keep procrastinating. But this year I bought three 4Tb hard drives, copied all my image files to each one, then gave one to each of the kids for Christmas.

I think I'll do that every couple of years or so. It makes them part of my backup strategy and gives me a motive to do it. If something drastic happens at least they have what I have up to a certain point in time.

Beyond that I just print. I much prefer to hold a print and look at it anyway and, short of a fire or flood, it will be there for the kids to hold as well. I put a few on the wall but even those get rotated around from time to time by my wife. Most of them just sit in files in the dark until I pull a few out to look at them.

EDIT - I do kind of feel sorry for them because up until just the last couple of years my labeling usually amounted to a date and maybe the camera I used. I have gotten a little better, but not much.
Click to expand...

Food for thought so that you don't have to buy 3 hard drives every year.

Buy another drive and backup everything on it, then every 3 or 6 months swap this drive with one of your kids.
then repeat the process so that at least one of your kids will have the latest back-up and the other ones will have a slightly older versions.
 
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