Scandalous, unjustified...

[scott kirkpatrick]

I backup to 4 TB USB disks, one at home and one in the office. I do it manually, at monthly intervals, saving all raw files that were not immediately erased compressed by shoot or shooting day. And all jpegs selected to be rendered. The disks get replaced about every two years as they fill and bigger disks become available. The problem I have with the cloud is that the ownership and management of cloud storage can change over time, and has. Getting stuff out of one cloud to move it onto another is difficult to impossible. I post a further down-selection to Flickr (and for years before that to PBase) and either of those could go away.

 

[gdi]

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.

You are right that the far bigger danger is disk failure, but all major drive manufacturers acknowledge the possibility of the change of electrical charge that could corrupt data. I have occasionally gotten a corrupt file but never had a significant problem except for a totally failed HD. I was a victim of failed "archival" cds/DVD’s which we’re totally toasted after a few years.....

 

[DrMcCoy]

I make a painting of all my favorite frames and send it to the National Archives.

 

[willie_901]

An important part of my job responsibilities once involved long-term data storage. This was primary analytical data recorded to support patents and EPA/FDA/EU product approval. CD/DVD media were not approved methods.

CD/DVD data lifetimes depend on several variables.

The quality of the media is very important. Not all media were/are manufactured the same. The materials costs and manufacturing and quality assurance methods vary. It is fair to say some inexpensive media were never intended for archival purposes. Sometimes (but not always!) more expensive media actually are worth the extra cost.

The storage environment is also important. Media stored in hot, humid environments will degrade quicker than media stored in climate controlled environments. Media stored so the media is flat will last longer than storage conditions where the media might not be flat for significant periods of time

The same goes for magnetic tape storage (which is generally more robust for archival purposes).

There are reasons why some people have good experiences with CD/DVD archives and others don't.