Story: Single Point of Failure Defined

[bmattock]

http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20100110/OPINION01/100109428?Title=How-much-would-you-pay-

How much would you pay?
Keith Magill Executive Editor
Published: Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, January 9, 2010 at 10:31 p.m.

It is Halloween, and three siblings, masked and costumed, are lined up by their mom in front of a Polaroid camera. The littlest girl, probably 4, is a fairy, like Tinker Bell. Beside her, a 6-year-old princess. Next is a 7-year-old boy, me, with a red pitchfork and horns.

“Perfect,” my sister, Michele, said as she pulled the aging photo from a thick album. “You’re the devil.”
...
But some of my friends, including one who lived in New Orleans East and another in Plaquemines Parish, can’t say the same. When I talk to them about their losses – their homes and virtually everything in them were destroyed – they tell me that more than anything, they miss their pictures. I’ve talked with a lot of others, here and back home, who have said the same thing after one storm or another. All of them use words like “irreplaceable,” “sad” and “heartbreaking” when speaking about the photographs Andrew or Katrina or Rita or Ike stole from them. Like most of us who roamed the Earth before digital cameras, they thought their boxes and albums full of snapshots would last forever.

For those who argue the life expectancy of a film print or negative or slide versus the potential loss of data from a CD or DVD containing digital photos (or scanned film photos), the most poignant argument. Whilst a Katrina could wash away DVD's as easily as a box of negatives, a DVD can be backed up and stored in more than one place, identical copies. Film negatives can be copied, but not identically.

Consider 'backing up' your film collection onto digital. Keep the prints and negs. But make digital copies.

 

[FrankS]

But which is more likely to happen: home completely destroyed by fire/hurricane/flood, or a computer crash?

 

[Krzys]

But the fact that they are raw and irreplaceable gives the value in the first place. Id rather have that and risk it.

 

[maddoc]

A very good point. Fire ... nothing can protect your negatives / prints / slides. Water-damage ... well sealed plastic boxes could help to some extent. A digital back-up of film (by scanning) is very expensive and time consuming if done properly....

On the other hand, how many back-up their digital images on a regular basis and also keep copies at different places ? I don`t know of anybody amongst my friends ....

 

[bmattock]

But which is more likely to happen: home completely destroyed by fire/hurricane/flood, or a computer crash?

Computer crash. However, you can't make an identical copy of your home and store it in a remote location (well, at least I can't). You can have copies of your data in multiple places, each identical to the original. This is how banks mitigate risk, and it works.

 

[former member]

We had a Disk Drive crash and go SO bad that it blew-out the power supply of the second computer that we used to try to read it.

 

[bmattock]

But the fact that they are raw and irreplaceable gives the value in the first place. Id rather have that and risk it.

I don't understand how a photograph becomes less valuable because a copy is made of it for archival purposes.

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.u..._settlement_news_155084.html?offset=&offset=1

When photographer Jacques Lowe stashed his 40,000 Kennedy negatives into the vaults of a New York bank, he could never have foreseen the tragedy that would strike his treasured collection 11 years later. For the location of the deposit box - just down the road from the photographer's office - was number 5 World Trade Center, a building adjacent to the twin towers which were destroyed in the terrorist attacks of 11 September.

The pictures represented Lowe's entire Kennedy archive. Most had never been published, many capturing historic moments of the president John F Kennedy at work and play, before JFK was killed by an assassin's bullets in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

Can you explain to me how it is better that these photos were lost to the world than it would have been if they had been scanned and stored in multiple locations?

 

[bmattock]

We had a Disk Drive crash and go SO bad that it blew-out the power supply of the second computer that we used to try to read it.

So do banks. They do risk analysis on their systems and create multiply-redundant copies of data when that data is of sufficient value to justify the expense.

The point is not that computers don't crash - they do. The point is that precautions can be taken to avoid data loss when computers and disks fail, if one feels the data is worth the effort to preserve.

If one feels their photos are not worth the effort, then by all means, carry on doing nothing to protect them.

 

[bmattock]

A very good point. Fire ... nothing can protect your negatives / prints / slides. Water-damage ... well sealed plastic boxes could help to some extent. A digital back-up of film (by scanning) is very expensive and time consuming if done properly....

On the other hand, how many back-up their digital images on a regular basis and also keep copies at different places ? I don`t know of anybody amongst my friends ....

I do. Regular as clockwork, and a great deal of it automated. However, I am a tech geek and I do this kind of thing for a living as well, so it's not that hard for me.

The question is whether or not one feels it worth the effort to safeguard their photos from loss. If not, then do nothing.

 

[wgerrard]

But which is more likely to happen: home completely destroyed by fire/hurricane/flood, or a computer crash?

A few years ago, I had a server running in a building that caught fire.

All photos are vulnerable. Remote storage of digital goodies often puts you in a position of dependence on a third party. On the other hand, you can stash prints and negatives in a bank vault, only to lose the bank in an earthquake.

The more copies you stash in as many different locations, the better the odds that at least one stash will survive.

[Speaking of fires and computer, I once managed to start a fire in a laser printer, located about three floors away from my desk. One of my proud moments.]

 

[Krzys]

I don't understand how a photograph becomes less valuable because a copy is made of it for archival purposes.

I can't help you understand and it doesn't matter to me if you don't. 😉

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

I have double backups on two 500gb hard dirves, but I really should keep a copy at my office as well.

 

[bmattock]

I have double backups on two 500gb hard dirves, but I really should keep a copy at my office as well.

If two friends swap external hard drives (and a 500 gig hard drive is what, $49 USD now?) every month or so, they've got a lot of protection for not a lot of money / effort.

In my case, I have an apartment in Detroit and a house in NC, but the house part is coming to an end, so I'll find a new offsite location to keep a hard drive. It's really not that hard to keep up with once it because a routine. I also have automated routines that store (admittedly lesser quality) copies via ftp upload on servers I maintain in various places around the world. This last bit is suboptimal because I have to dump a lot of data to make the file sizes manageable, but it's last-resort kind of stuff.

 

[Pickett Wilson]

I have a RAID array with two, 2 Terabyte drives on my home network where all my digital files live. These are backed up monthly to an identical RAID array that is stored in a safe deposit box. Individual projects are backed up to DVD's between the monthly network backup. Files are archived to long term storage on additional hard drives when the RAID disk begin filling up. That's the best I can do for protecting files.

This is actually overkill. Most of these digital images will never be looked at again. It's not hard to keep redundant copies of digital files. It's impossible with original negatives.

 

[bmattock]

My methods tend towards the low-buck, low-tech, but obviously RAID and fire safes, etc, are much better if one can afford them and/or values their photographs to the extent of making that level of safety a priority.

For fear of scaring off non-computer types, it's really very simple. If you buy a couple (or three) external USB hard drives, you simply have to connect them to your PC or Mac (most recognize the new drive automatically these days), copy your photo directory or directories to the drive, and disconnect the drive again. Do this for each external drive, then store at least one drive in a remote location, such as a friend's or relative's house. Make a rotation plan to repeat this every month or so and you have achieved a rather high level of security for your photo archive for not much money, not much work, and no real computer skills needed.

 

[BillBingham2]

I'm doing a combination of NAS (Network Addressable Storage) local, the Cloud (storage on the internet somewhere) and DVDs off site in a gun safe.

B2 (;->

 

[user237428934]

My methods tend towards the low-buck, low-tech, but obviously RAID and fire safes, etc, are much better if one can afford them and/or values their photographs to the extent of making that level of safety a priority.

For fear of scaring off non-computer types, it's really very simple. If you buy a couple (or three) external USB hard drives, you simply have to connect them to your PC or Mac (most recognize the new drive automatically these days), copy your photo directory or directories to the drive, and disconnect the drive again. Do this for each external drive, then store at least one drive in a remote location, such as a friend's or relative's house. Make a rotation plan to repeat this every month or so and you have achieved a rather high level of security for your photo archive for not much money, not much work, and no real computer skills needed.

It's so simple but you need a lot of discipline to do it regularly. I must admit that the drive in the remote location is updated not often enough.

 

[photogdave]

I live in a an old bank vault built in 1915. It is made from brick and concrete and would probably withstand a fire or earthquake. My geographical location is not prone to natural disasters like hurricanes, tornados or floods. My girlfriend's laptop had a hard drive crash and she lost all her digital snapshots. Luckily I had backed up most of her more important shots on my computer. I have Time Machine backing up to a LaCie 2Big that has two mirrored 500GB drives.
I guess my point is: whatever! 😛

 

[varjag]

There are even fewer people who do proper backup routine than of unlucky fellows who's houses burn down. Even among IT folk those are in low percents..

 

[Ezzie]

As with every safeguard procedure, one would very much like it to be proven unnecessary. That doesn´t make it any less important. You don´t think twice about installing fire extinguishers or smoke detectors do you, or insuring your house and your belongings for that matter?

I sin, but am in the process of establishing an off site copy of all digital image files. At the moment they are represented in JPG and RAW format on two different disks. Another with an iphoto database and Aperture Vault. And a further disk backing up all these.