Story: Single Point of Failure Defined

Bills point was that if you do back up your film negs digitally, you at least have some measure of security. It doesn´t detract from the value of the negs (or pos slides for that matter). If you don´t think your house will ever catch fire, fine. I for one dread the day that such a thing should happen, and have taken measures to safegaurd my family, and soon my pics.
 
bmattock said:
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.
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Bill, I'm proud of ya. I'm still trying to convince half my clients of the virtues of just a simple backup. (I've had to do a lot of damage control for a bunch of people who had their hard drives lunch out suddenly, and getting that deer-in-the-headlights look when I ask "Did you back up anything?"

All my computers have either automated or (in the case of the PowerBook I'm using now) semi-automated backup to a network drive. I'm going to have a single drive just for my images for off-site backup storage. Even if people can't do it as thoroughly as you are (or even as I am), a simple backup is better than nothing. Alas, too many don't bother at all. Pulling data from a dying HD isn't fun.


- Barrett
 
ryan26 said:
http://www.steveanchell.com/index.p...=article&catid=16:profiles&id=65:brett-weston

Make prints. Your kids aren't going to get much out of staring at a silver disc anyways... REally, who's going to care to sort through your archives.. be it digital or analog.
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I have no kids, and if I did, I presume they'd treat my photographs like everyone else's kids do - by throwing them directly into the nearest landfill. I do backups for me. Prints are a single point of failure; and I have no desire to print every photograph I take, while I do want to save every photo I take.

Therefore, making prints would be a poor choice for me.
 
amateriat said:
Bill, I'm proud of ya. I'm still trying to convince half my clients of the virtues of just a simple backup. (I've had to do a lot of damage control for a bunch of people who had their hard drives lunch out suddenly, and getting that deer-in-the-headlights look when I ask "Did you back up anything?"

All my computers have either automated or (in the case of the PowerBook I'm using now) semi-automated backup to a network drive. I'm going to have a single drive just for my images for off-site backup storage. Even if people can't do it as thoroughly as you are (or even as I am), a simple backup is better than nothing. Alas, too many don't bother at all. Pulling data from a dying HD isn't fun.


- Barrett
Click to expand...

I even have plugged my webcam USB cameras into a little Linux piece of free software called 'motion' and automated it to send photos to Flickr and my email and another undisclosed location if it detects that a) my main PC is turned off and b) motion in the range I've specified. I can also monitor my PC from a web browser wherever I'm located anytime I want to.

Here's a photo of some maintenance guy who entered my Detroit apartment while I was at home NC for Christmas. If it were a bad guy and he took my PC that has my webcams mounted to it, I'd still have photos of his face as he took it. OK, sure, I'm paranoid. The only real question is whether I am paranoid enough.



 
maddoc said:
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 ....
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I have two computers, and before I wipe the SD or CF card, I store the files on both systems, one desktop and one laptop. Not perfect, but as long as I grab the laptop during a house fire...
 
If digital backup is done religiously, then no problem.

The reality is that no backup is done in probably 90% of households.

If no backup is done, then archiving on film is a better idea than on digital because computer crashes causing data loss are far more likely than natural disasters causing print and negative loss.

If there is no effort expended to backup digital files (90%) then film storage is more archival than digital. Restated: film storage is more archival than digital 90% of the time.

That's all I'm saying.
 
Last edited:
It's just 'stuff'

It's just 'stuff'

I have never felt that things were all that important, if i lost everything in a fire but my life i would consider it a lucky day.

While my photographs and cameras are important to me I don't think they are irreplaceable ... I would just go out and take more.
 
FrankS said:
If digital backup is done religiously, then no problem.

The reality is that no backup is done in probably 90% of households.

If no backup is done, then archiving on film is a better idea than on digital because computer crashes causing data loss are far more likely than natural disasters causing print and negative loss.

If there is no effort expended to backup digital files (90%) then film storage is more archival than digital. Restated: film storage is more archival than digital 90% of the time.

That's all I'm saying.
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And all I'm saying is if that is the value people put on their photographs, then they have no one to blame but themselves when bad things happen. The nature of film and digital is understood; anyone who thinks either is immune to disasters is fooling themselves and/or extremely lazy. In either case, blaming the format (film or digital) is likely to happen, but not likely to have been the cause.

Bluntly put; people get what they deserve; good and hard.
 
bgb said:
I have never felt that things were all that important, if i lost everything in a fire but my life i would consider it a lucky day.

While my photographs and cameras are important to me I don't think they are irreplaceable ... I would just go out and take more.
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I have photographs of my father before he died. Tell me how to 'take more'.
 
I had some photos of my grandparents who are both long gone but don't need the photos as they live in my memories ... good enough for me

When my parents are gone i will still remember them clearly ...

🙂
 
antiquark said:
Nobody deserves a natural disaster.
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Of course not. On the other hand, natural disasters happen; so under what circumstances would be it be smart to not take precautions against known risks? If the worst happens and one has chosen not to do anything to protect oneself, I have a bit less empathy than I otherwise might.

We have heard on RFF from agonized people whose hard drives have failed and they had no backup. We can certainly rage against outrageous fortune, but what good does that do?
 
All of my data, photos and otherwise, is backed up on a NAS set up as RAID 1 (mirrored), and then I have two drives that rotate for off-site storage... which has me fairly well covered compared to most. But even my offsite is only 15 minutes away so if, say, a tsunami took out the westside of LA I'd still be screwed.

j
 
Bill,

Find a off-site friend and swap drives, it works.

Im paranoid like you, and have kept a constant line of data since the early nineties, keeping at any time at the very least one duplicate drive, most times, two duplicates, one local and one offsite. the offsite was never updated as frequently as the on-site, but it would have saved most of the data had something happened.

In this period of time (roughly 20 years) I have done complete recovery from two disasters for my girlfriend... so Stuff happens.

BTW.. one of the biggest treasures in my life, is my grandfathers negatives from 1930-1990 ish.. Scanning these have brought me more joy than anything else... I just got started on my fathers negatives. which is a matter of a few yards of 120 negative books. I am so happy nothing happened to these.

.
 
JonasYip said:
All of my data, photos and otherwise, is backed up on a NAS set up as RAID 1 (mirrored), and then I have two drives that rotate for off-site storage... which has me fairly well covered compared to most. But even my offsite is only 15 minutes away so if, say, a tsunami took out the westside of LA I'd still be screwed.

j
Click to expand...

I'd guess you'd have other priorities if a Tsunami took out LA; but even so, your risk is greatly lowered for disasters of the sort more likely to happen, don't you think? Hard drive crashes, theft, or a house fire, that kind of thing.

I'm reading responses from people who do backups and appear to be fairly intense about it (like yourself) and others who simply seem not to give a flip. Which is fine, of course, everyone has to put a value on their time versus their photos and how much they really want to preserve them. I'm alway somewhat surprised to find some 'photographers' seem not to care what happens to their current catalog during their own lifetimes, at least.
 
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