Photo storage issues

[Spooky]

Browsing the net I found this very informative story on how to protect yor valuable photo's.

Happy reading and especially note the fact that if you leave your harddisk unused, you may be up for problems!
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Guys, my world is that of high end broadcast & Film Post Production – so if you think that you might never run to the end of 4Tb of storage … the guys I consult to, are talking about Petabytes of daily managed storage! Yeah, crazy, right? But, they, like you, are working with an absence of shooting media that is a recording source (remember that funny organic stuff called film?) and have pretty much all moved to digital file based media. I really want to throw my two cents worth in here just because this area is something that has been the focus of my world for the last seven or eight years at least. What I’d like to offer is the pros and cons of some of the systems available to you.
Hard Drive (HD) vs Optical Disk (OD) approaches.

HD is cheap and gets cheaper. It also gets corrupted and can fail. What’s worse, it will, unlike most forms of storage, fail more, the less you use it – strange right? Well, this is because, the disks are iron oxide (fundamentally) baked onto plastic disks. If you don’t spin them, make the heads access the information on them on a regular basis, the iron “forgets” to stay magnetic, and the magnetism of the disk is how all the information stays recorded. So, one thing you have to promise yourself that you will do is to get out your backups, put them into the caddies and do a read/write operation once every three months or so – the rust stays magnetic, the information stays intact. Good. Now, the other thing that you should contemplate is way more storage than you will ever need! if you have 5 DVDs worth of storage now – bear in mind that you have over 20 gigabytes of storage – and the chances are that the camera you shot those files with was only recording half the information that the camera you have now or are lusting over now can record, right? Go bigger than you think you need and be prepared to upgrade it. And seriously think about going to a minimum of RAID 5 technology – that system has one redundant disk that with failure can be removed, replaced with a similar drive and the rebuilding of your library takes place in the background. RAID 6 will let that happen with two drives failing – and that really is a pretty hard to imagine situation (short of a power failure).

Now, I’d like to offer up some opinions on Optical Drives.

The start of the thread suggested that there were some points of failure possible with the media type. While there is a great deal of material out there on both sides, I can only offer up my own experiences. As of now, I’ve been authoring DVDs for almost 10 years now. I still have my original 1X (single speed) burned DVD-Rs and they still read, they still are accessible. Seriously, the one thing you CAN NOT do with them is use them as drink coasters and they will offer you years of storage potential!
Unlike magnetic disks, there is nothing for them to corrupt them if you store them on a shelf away from excessive humidity, heat and too much light. They are very very cheap, you can set up your archive system to span across many disks if you need a big back up set. That is to say maybe you have more than the 4Gb of material that can be recorded readily to one DVD, then you can tell your Nero or Toast program to burn it to two or three or more DVDs and you simply put your disks back in the sequence that the program recorded the material.
Or, even better, make more use of one of the simple units of your operating system, Folders, when you break down your images, so that you only need to record the contents of one folder to a DVD.

Now, the DROBO unit that many of you said very positive things about I have to add that while I don’t use one, thats more about, I don’t use one now. The system offers very high level management of your drives and will permit you to add more storage when and as you need it. It also takes away the need for you to remember when to run your hard drives to make sure the rust stays magnetic, it tells you when there is a chance of your hard drives fail so your peace of mind factor is quite high. If you are more IT savvy, the same effort can be done with off the shelf tools and a little “IT OCD” determination. So that will probably let 97% of the rest of us enjoy the extra time to shoot pictures with a clear conscience!

But seriously, keeping your material for the ages is in many ways easier than ever, but more about making it a regular routine then ever. And for what it’s worth, while the ideas expressed here are from my own experience, study and research – you have to understand that I could be entirely wrong and that the moment you try the technologies they could fail – that’s the thing about this stuff – it works like this for me, it may not for you. Whatever works for you, is the best system possible.

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Best,
Anno

[ehusmann]

Very interesting stuff and it becomes more important everytime you take some shots. But there is one point that this post is missing. One thing he says is this:

I still have my original 1X (single speed) burned DVD-Rs and they still read, they still are accessible. Seriously, the one thing you CAN NOT do with them is use them as drink coasters and they will offer you years of storage potential!

Although he is probably right from a DVD standpoint (that they can be stored for years), he doesn´t mention the equipment you need to read it....
I am also in the business of storage and archiving, albeit not in a technical role, but in a strategy role. One thing that comes up with my customers, all the time, is how to read the data that has been stored for many years. And mind you, some of these customers need to store data for 15 years, 30 years, sometimes even forever!

Just think of the media and software you used 20 years ago..... would you still be able to read a cassette? Or a floppy? So even though the DVD looks like something that will stay, it will not forever. If in 20 years your DVD is still ok, but the slot in you computer is too small for it, you still cannot read it. Everytime you make a shift to a new technology (computer, camera, tv, etc), make sure you can still use all your old media, or make sure you are able to copy it to new media. It is not a nice job, but it can save you from lost data.

Erwin

[Key]

Why not mention the source, Spooky? Not only is it nice as a credit, but it also enables everyone here to read follow-ups on that thread.
Thanks for sharing of course,

Erik