archiving of digital photos

Gordo wrote:


Remember that back up copies should be stored off site such as a bank vault.

A set at work, a friend's, a relative, is usually sufficient.


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James Silverton wrote:

I wonder what is or are the best media for archiving? Have you tried
randomly recalling some of the older images and checking for loss of
quality?

Long life "gold" CD's or DVD's. 100+ years in benign condtions.

Another interesting thing is what sort of indexing system is best?

There's the rub.



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James Silverton wrote:
David wrote on Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:03:07 GMT:

James Silverton wrote:
[]
I wonder what is or are the best media for archiving? Have
you tried randomly recalling some of the older images and
checking for loss of quality? Another interesting thing is
what sort of indexing system is best?

Yes, when I got the external HDs I had to recover almost all
off the CDs and DVDs. All but one were readable, which might have
been frustrating had I needed images of that DVD. One HD
and one set of DVDs are off-site.

Indexing for me is strictly year-month-day.

I guess that you are saying that off-site storage, possibly multiply
redundant, is the way to go. I wonder what are current estimates of life
time of personally written DVDs? I don't *need* professionally to have a
high probability of successful retrieval tho' I'd like it.

Long life gold DVD's : 100+ years in benign conditions

Ordinary DVD's: 5 years (~) in benign conditions

As an amateur, I need more than a date to find an image.

One nice thing about the Finder in Mac is that you can use it with a few
keywords to find anything pretty quick. So if you name a folder (or
even photo files) with the right keywords, you should be able to find it
pretty damned quick. Also add the date in the folder name as a general
mark.

Couple the above with Time Machine and you can find anything very quickly.

Hate to tout Mac, but for this sort of thing it is *** way *** ahead of
Windows...


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Per :
SD card's prices went down and you can get 4GB
for $10 now on special sale.

Which begs a question: has anybody heard of an SD==CF adapter?

I've got a Micro-SD==MiniSD and a Mini-SD==SD...

I've got a couple of CF cards, but it would be convenient not to
have any more - just buy more SD and use an adapter.
--
PeteCresswell

Per Ray Fischer:
and comes home once every 1-2 weeks to get an update

Which backup utility do you favor?
--
PeteCresswell

Per :
I always have to wonder how anyone (other than a professional) can
need to save 16,000 images.

I'm no professional.

Not even a hobbyist.

Probably below dilettante.

Just checked my "Photos" directory and Windows says it contains
11,104 files/308 folders/22.5 gigs.... and I'm not even trying.
--
PeteCresswell

Per James Silverton:
I wonder what is or are the best media for archiving? Have you tried
randomly recalling some of the older images and checking for loss of
quality?

My feeling is that some sort of database-based backup utility is
a must. That way, the DB's integrity checking guards against
lost files. Otherwise one would never know if a file got lost.

Dunno if DB backup utilities check for corruption though....
OTOH, there's something called a CRC check that, in my
experience, won't let a file be copied if it fails.
--
PeteCresswell

Per James Silverton:
As an amateur, I need more than a date to find an image.

Give ThumbsPlus from www.cerious.com a test drive.

I also file by dates, but give pix long meaningful names like
2006 12-25 Fred Judy Christmas

ThumbsPlus will generate keyword index by parsing file and folder
names.

It will also retrieve photos based on searches for those
keywords.

That way something can be effectively filed under many
categories.

Too many other features (like indexing the contents of CDS and
DVDS) to mention.

There are probably other utils that do the same thing, but I've
been using TP for over five years now and it *really* does the
job.
--
PeteCresswell

Per Keith nuttle:
In my computer files I have tried to maximize portability. Most of the
photo indexing software that I am aware of puts the image data into a
proprietary databases.

With the one I use, that's only the case of one explicitly enters
the info into it's DB.

Like you, I prize portability. So, instead of entering data
into the DB, I wrap it in the file names. Looooong file
names.... -)

But it does the job and my photo storage utility can disappear
any time and I'll still have all my data.
--
PeteCresswell

(PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Ray Fischer:
and comes home once every 1-2 weeks to get an update

Which backup utility do you favor?
I use SyncBack Freeware to synchronize all of my files. Using the
synchronization software, my two computers are all ways nearly identical.

By using the synchronizing the files rather that backing up files I do
not loose files, as may happen with a backup.