Archiving Digital Photos

jeff318

Hi there,
I tried to find if this topic had been covered already, but couldn't seem to find anything. I apologize in advance if this is a repeat of an existing thread.

I know that most (if not all) of you are SmugMug users, but how do you retain your own backups of digital photos? How do you protect from equipment failure or natural disasters?

I'm working on starting a "shoebox scanning" service for consumers, which would convert the customers' boxes or albums of photographs to digital – and one of my main selling points is the fact that the photos will better preserved than they would be while sitting in albums in a closet. I plan to post the photos to SmugMug and provide a copy on a Verbatim UltraLife Gold Archival DVD-R.

What preservation guidelines should I give my customers?

Thanks,
Jeff
http://shoeboxsavior.smugmug.com

claudermilk

Backups is on multiple removable hard drives. Best practice is one copy local to the PC and one copy remote (relative's house or the office). I will not use DVDs for two reasons: 4GB is too small these days, 2) the claimed lifespans are total pipe dreams.

Rhuarc

One option (expensive) option to look at instead of DVD for your own backups would be Blue-Ray. I don't know what the life of the disc is, but you can fit between 50 and 100GB on one disc. Myself, I use 2 drives inside of the computer. They aren't moirrored, I just use a program to auto copy from my main drive to my backup drive. Then I also make a DVD copy, and upload a copy to Mozy. All this is done automatically (except for putting in the DVD)

Cuong

Check out this thread regarding storage backup for those precious files.

Cuong

claudermilk

I would trust Blu-Ray even less than standard DVD. It's a brand-new unproven technology based upon DVD. If they still haven't figured out DVD yet, I have 0% confidence they have with Blu-Ray--or HD-DVD. Even if it somehow miraculously was reliable, you still have the $/GB part of the equation and capacity in a single unit, both of which still strongly favor hard drives.

greenpea

I just started using Amazon S3 to back up my RAW files, PSD files, and video files. Its suprisingly affordable, secure, easy to use, and far more reliable than DVDs or hard drives.

For a mac, the client that I'm using right for uploading to Amazon S3 is Transmit.

ziggy53

I recommend a "2 technology" rule for archival work which means that you need 2 copies of all files on 2 different types of media in order to be reasonably safe. Having the copies in two different locations helps to guard against most disasters.

For you, DVDs and SmugMug would qualify for both the 2 technology and offsite requirements.

For your customers, I suggest that the DVDs qualify for one of the requirements of backup. but you really need to avoid having them use you and SmugMug as a backup source in perpetuity. That makes you responsible, and liable, for their product for whatever term is specified, potentially forever (unless you specify otherwise).

I specify in the signed contract for a short term storage of the images on SmugMug, usually not longer than 2 months. That gives the customer long enough to make prints and send invitations to others. The customer understands that I am no longer liable after that period.

In reality, I will keep the images up far longer than that, but point is you need to limit your own liability.

Suggest to the customer that they need to make their own copies, at least copies of the DVDs, and store them in two different locations.

You may want to mention the "2 technology" rule to your customers as well, especially if you think they might be repeat customers.

BTW, hard drives are much faster and are a very reliable method as well, but the cost per unit storage is sometimes higher and they have their own problems, like being much more complicated and subject to both a "half-life" phenomenon and a MTBF (mean time between failure). Plus you are now strapped to both a controller and cabling unless you transfer to a different device in the future. I have 15 year old hard drives that I can no longer read because I no longer have machines to support them.

For these reasons I don't recommend either hard drives or tape backup.

While we don't know for certain that CDs and DVDs will be any different in support in the future, it does seem that manufacturers understand that backward compatibility is important, so they may be more likely to support previous formats.

jeff318

I think some people may be interested in Sentry Safe's Fire resistant and waterproof hard drive

I stumbled across this today, and it looks like a good product!

jfriend

jeff318 wrote:

I think some people may be interested in Sentry Safe's Fire resistant and waterproof hard drive

I stumbled across this today, and it looks like a good product!

Looks interesting, but it's only an 80GB drive! That would work for Quicken data and other home documents, but it's 5x too small for my digital images.

jeff318

There's a 160gb offering too.

Rhuarc

jeff318 wrote:

I think some people may be interested in Sentry Safe's Fire resistant and waterproof hard drive

I stumbled across this today, and it looks like a good product!

Instead of this, why not spend the same amount of money to get a larger fireproof waterproof safe that you could store several hard drives in? Then you could get a 500GB drive for a hundred bucks, and just plug it in once a week to back everything up. I realize it wouldn't be real time, but you could even just plug it in each time you download pics to copy the new ones over if you wanted closer to real time.