Looking after our precious memories - the digital ones .

It occurred to me last week that as technology changes so to must we look at back up of our pix to the latest technology to save them for a long time.

I was watching a special on the remaking of the Moon Landing JUST 40 years ago, and they had a huge problem getting the "original" footage they needed because the Old magnetic tapes cannot talk to the latest computers and no one had a usable old style tape reader that could read the tape without destroying the tape in the process, NO ONE had thought about that problem.

Australia still had the data etc re moon rocks on data tape but again no way of reading those tapes without destroying the tape in the process, they are now "making a tape reader" using the old technology to achieve this.

So long term back up might be a constant problem with ever rapidly changing technology.

We all thought that CD & DVD was the bees knees but a day will SOON come when our children may not be able to read those devices because of changing technology.
Colin.

Hi Mandrake,
After having the hard drive crash and loosing a few months of grandchildren photos I did exactly what you did. Cheap and safe. The portable hard drive stays disconnected untill need for further back up. I also put all our program files on it to make reloading them easy.
Ian

Well fellas, the extra hard drives are already superceded.

Son was here last week with a little gadget/card that stores 8 gig of data. He'd just bought it for $30. It comes with a little cord with which you can attach it to your keyring. It seemed to me that it was similar in size to the 'tongue' of a USB memory stick, but thinner like a phone card etc., certainly wouldn't weigh as much as a key. That thing was so small, I would probably lose it anyway by not being able to find/see it in plain sight.

I seem to be forever trying to catch up to this technology and just when I get a handle on it, it changes.
Sheila.

In my experience, flash drives (the little usb thingys) do break with time and use, but they are usually great for a year or so. Bear in mind I use mine every day.

I have just purchased a 1 terrabye (that's 1000 GB) external hard drive for $200- now to see if I will ever need that much space!

Sounds like good advice Mandrake. At a photograhic course I did recently the
bloke running the show suggested the following, & I find it works fine...
Use small capacity SD cards & file them away as your primary backup, preferably
in a damage proof environment. For example keep each holiday on a separate
identified SD. You may ,of course, download to your hard drive, cd etc.
I file the SD in a safe, dowload the pics to a memory stick, print as required,
& delete off the C drive. As he kept saying..."memory is cheap"......oldbaz.

Yep, now that just about all photos are digital you can't be too careful with backups. Hard Drives DO have a limited lifespan and DO fail. Houses still burn down too.

Here's Muddys foolproof backup stragedy..... I call it a Stragedy as it helps avoid Tragedy - the loss of thousands of photos gathered over many years can indeed be a real tragedy.

I have a home network in the house and part of that network is a NAS. This stands for Network Attached Storage. They are a small box with one or more hard drives and connect to the network. They are available from places like Officeworks for not too much coin in sizes ranging from 300 Gigabytes. This size will hold thousands of photos and songs and other files.

If you don't have a home network (only one or two computers in the house) then go for a USB External drive. It just plugs into a spare USB port on the PC.

Whichever way you go (Networked or USB) you will see the extra hard drive as an extra letter in Windows Explorer (setup is usually pretty automated and easy). It might come up as E:\ drive.

You can now save your files to the extra drive. My suggestion is to use your normal computer hard drive (usually c:\ ) to organise and view your files in folders. You then periodically copy any new folders to the extra drive. This way they are always in at least two places. I also like the tip above about leaving them on the original camera memory card for a while until you have got your downloads AND backups in place.

If you are using a NAS (or thinking of buying one) it is a good idea to have it set up with RAID. This stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It means that the NAS box has 2 or more hard drives and whatever you save to the NAS is written to all disks in the array as a mirror image. If one disk fails another one takes over and no data is lost.

Another good point mentioned here is off-site backups. This means that you have a complete copy of the data on a hard drive/CD/DVD/USB Key (depending on how much data you have) and you take it somewhere safe. Best places are and office if you have one, mum and dads place, shed away from the main house that won't burn. If you are really worried you can put it in a bank safety deposit box. The key thing though is that it has to be easy to get to and you need to REFRESH it regularly. Monthly is great.

So to summarise my setup. All photos are stored on PC and on a Network drive (NAS) at home. I also have a Western Digital Passport 320Gb USB drive that is a backup of all the stuff on the NAS and that is stored at the office. This is brought home to be refreshed every month or so. If you are completely paranoid you have TWO off site backup drives and refresh them in rotation.

Happy to answer any questions people have on this important topic.

Cheers

Muddy

I have 3 back up drives. The first automatically backs up the entire system and this lives on a second hard drive inside the PC case. I can immediately rebuild the syetm including programs with this. The other two back up drives are plug in hard drives. 500gig each, probably soon to be 1tB each. Once a week, or when I have new impostrant stuff, I back up all important files (including the photos of course) yo one of these drives. This is an incremental back up only so it only adds new stuff and so doesn't take long to do. I never have both the plug in hard drives in my house. One stays at a friends place and about once a month I swap them over so that should I be burgled, burnt out etc, one drive should always survive. Wec regularly also back up the wife's computer onto the rotating plug in drives
I am also wary of programs that might be needed to read these files becoming obselete and make sure I have copies of any software that might be needed.

Mandrake,

I find the best way to store photos is to print them out and put them in a photoalbum.

Once a year we pick out about 50 of the best photos and print them out. Why store thousands of photos that nobody will ever look through?

The problem with digital photos is that data can be corrupted easily and the technology required to extract that data wil not be around in 20 years time.

For example, try reading a digital copy of document written in 1989 on wordperfect 5.1 and stored on a 5.5" floppy disk.

I recently had a 1TB external network hard drive crash. After the event I realised how imperfect my backup strategy was. All my photos were OK, but a lot of other stuff was not. I sent the drive off to a recovery firm and they managed to find over 1 million files. They could tell the type but not the name or directory structure. I now have a huge number of files that I have no idea what they are!!!

I also have a much better backup strategy.

My approach is very similar to Mandrake's. The most important thing is to back up regularly and include a remote copy in the routine.

Without an adequate backup system there will be fire and brimstone and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. OK not original but it fits. I am sure a few of us have been there done that or had mates do it.

Once had a complete loss of data on the hard drive. I had access to some reasonably powerful tools for recovering lost files but no good. Recovered all bar two photos from a 2 day old backup. Now if I have dramas I just get the most recent stuff off the hard drive and then restore it and then copy the most recent stuff back to it. Quick and effective.

I use a combination of usb, firewire, esata and flash backups. No particular reason beyond different things purchased at different time with changing prices and technology

By the way I do have stuff off a 1987 computer migrated to my PC and backed up and readable. Regarding pictures the current jpeg standard pictures should remain usable as long as can be foreseen. There are always conversion programs for converting images to other formats and will be in the future. RAW images from some cameras (mainly SLRs but some compact cameras as well) are quite different. Probably best to store them as dng files for the long term.