Hi Jostein, To help out with your statistics (and to pass some time) I thought I'd take a shot at a response.
I've recently reevaluated my storage situation after deciding I'd like to switch to shooting RAW primarily, and realising my 80gb notebook had run out of space. I've had one 40gb notebook harddisk fail on me once- started clicking and not long after I had to come to terms with losing more than a few shots. I purchased an 80gb 2.5" with external enclosure (usb 2.0 + firewire), and not long after a 80gb Vosonic X'S drive. I now also have a Zoomextreme ZX8 3.5" enclosure (love this thing.. it's aluminium, got it's own large fan and runs fast and quietly) with a 300gb drive inside, firewire and usb2.0, can also be daisychained to other drives- I occasionally link the 2.5" enclosure too. With the firewire, the 300gb drive feels nearly as fast as a 'local' drive, so storage and editing is pretty straightforward. I keep all originals (RAW + small jpg). I'm also going about backing up all photos to CD-Rs.. conventional ones, and I'm about halfway through. I still don't trust DVD-Rs because of a few bad experiences, mainly concerning minor looking scratches (judging by how you'd expect it to affect a CD-R) causing read problems. The 80gb X'S drive I use for extra storage in the field, I'd feel more at ease knowing my files are stored in a medium which doesn't bump in my bag around too often. I haven't really thought about the longevity of the access technology, but as long as there are a couple of options to choose from at any time, e.g. firewire or USB2.0, which are sufficiently fast for my purposes, I'm not too worried. Hmm.. software support for RAW.. quite happy with it at the moment. ACDSee Pro doesn't seem to be as accurate or flexible with my RAW files, but, it's still somewhat new in their software, so I trust they'll try to improve it. PSCS2 does me alright- if anything, my computer's does things a bit too slowly. I think if anything's going to be outdated soon, given me starting to be a bit more demanding towards my resources- it's probably going to be my computer's ability to cope with it all. I'd recommend a good 3.5" drive or two- if you can afford it, why not have a little farm of them. They're bang for buck, convenient, quick, and probably will be relevant for a while. I suppose if you were really bored, you could make a cd collection of it all too, just in case.. maybe even store it somewhere else. CDs are cheap, and I'm pretty sure that if you really wanted.. in 300 years you or someone like you could find some antique cd reader on eBay.. Probably nothing new here, but hope it's useful somehow. Cheers, Ryan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jostein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <pentax-discuss@pdml.net> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 9:09 PM Subject: OT: How do you store your precious moments for posterity? > > > Dear gang, > > I discovered the "need more storage" thread just now, by looking in the > archives. Long term storage is a hot topic among my friends over here > at the moment, but nobody seems to have any "best practice" to point > to. > > "Nobody" includes me too :-) but I would very much like to establish > a good practice for myself. > > So by googling, and some thinking, I've come down to a list of things to > consider. I'm not sure if this is a good list to go by, and would very much > like to hear some opinions: > > 1. Longevity of storage medium (Hard-drive, DVD, etc.) > 2. Longevity of the technology used to access the medium (USB, SCSI, etc.) > 3. Longevity of software support for the chosen file format (RAW, TIFF, etc.) > > Then there is: > 4. Data safeguarding (backup routines etc.) > 5. Data availability (access time to a file) > 6. Production volume (number of exposures and edit-files) > 7. Convenience > 8. Cost (both time and money) > > By any measure, a solution to cover all this points will be a trade-off > between several of them. Convenience and longevity pull in the same > direction, for example, while cost pulls the other way. > > So what do you think? And how do you store your precious moments? > > Thanks for your thoughts, > Jostein > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. > >
