On 1 Dec 2005 at 13:57, Toralf Lund wrote: > There is also the "cost" of doing the storage job. Moving files around > or writing them to DVD takes time - probably more than handling the negs > in my experience. Then it is a question of how paranoid you are. Should > you trust the DVD media (which does not really have a proven track > record)? Do you want redundancy, and how much? At work, we use tape > media with quite a bit of overlap, and trust me, this will be a lot more > expensive than film. But it's a lot safer, too (I mean, I'd probably > trust one negative more than one DVD or tape, but not more than 3 or 4 > copies on different tapes stored at different locations....) Still, it's > the time taken to handle the data that's the main issue, not the media > cost. And yes, this increases a lot when you keep data on-line instead > of archiving the data directly.
Interesting perspective, given my fairly lengthy experience with tape and optical media I'd say that optical media would be an order of magnitude more reliable than tape media. Firstly I still haven't heard instances of optical discs (DVD or CD) that have been stored appropriately failing. I have however seen worn, tangled tapes and shedding and dirty heads and incompatibilities due to head misalignment and firmware/software incompatibilities. Give me DVD over tape any day. Time, when was the last time you cut and sleeved ten rolls 36 exposure film (roughly equivalent to the number of *ist D RAW files I can fit on a DVD)? I can assure you it would take longer than writing and verifying a main and back- up DVD. > Of course, I do some of the same things for a living so it's tempting to > estimate the cost of e.g. writing the files to a DVD from what I get > paid to do the same job at work. Which is probably more than the film > cost of the same images... I don't think it's fair to cost DVD back-ups at you professional rate, a garbage man can write DVDs why not use his rate as a reference over the whole 15 minutes it takes? > Another thing is that when people talk about how much cheaper digital > is, they seem to be comparing with the price of developing *and > printing* from film, which does not seem fair... I don't, the cost of (good) film and (professional) developing is significant enough and since prints are cheaper from a digital source so I'm sure it's not fair to include them. > We've discussed this before, of course... > > I think digital will *really* make a difference as and when the actual > media used in the camera becomes so low-cost and reliable that you won't > have to copy the data at all. (But I've probably mentioned that earlier, > too.) I think it's insignificant enough now that the vast majority of RAW shooters here consider it a non-issue. Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
