I've got 4 PC's wih images on hard drives that I want to get off and archive. The time involved will be substantial. One of them, will probably have to have the hard drive recovered. Will I remember to do it before it's too late? Much of what's on them is scanned from transparencies and I have them, so I'm not totally worried except that rescanning wouldn't be fun.
Most of my images from the last 3 years are backed up on two different external hard drives, but I really should burn them to DVD's as well. Reminds me I have about 50 slides I absconded with from my Dad that he took before I was born when he was in the Navy in Spain, Monaco, Italy. I really need to scan them for viewing and/or printing. Tom On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 8:31 PM, William Robb <[email protected]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Graydon" > Subject: Re: pef vs dng > > > >> Copy all your digital files forward; this is the way, the truth, and the >> life with digital files. >> >>> For paper, you need the paper. For any digital storage medium, you >>> need an entire, *operational* system including peripherals and >>> software. >> >> For paper, you need paper, reasonably humidity, dark, lack of ants, >> termites, wasps, weevils, and silverfish, and the blessed absence of >> fungus. For truly long-term, you need the blessed absence of oxygen and >> atmospheric sulfates. >> >> It's not an easy problem; all things come in time to die. > > I have prints dating back close to 100 years. They are in perfectly > acceptable condition, even though they made a trip from Scotland to Canada > with my grandparents and family in the mid 1920s, a train trip across Canada > and were probably stored in a cardboad box under a bed at their homestead > through the Dirty Thirties, moved a couple of times from the homestead to > Mossbank to MooseJaw to my parent's hose, and finally to my own construction > riddled house in 2002. > They have recieved no special care, and are eminently copyable if I so > desire (and if I can lay my hands on them as they are now in long term > storage). > > I also have a stack of high end Verbatim compact disks that were burned > using Nero Burn software on a top end Plexwriter CD burner around 6 years > ago that can no longer be read. > > Prints will survive benign neglect. A box under the bed in an above grade > room is all that is required to preserve them (dark fading and the like > still is an issue of course). > A digital archive will not survive being neglected. An active and ongoing > strategy is required to preserve digital images, and this extends to far > more than the media it is stored on. > > I've been at this digital photography game for less than ten years, and have > lost serveral thousand times more digital images to media failure than the > number of silver/dye based photographic images lost over the previous 3 > decades. > > The simple and sad fact is, digital image files cannot be trusted to last > over the long haul, especially given most peoples rather lassez faire > attitude towards how they keep their computer files. > There is just too much more that can go wrong with them compared to a > photographic print. > > William Robb > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
