Do you keep all your raws, and how many copies?

[vanylapep]

Just curious how everyone store and backups their photo files.

[Sjak]

In general, I keep everything I shoot. SD-cards filled with travel-pics are my 1st backup. I also have all my SD-cards on my PC's harddrive, and on a regular basis, I make a backup.

[tb_a]

Up to now I keep all. Still no storage problem. Backup sync on Google Drive (max. 2 TB) to avoid total data loss in case of fire.

[SkedAddled]

I keep 2TB and 1TB drives on my system, and don't produce pictures in the
hundreds every time I use my camera, so it's been easy for me to keep all RAW copies so far.
Older available drives cleaned out after primary use as obsolete, take up
any slack in the interim.
This dates back to my use several years ago using a Canon PowerShot S3iS,
having used CHDK to allow me to save RAW files from it.

"Cloud" storage is never definite nor permanent, subject to the whims of whatever
force(s) are providing the storage, be it operating costs, takeovers,
storage limitation changes, bankruptcy, sellout, etc...

[cooltouch]

I used to d/l my memory cards' contents -- raw files -- to one of my computer's drive partitions as a way of "storing" the media. Now, I still do this but since SD cards have gotten so cheap, I just leave the data on the card and buy more cards. I can buy 32 gig SD HC cards now for less than $10 so I figure this is just a cheap sort of backup that's relatively secure.

[SkedAddled]

Michael,

Flash memory needs some sort of power current introduced to it
for it to remain viable. Simply taking the shots and then shelving
the memory cards will not assure their longevity.
I've learned about this by reading about SSD testing and how they use
similar memory as flash cards.

If you want to assure longevity, transfer to magnetic or optical media.
Flash memory does not assure the long-term storage of data
which is realized by current magnetic and optical methods,
so you would do well to offload those cards to more traditional media
if you're interested in long-term storage which is viable.
The difference equates to something like 10 years vs. 100 years,
or thereabouts, as I understand it.

[Sjak]

[PhantomLord]

[Sciolist]

Some good advice on here. I'll mention printing off the images you hold most dear. I have these prints stored flat in archival boxes that stretch back a century and more. It's not as expensive or space consuming as you might think, which is helpful, as some other poor bugger is going to have to carry it on after me.

[kansalliskala]

[visualopsins]

I have cds from 1985; very few suffered 'rot' or metal substrate corrosion. The Kodak Gold cdrom seem indestructible. A Bob Marley dvd completely rotted; actually looks like lens fungus! Some dvdroms are unreadable due I think to too high write speed. All dvds written 8x or less are fine. I've had SD cards go bad unexpectedly; never a failed CF card.

I leave raws on the card, archive twice on separate 1T hdds, total original plus 2 copies. Got all raws from 350xt daze. Been using Seagate Barracudas never a problem in 25 years, some of those ran every day for over 10 years. Had a Maxtor that sounded like a jet engine after 5 years continuous use, retired because too loud!

Yeah, forget optical media & memory cards for archive. Also magnetic tape which is too easy to damage. Best IMHO is HDD (not SSD).

[cooltouch]

In my probably somewhat biased opinion, there is NO SUCH THING as digital archiving of media information, such as images or music. Name one that has the archival stability of Kodachrome -- or paper. Or stone. Gold CDs and DVDs that are claimed to have 100 year lives are just that -- they're claimed to have these life spans. No one has been able to document any sort of long term storage of this span so far, and they won't be able to until the actual real physical time has elapsed. And then there's the whole likely giant headache of converting what will have become outdated storage formats to what in the future will be the standards. But what happens in even the further future, when these formats become obsolete? For those digital images that survive in their digital form, they will have to be continually updated forever.

The whole notion of digital archiving is just a giant quagmire that no one has found the solution to yet. I mentioned above that I have many of my images stored on cards. I have many more stored on CDs and DVDs, but who knows how long they will last before failing? And I have most of my images stored on my computers' hard drives, keeping my fingers crossed that they won't crash. About the closest I have to an archive now is my own website, which I use mostly as an image storage site. During the past 20 years of owning my own Domain, I've only had one instance where my hosting service had a server crash, where all my data was lost. Yep, it can happen even where you would expect it should never happen.

I guess it is for all these reasons that, to this day, I still do all of my important photography on film. So what if I lose a little resolution compared to digital? At least I will still have images that can be viewed independent of digital technology so they can be shared and enjoyed for the foreseeable future. And now that, sadly, Kodachrome is gone, I suspect the only real archival material for film based photography is black and white. E6, C-41, and similar emulsions fade and shift over time and there's not a whole lot that can be done about it.

[visualopsins]

I think data structures are pretty well defined by now. Gif? Tif? Those have been around like forever. Tech for reading old media storage is more of a problem long term. Tape decks. Read from IDE hdd?

Store a few 2.5" hdd or 50,000 negs, slides, prints.

Search engines amazing archival data navigation, search, summary are basic building blocks that probably won't be changing much. See, early on some very smart people realized since all this computer development builds upon itself the only logical way to proceed is to solve each problem exactly once. Thus the future will contain the past.

[cooltouch]

I don't share your optimism. I was a regular user of PCs and IBM Mainframes, and even the odd DEC or two back in the early 1980s and there is very little in common between what I was doing then on those machines and what I'm doing now.

GIF? Who uses GIF files anymore? And TIF files may be lossless, but they suck up HUGE amounts of disk space, so they're highly impractical for archiving. PNG is a better choice because PNG files aren't nearly as large and it is also a lossless format. But PNG has never really caught on -- dunno why. Back in the early days of the Internet, a very common way of sending images over the 'net was ASCII files that had to be recompiled on the receiver's end. Yeah, things have changed just a bit in the past 25 years or so.

Technology obsolesces. This is like a fundamental law of progress and advancement. When I started out using PCs, I was running an IBM XT clone at the blazing fast rate of 4.77 megahertz with a huge 20 megabyte hard drive. Or so it seemed at the time. All my program disks fit on 360 kilobyte floppies. My machine, like all XTs and their clones, was built on an 8-bit bus architecture. I wonder just how difficult it would be for the average person today to read data from a 360k floppy, or data from a hard drive running off an 8-bit bus. Heck, these days you'd be hard pressed just to find hook-ups for IDE hard drives. Now, how about we jump in our little time machine and fast forward, say, 50 years into the future, and see what sort of information we can extract from 360k floppies or 20MB hard drives -- assuming their data hasn't gotten all corrupted from random bit loss. I suspect it would be considerably more difficult than it would be today trying to resurrect a Wordstar file from the early 80s.

Perhaps some day in the hopefully not too distant future, somebody will come up with a true archival storage medium and at least the method of storage can be put to rest.

[ZoneV]

I do store all the good RAWs at the moment.
I try to delete boring files to reduce the storing capacity needed. I kind of fear even higher megapixel cameras.
At the moment it is near 4TB of images, they are backed up on three harddrives, which I store in two different places. I plan to access a third place. Problem is at the moment, the encryption key I use - I am the only one who knows it. So in case of my dead, my children or my wife can only access the main drive, not the backup drives. This is bad, have to change this.

[visualopsins]

Right, the hardware tech goes obsolete, however the data is simply copied to the new hardware. How many file formats will Paint Shop Pro open? How about the latest open source Office software? My pallet of music cds fits on a 2.5" ssd; access is far easier, as is sharing widely.

Dan Healy always said recording "tape is cheap". Photographers have said "film is cheap". Digital photographers might say "hdd storage is cheap" i.e. don't worry about running out of storage more is cheap will be less cost for more later.

Ever use a Keypunch? Or a paper tape reader. How about a teletype with 300 baud modem the telephone handset fit into? A Wang calculator network that communicated with mainframe over same 300 baud modem setup? Write PDP-8 programs that fit into whopping 4k real core memory, little ferrite rings woven into sheets or pages. Okay, I'm tooting lol, all true. No Amiga, some TRS-80.

[cooltouch]

When it comes to archiving, I prefer to take the long view. The very long view. And this is what I've realized. Art and text younger than about 500 years is all ephemera. Oil paintings on canvas, text written on vellum, they don't exist much older than this figure. So what this means is sculpture still trumps all other forms of art, when it comes to longevity. For a more traditional image, the medium will need a very durable substrate if it should last longer than about half a millennium. The first photographs were recorded almost 200 years ago, and they still exist in their original state. But can they exist like this indefinitely? Fast forward to the last century and we have the champion of all film emulsions -- Kodachrome -- which is proven to last better than 80 years without showing any appreciable degradation. But given the materials a Kodachrome slide is made from, how long can we expect the substrate to last before it degrades, even if the dyes do not? I suppose one could argue that the most durable of all information is digital, since it's just a collection of ones and zeros. I mean, if an archivist wanted to, he or she could chisel the ones and zeros onto a cave wall and that would be a digital archive that would last for thousands of years, no doubt. Assuming that, thousands of years in the future, digital information will still be encoded in the same fashion. Seems to me, that would be a pretty big if.

I envision that, perhaps in the not too distant future, digital information will be archived by holding it in a sort of electromagnetic suspension -- stasis, if you will -- where it can be preserved indefinitely and retrieved without too much difficulty.

[visualopsins]

Nothing lasts, or, more accurately, everything changes. Humanity juggles what it has "archived" to survive the changes. Pyramids. Cave paintings. Lucy's jawbone. The stories, originals long lost. The archive is missing so much. The archive has lost so much. In the expanding universe everything grows apart, the archive loses significance, appears to retreat, to shrink, relatively.

Any surviving digital archives will have undergone a series of preservation steps to remain viable.

[cooltouch]

[visualopsins]

EM pulse can ruin much

[cooltouch]

A frightening thought. But since a major EMP would catapult everyone back into the 19th Century, I suspect that maintaining a digital image archive would be the least of our worries.

[kypfer]

[cooltouch]

What was called "programming on bare metal" back in the day, I've heard it described as. I wonder, is assembly language a lost coding art now? I guess the great thing about assembly was how tight the code was, which was absolutely necessary back in the days of the memory starved machines that were the rule.

[kypfer]

[visualopsins]

The pdp-8 had a 17 line routine entered via front panel switches, now that's machine language, which enabled paper tape reader part of the wired teletype terminal to read the "boot loader" from paper tape. The boot loader was used to load other programs, such as a machine language mnemonic interpreter, and higher level programs such as FOCAL language, a precursor to BASIC. Computer architecture controlled by individual bit switches, machine language taught computer architecture white well, giving a great grounding IMHO for what came later.

The Wang's had a macro-like language, consisting of lists of keystrokes, much like later spreadsheet macros.

Much of my life was spent building our current computer software and hardware universe. Only recently nhave I become a user rather than a programmer. Hey this stuff had gotten pretty good! Lol!