Filing CD/DVD discs...need some advice

[jp mcgraw]

With the price of compact flash cards now below the cost of film and processing and still falling, would it be a good idea to just leave the photos on the compact flash card permanently? What are the archival qualities of this media? I am just curious and would appreciate any input.

John McGraw

[PhilipKach]

Originally Posted by jp mcgraw

With the price of compact flash cards now below the cost of film and processing and still falling, would it be a good idea to just leave the photos on the compact flash card permanently? What are the archival qualities of this media? I am just curious and would appreciate any input.

John McGraw

Never thought of that, but my first thought is no.

1. Compared to other media, CF cards are still expensive.

2. Filing problems (I guess you plan to store it like negatives).

3. CF cards have the same risk as other storage devices of becoming obsolete.

4. I still prefer several smaller cards to one large. That way if one fails I don't lose the whole shoot. Thus you have several to store from each shoot.

5. Burning three copies of a CD or DVD makes more sense. One for the file, one off site, and one with your master storage.

Just my thoughts.
Philip

[PB&J photography]

It seems as if most any type of digital media storage device is subject to failure at some point or another.

I had some images on a CF card, and the card went bezerk on me. kind of just died. Good thing I had already archived these images other ways, but it made me think about your question of keeping it on the CF/ media card itself. Had I relied on this, it would have been gone.

I was able to retreive the photos via recovery software, but I no longer trust that card. It was filed in the trash.

[Noel_Carboni]

Just doing a bit of mental math...

100 DVD-R (or similar) good quality discs cost what, now, about $25 to $75? That's a bit under 500 GB of archival storage.

500 GB of external hard drive storage in a Western Digital My Book is around $100. More than DVDs but not in a complely different ballpark.

Emotionally it would seem awfully strange to buy a whole bunch of hard drives to squirrel away, but financially it makes some sense - especially considering you won't have to hand-juggle 100 discs. Back the data off the computer until the external drive gets nearly full, then retire it to a (well magnetically shielded) cabinet.

I don't know how long the data will live on a hard drive, but you could conceivably plug each of them back in every year or two and have the computer re-write all the files.

And it's not like DVDs are permanent either. I am already having trouble reading some DVD+RWs I wrote just last year.

-Noel

[PB&J photography]

This is very true what you write. DVD's are not permanent, nothing digital is really permanent. We can turn negatives into digital format, it'd be nice to turn digital into negatives or slides...whichever you prefer.

I say that because I have negatives that are ages old, yet I can still get the image from it. I've had CF cards and CD's and DVD's fail me.

Harddrives crash. External, interal whatever...they can go bad. It has moving parts. The old saying is if it has moving parts, it's not a matter of it will fail, but when.

I'm a bit anal in my back up of digital. And for this fear and reason I am still partial to film in many ways. Other than ordering. Hard to order photobooks and design albums from film. Plus a lot more costly to digitize everything.

My method is:

Photograph event
1. CF card into reader, images on HD.
(Put CF card away until all orders are filled, placed and even a few weeks after that...then I'll format it._

2. Mark CF card and place in envelope...see above ( )

3. Place images onto external HD. I use my internal HD for all the uploading, touch ups, etc. Don't touch ones on external unless I have to.

4. Burn CD of images. Archival of course. Mam-a or Delkin

5. Burn DVD of images. Haven't found a preference here. This step isn't done on every session, just the high end ones. Or the ones that have large potential for later resale. Why? I don't know if/ when CD technology may change or vise versa.

** I often will still get paper prints. Worse scenario all the above fails, I can scan in a paper proof. Quality will be poor, but at least I can still access the image and do something with it.

I have a safe I keep my CD's and such in.

[Noel_Carboni]

Seems like what we're missing is a hard, reliable archival storage medium that can store 10x to 100x of that which will fit on a DVD.

It seems there been markedly few breakthroughs in storage lately... Everything else keeps getting faster/more data-rich.

It's fun to think that not so long ago at all those of us who could produce a CD were few and far between.

-Noel