Scanning Thousands of Slides

Alan Browne wrote:

Ron Hunter wrote:

HDs are so cheap these days ($.33/Gigabyte) that having more than one is
not expensive, given the convenience. My pictures are duplicated on 3
or 4 drives. Calculating the probability of failure of all of them at
the same time gives VERY small numbers. Then there are the pictures I
send to Webshots, which really aren't a great backup, given that they
are compressed from the originals, but they would serve as some backup,
in a disaster situation. Surely moving the files to a new HD
periodically isn't a big problem, and certainly easier than burning
10,000 pictures to CD/DVD!

It comes down to your notion of a backup. To me a backup remains a
static device that can be stored conveniently. Gold CD's don't need to
be copied periodically to referesh them. As I said, in benign
conditions they will outlast us all.

Pressed commercially with a gold reflective layer perhaps, but "gold CDs"
don't record the data on gold, they record it on the same dyes or
phase-change crystals as any other CDs. What matters is the chemistry of
the dye or phase-change layer, not the composition of the reflective layer.

A static CD/DVD sitting in a drawer is not vulnerable to operator error.

Of course it is. Spill a bottle of nail polish remover on a stack of them
sometime and see how useful they are afterwards.

Ultimately, of course, we should not store precious backups at home.
Fires do happen.

I don't find burning CD's or DVD's to be onerous, just set it up before
I go to bed and it's done before I fall asleeep.

To each his own.


--
--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)