A Photography forum. PhotoBanter.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » PhotoBanter.com forum » Digital Photography » Digital Photography
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #21  
Old January 5th 18, 11:13 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,514
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

"nospam" wrote

| Sure. That's a good idea if your answer to the
| questions about losing your computer, backup
| and cloud backup is "I couldn't care less".
|
| the chances of *all* of those happening *at* *the* *same* *time is
| *far* less likely than winning the lottery jackpot.

You missed the point. The 3 questions are
useful to assess one's backup in a practical rather
than theoretical way.

If your answer to the
3 questions is adequate for you then you're OK.
I'm not making an assumption about anyone's
backup. Most do not have all 3. People who
do usually don't have it up to date. That's why
those 3 questions are useful: Maybe you have all
sorts of backup, but imagine losing your computer
an hour from now. If that would leave you with
problematic losses then you don't have adequate
backup.

..... But I don't mean you personally. I mean
everyone else who's not as brilliant as you and
doesn't know they should do their backup by
buying lottery tickets.


  #22  
Old January 5th 18, 11:32 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 24,165
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


| Sure. That's a good idea if your answer to the
| questions about losing your computer, backup
| and cloud backup is "I couldn't care less".
|
| the chances of *all* of those happening *at* *the* *same* *time is
| *far* less likely than winning the lottery jackpot.

You missed the point.


it ain't me who is missing the point.

The 3 questions are
useful to assess one's backup in a practical rather
than theoretical way.


they're different failure modes, each requiring a different type of
backup. a good backup strategy covers all possible scenarios.

you're still at risk if all three occur at the same time, but that's
extremely unlikely, and if that does happen, something *very* major is
going on.

If your answer to the
3 questions is adequate for you then you're OK.
I'm not making an assumption about anyone's
backup. Most do not have all 3. People who
do usually don't have it up to date.


anyone who doesn't cover all possible scenarios *and* keeping the
backups up to date is at risk. nothing surprising about that. a good
strategy includes multiple hard drives (from different batches) with at
least one off site and a cloud service.

you said you back up to cd/dvds and 'old hard drives'. you didn't say
you keep any of them off site and also have previously criticized cloud
services, so i assume you don't use one.

unless you burn cd/dvds on a continual basis, they're out of date.

if your house burns down, you will lose your computer *and* your
backups.

old hard drives are more likely to fail, so if your house doesn't burn
down, the drives might fail when you try to restore.

That's why
those 3 questions are useful: Maybe you have all
sorts of backup, but imagine losing your computer
an hour from now. If that would leave you with
problematic losses then you don't have adequate
backup.


snapshots are automatically taken every hour, so worst case i lose one
hour of work and best case, less than a minute.

.... But I don't mean you personally. I mean
everyone else who's not as brilliant as you and
doesn't know they should do their backup by
buying lottery tickets.


missing the point yet again.
  #23  
Old January 5th 18, 11:49 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
Carlos E.R.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 278
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

On 2018-01-05 06:15, nospam wrote:
In article , J.Albert
wrote:

Are CDs/DVDs the best option for long-term storage? Or is there
something better today? Most important is permanence, but with
several hundred photos per batch, one DVD is not big enough if the
RAW files are included as well.


For optical media, you might consider M-DISC's.

They're claimed to have a life of hundreds of years, because
they don't use "dyes" in the recording process, but rather
some inorganic compound.


optical discs of any type are a pain in the ass and obsolete.


Maybe. But these M discs claim to last 1000 years, and hard disks do not.


If you needed more space than a DVD offers, get Bluray which
offers 25gb and 50gb capacities. Also available in M-DISC.


50 gb is tiny. today's hard drives are 100x bigger. nases are 1000x
bigger.

for example, you'd need 160 50 gb discs to back up an 8tb drive, and
that's assuming each disc is filled to capacity, which is unlikely.


Then use 100 GB discs :-)

I think they are enough to store photos.

I would use archival tapes if I had the money...

--
Cheers, Carlos.
  #24  
Old January 5th 18, 11:53 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
Carlos E.R.
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 278
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

On 2018-01-04 17:16, nospam wrote:
In article ,
(PeteCresswell) wrote:


File copy backups have the problem that if a file quietly disappears or
becomes corrupted, you will never know....


modern file systems can detect and correct bitrot, without any
additional software.


No, I don't know any that does. Only metadata is protected, not data.

However, the disk firmware does have some data checksums and recovery.
Not at the filesystem level, but below.


On day one of each month, I take the oldest drive, format it, and have
Macrium to a full data backup to it. Then, on each succeeding day, I have
Macrium do an incremental backup to it - so I have my data as of the
beginning of the month plus any changes as of any given day of the month.


no need to reformat it each time.


Right. A modern format tool only erases and recreates the "indexes", it
leaves most of the disk intact.

--
Cheers, Carlos.
  #25  
Old January 6th 18, 12:14 AM posted to rec.photo.digital
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 24,165
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:


optical discs of any type are a pain in the ass and obsolete.


Maybe. But these M discs claim to last 1000 years, and hard disks do not.


so what? it's still a pain in the ass to burn them, so few people will
bother.

plus, as i said, they're too tiny to back up a modern hard drive.

If you needed more space than a DVD offers, get Bluray which
offers 25gb and 50gb capacities. Also available in M-DISC.


50 gb is tiny. today's hard drives are 100x bigger. nases are 1000x
bigger.

for example, you'd need 160 50 gb discs to back up an 8tb drive, and
that's assuming each disc is filled to capacity, which is unlikely.


Then use 100 GB discs :-)


still too tiny. all that would do is reduce the total to 80 discs (best
case) or more likely ~100 discs.

I think they are enough to store photos.


maybe if all you do is store photos.

it's horribly impractical to back up multi-terabyte hard drives. even
500 gig drives would be at least 5 discs.

by the time you're done burning the 100th disc (for an 8tb drive),
you'd have to start over again because of all the changes that occurred
during the time you've been burning the discs.

I would use archival tapes if I had the money...


tapes aren't archival and they're a pain in the ass too.
  #26  
Old January 6th 18, 12:14 AM posted to rec.photo.digital
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 24,165
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

File copy backups have the problem that if a file quietly disappears or
becomes corrupted, you will never know....


modern file systems can detect and correct bitrot, without any
additional software.


No, I don't know any that does.


i do.

Only metadata is protected, not data.


data too.

However, the disk firmware does have some data checksums and recovery.
Not at the filesystem level, but below.


true, but that won't detect bitrot.

it also doesn't detect writing data that has already been corrupted
somewhere along the way.

On day one of each month, I take the oldest drive, format it, and have
Macrium to a full data backup to it. Then, on each succeeding day, I have
Macrium do an incremental backup to it - so I have my data as of the
beginning of the month plus any changes as of any given day of the month.


no need to reformat it each time.


Right. A modern format tool only erases and recreates the "indexes", it
leaves most of the disk intact.


true, but there's no need to do anything.

just do another clone, which will copy new files and delete old files
as needed such that the clone is the same as the source.

the computer is there to do work *for* you.
  #27  
Old January 6th 18, 12:49 AM posted to rec.photo.digital
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,514
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc


"nospam" wrote

| if your house burns down, you will lose your computer *and* your
| backups.
|

Yes. If I only have backups in the house.
Maybe you should worry about your own backups
and stop trying to find fault with everyone elses.


  #28  
Old January 8th 18, 04:28 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
[email protected]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 51
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

On Thursday, January 4, 2018 at 6:40:31 AM UTC-5, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
In the old days, I used film. I had my first SLR in 1983 (Ricoh KR5).
Around 2002, I started getting a CD of the pictures along with the
prints. The JPEG files are around 500 kB. When I have time, I plan to
scan the old negatives in higher resolution. Presumably this will
result in TIFF files, which I should then convert to JPEGs for viewing
on a webserver etc. What resolution is recommended for ISO 200 35-mm
film? How large would the resulting TIFF be? What size JPEG should
result from this (such that viewing at 20×30 cm, say, shows no obvious
lack of quality)?

In 2007, I bought a Pentax K10D and in 2015 a Ricoh GR. I tend to take
more pictures with the digital cameras, for a variety of reasons, and
appreciably more with the GR, since I almost always have it with me.
With the K10D, the procedure was similar to film: get prints made and
get the photos on CD as well. However, there are three differences.
First, I get both the JPEGs (produced by the camera) and the RAW files
on the disk. Second, these days it is usually a DVD. Third, the JPEG
files are bigger, around 3 MB. (This is fine as far as quality goes for
my purposes.) The JPEGs from the GR about 6 MB.

Up until now, I have copied all the JPEG files to web pages (I run my
own server). Even if I continue at the present rate (on average a photo
per day) for the rest of my life, disk space shouldn't be a problem;
we're looking at around 100 GB. Apart from the disk (RAID, but still),
I like to have robust backup copies. However, several questions arise:

o Are CDs/DVDs the best option for long-term storage? Or is there
something better today? Most important is permanence, but with
several hundred photos per batch, one DVD is not big enough if the
RAW files are included as well. Of course, I could process
smaller batches, or split big batches among several DVDs, but with
other storage media being reasonably inexpensive now, the question
is whether it would be good to move to something else.

o Some people just buy a new SD card when the one in use is full,
and use the old one as a backup. This might not be the cheapest
option, but is not too expensive. How robust is this medium for
long-term storage?

o What about other storage media, such as USB sticks? Are all of
these essentially the same under the hood, essentially SSDs,
though with varying speeds? (In the old days, at least, a
limitation of SSDs was how often they could be rewritten, but I
don't think that this is a problem today, especially in this case
where it is rewritten at most a few times before becoming static
as long-term storage.)

o A problem with SD cards in some case, such as on my wife's camera,
a Pentax Optio, is that there are several directories, each with
a few files. This is not easy to use, especially if restoring
files from backup. I suppose that I could mount it as a disk,
though, create a new directory, and copy all the files into that.

o My wife has a video camera which writes directly to (small) CDs.
What is the best way to secure long-term copies of such media?

o These days, SD cards are large enough for videos, and we have
various cameras with SD cards which can take videos (the Pentax
Optio, the KR5, the GR, iPhone, iPad). We haven't done much with
videos yet, in the past because it was too much trouble because
storage was small and expensive, these days because it is not
clear what the best path forward is. What do people suggest here?
I don't think that putting the videos on a hard disk for viewing
with a web browser would be a good idea---probably too much disk
space, and might take too long to load. Perhaps better would be
some sort of USB device which one could attach locally when one
wants to see the videos.

Relatively quickly, I'd like to come up with a good strategy, and stick
too it.


I use Japanese-made T.Y. (Taiyo Yuden) CD-Rs, with a cyan colored dye. They are supposedly stable for 100 years,and the recorded areas are clearly visible to the naked eye. Bought in 100-packs, they cost about USD $0.60 each.
They are apparently discontinued by the manufacturer, but many on-line sources still have them in stock.

Mort Linder
  #29  
Old January 8th 18, 04:39 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
nospam
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 24,165
Default long-term storage for digital photos, videos etc

In article ,
wrote:


I use Japanese-made T.Y. (Taiyo Yuden) CD-Rs, with a cyan colored dye. They
are supposedly stable for 100 years,and the recorded areas are clearly
visible to the naked eye. Bought in 100-packs, they cost about USD $0.60 each.
They are apparently discontinued by the manufacturer, but many on-line
sources still have them in stock.


tys were very good discs in their day.

the problem is that they don't hold much and far too expensive for the
space they offer.
 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Where can I find results of long term tests on digital cameras? [email protected] Digital Photography 3 October 14th 07 05:52 PM
Where can I find results of long term tests on digital cameras? [email protected] Other Photographic Equipment 3 October 14th 07 05:52 PM
Long term camera storage. Joseph Chamberlain, DDS Digital SLR Cameras 8 November 17th 05 08:06 AM
Long term camera storage. Joseph Chamberlain, DDS Digital Photography 6 November 15th 05 12:14 PM
Need Advice - Long term storage of Digital camera zxcvar Digital Photography 2 July 5th 04 07:01 PM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 11:40 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 PhotoBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.