Digital photography is a wonderful technology. Film is great too, but they each have their own distinct advantages. Digital is convenient and gives you instant feedback. It is already in a format that allows you to easily manipulate it once you have transfered your files to the computer. For me digital gives you clay and then you can mold it and finish it any way that you see fit. And, unlike clay, you can remold and reinterpret it over and over again. On the downside, digital is easily lost, corrupted, or erased. It only take s fraction of a second, or a computer malfunction, and years of images and hard work, and possibly money, could be gone with little chance of recovery. I have read a few articles recently that spoke about how digital photographs have entered into the disposable realm. They pointed out that so many of the photographs being taken today will not be around in a few years. Think of all those images that you take with your phone. I think that there is an implied disposability to them. Now when film was around, if you remember, there were many photographs taken. Kodaks estimated that number to be in the billions per year. But even when the negatives were misplaced there was the chance that the prints lived on in some album or some drawer. You can read an interesting article from 2000 about how much information is produced each year here.
So I am encouraging everyone to have a back up strategy in place to preserve your images. Even if you think that you do not care about them now, in time you may, and some images may become very significant. Keeping extra digital copies is easy. It just takes a little time and some storage media. Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional will determine the level of safety that you set up.
First, you should never leave any images on your computer that you cannot afford to loose. I would say just don’t leave the only copy of any image on your computer. Computers crash, they get viruses, they get replaced, and things don’t get transferred. So take the images off of the memory card on to your computer, then immediately copy them to an external hard drive. Don’t erase the memory card until you are sure that you have the images saved. Then you should reformat the card in the camera. Don’t add to the images already on there. The cameras don’t like that and the cards can get corrupted. External hard drives are cheap and you should have a few. I would recommend copying the image files (the originals) to two (2) external hard drives. I would also suggest that you put the images on another form of media, one that is less prone to being erased. That would be either a CD, DVD, or BluRay disk. If you are a professional, or someone who is very serious about your images, you would make a set of disks and store them off site. It does you no good to have an external hard drive back up right with the laptop that gets stolen, or alongside the computer that gets water or fire damaged. So if your images are important to you, and they should be, get a back up set off site.
Luckily I am not writing this because I have had a data crash. I am currently teaching a class in Digital Asset Management so I have been keenly aware of this recently and I have been accessing my own back up systems. I just added a BluRay burner and a few fast, 7200 RPM, external hard drives to my system. I will be adding a RAID system in the future. And some larger photographers will want to set up a server. Delkin makes gold CDs, DVDs, and BluRay disks because the regular ones only last a few years. The gold ones are archival and should last up to 200 years. They are worth the extra cost. I keep a set of gold disks along with a set of regular ones.
Everyone will have their own system based on your level and how much you want to invest in backing up. It is not expensive to do it the right way. No matter what type of images you create, please back them up so that you will have them for long periods of time. Don’t keep putting this off until you have a disaster on your hands.
Gary Miller
Houston Fine Art Wedding Photographer
Eye Candy and Brain Veggies
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