For my first information blog I would like to speak about a very dear subject to us all, Family & Friends Pictures. Videos will be in the next blog.
Since the digital revolution we shoot every little thing that appends in our life, we takes exponentially more photographs than we did with films. It’s quick, free & has virtually endless storage, especially when compared to the maximum 36 exposures there was on the old cameras. For the younger generation please ignore the last sentence.
The casual photos don’t interest me, the dear family photos of our loved relatives & friends, be it children or parents, is what has me worried. I am a very keen family person, and I treasure the memories imbedded in those pixels. This last year I have scanned more than 3000 very old pictures that my mother, at last, gave me in the form of negatives. How to scan will be the one of my future blogs.
The pictures are kept on all the possible media;
- The original camera memory flash card. It does not easily deteriorate but can be very easily lost or deleted by mistake, is too small to contain all our pictures and to have many of them could become bothersome and is very costly.
- Copy the pictures to DVD. It is a slow process, the DVD deteriorate very easily. Leave it one week on your car dashboard and try to play it! Its life expectancy, in the best of conditions is about 5 years. Give or take 5 years.
- Copy the pictures to a Disk On Key. Better, but has the same drawbacks as the original flash memory.
- External disks. They do have a better storage capacity, but they are the absolute least reliable. Just drop one from your table and see for yourself.
- Store it in the computer. Well don’t count on Laptops, they are to easily dropped or lost unless it just contain a copy to show around. The desktop computer is a good choice, but the Hard disk is quite delicate. It has a life expectancy of 3 to 5 years and too much heat can lower that to mere months. In the daily cases I see in my line of work, there is too much need for Data Recovery. Specifically there are too many persons that are coming to me with their dead disk in hand and with sadness in their eyes, telling me that all their family photos are lost and can I do something please? In the best case scenarios the disk has only bad sectors and the data can be easily copied to a new media, but in most of the cases, the disk suffered a malfunction, needing special recovery techniques. In some cases, I even need to send the disk to a Data Recovery specialist, which may or may not, for a substantial fee, recover the beloved memories.
- Store it online? A very good option for a secondary or tertiary solution, but quite slow & once it’s on the cloud you don’t have complete control any more. Passwords are stolen everyday from very big companies (remember the Playstation fiasco), so, any one may some day, have access to your data.
- Print it? When you are printing your pictures, in the process of moving from digital to analog, you are automatically loosing quality! So, not a very good scheme not to lose your data.
SO WHAT DO WE DO? Well, I am going to let you in on my first rule;
Always store your valuable data (here read “pictures”) on TWO or MORE different electronically rewriteable media.
How to Do This;
The first step is to move the pictures from your stills camera flash memory to your computer (do not copy), do this every day to once a week if you use it daily, or after every session if you use it only on holidays & at family gatherings. So, move the pictures, as I said, to a dedicated folder on your desktop hard disk. It should be your newest disk on your newest desktop. The pictures must be in order to be able to access them easily & to do a thorough backup. The best way is to index the pictures for better retrieval. I myself organize my folder by years & rename my picture with first the date, when the date format is year-month-day of month, this way it is always chronologically arranged, then the event account & then a running counter with two or three digits depending on the number of pictures, for example;
2011-11-04 Sunday at my mother in law 01
If you do not know how to batch rename your files or are too busy, you can store them in a folder under the same naming scheme without renaming the files themselves.
Now that we can find all our pictures, we arrive at last to the second part of our plan to protect them. we have to choose a secondary storage for backup. The absolute minimum scheme, is to use an external USB disk & to copy the entire chosen folder (the one we store our entire picture collection in) to a dedicated folder. You will have to do that every time you ad pictures to your main depositary folder. You can always automatize the process with a backup application. The external USB disk should never be used for anything other than backup your data, never ever take it to your friends or family for show or use it for anything else, store it in your safe (if you have one) or somewhere safe. Not in a drawer for fear of being banged when opening it. Under this set of circumstances it should last at least 5 years. You should change the disk every 5 years & not take chances.
I myself do not trust only 2 storages. I have four of them!
- I have my main storage on my main personal computer, always on the newest drive.
- The second storage is a read only shared folder on my server so the family can see the pictures on any of their computers or on the living room network attached TV, instead of a server you can use a Network Attached Storage as well.
- The third device is my laptop so I have all my pictures with me always.
- & the last but not least is an external drive at my mother home that I actualize once a year at Passover. This is in case of a major disaster like fire or a devastating virus attack.
So there you have it, Ilan’s first rule for not losing your pictures (here you can also read “data”).
Next blogs I will review other backup method & other picture sources like phones & scanners.
