Comments on: Digital Photographs for a Lifetime

By: SnapHaven Offers Lifetime Guaranteed Photo Storage

SnapHaven Offers Lifetime Guaranteed Photo Storage — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:23:17 +0000

[...] in September we wrote an article discussing how difficult it is to keep digital photographs safe for a really, really long time. We [...]

By: Fotografie digitali per tutta la vita? | adolfo.trinca.name

Fotografie digitali per tutta la vita? | adolfo.trinca.name — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:20:03 +0000

[...] letto un interessantissimo articolo di Michael Zhang su PP ovvero Peta Pixel che affrontava il problema della conservazione delle fotografie digitali e ne [...]

By: Nathan Yan

Nathan Yan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:31:14 +0000

If you're using hard drives for archival storage, however, the moving parts is not an issue – you're essentially using them as write-once drives that you won't be frequently accessing.

Flash is the same – the limit only applies to writes, which you'll basically be doing once per bit for archival storage.

By: Nathan Yan

Nathan Yan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:25:17 +0000

Online cloud storage is the way to go – they have so much redundancy (geographic redundancy too, which you don't get by keeping a bunch of hard drives or a box of photos at home) that your risk of data loss is virtually zero.

By: Nathan Yan

Nathan Yan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:31:14 +0000

If you're using hard drives for archival storage, however, the moving parts is not an issue – you're essentially using them as write-once drives that you won't be frequently accessing.

Flash is the same – the limit only applies to writes, which you'll basically be doing once per bit for archival storage.

By: Nathan Yan

Nathan Yan — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:25:17 +0000

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:11:51 +0000

Sure I hear that (I remember those starving student days). Still, it's all about priorities, I personally could have shaved $500 out of about two months of the "beer and (insert other party favor here)" fund.

Practically speaking the $55 for a year for Carbonite alone should pretty much cover it for a student type (you'll pay more than that for a USB HDD anyway). And then once you get out into the 9-5 world, supplement with the storage array.

Funny story, about jeez I guess it was eight years ago now, my apartment got robbed. They took pretty much everything except my pots and pans, and my NAS (at the time it was something like a whopping 250GB of storage or something like that). They didn't get that because I had installed it in one of my kitchen cupboards (it was the only place I could poke a hole through the wall from the garage without the landlord seeing it).

At the time I didn't even realize it was still there until I went to the garage to see if they took my router (they did). The idiot actually unplugged the CAT5 cable from the router that went to the NAS, and never thought to look to see where it went I guess.

As to not being willing to shell out the money for the RAID setup, it really comes down to this: sure you can get a 1TB USB drive for about $100, but when that drive dies, it's dead, and the data is gone. With the RAID setup, if a drive dies, you just replace it, and the data is still there when the rebuild is done. Long term, the RAID array is a far better investment.

By: Cool Links #59: New Toys Edition « TEACH J: For Teachers of Journalism And Media

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:35:50 +0000

[...] 5 – How do you store digital photos for the long-term? What is bit-rot? Burn CDs, DVDs, TB drives? Petapixel has the answers to all these questions on how to store your digital pics for the long term. [...]

By: joakimbergquist

joakimbergquist — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:50:39 +0000

That first photo of your would fit perfectly as a tilt-shift edit :) try it out.

By: Michael Zhang

Michael Zhang — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:06:04 +0000

Hi Joe,

Thanks a lot of your advice!

RAID 5 + online backup does seem like a very safe plan to keep your data safe. It's just that a lot of people aren't willing to shell out $300 for storage when they can purchase more capacity for a lower price, and aren't willing to pay $55 a year to keep their data safe.

However, for people with the means to pay this and who wish to keep their data as safe as possible, then they should definitely go the route you're suggesting. :-)

Just speaking from the perspective of a student. Haha.