Shoe box versus Cloud Storage

[Terry_VK5TM]

My father threw out hundreds of photo's of us kids after he and mum split up (and boy was she pissed).

I likewise have not done anything in the photography vein for years, other than those needed for my website and the odd happy snap.

The Nikon DSLR hasn't moved from it's case in I don't know how long, I just use an old, cheap Fujifilm digital point and shoot camera these days.

The photo albums are in a box somewhere and haven't been looked at in years (assuming the mice haven't got to them - mouse plague time again here).

So the point is, (in my case at least) why bother with digitising, backing up etc, I don't look at them and doubt anybody else will.

[bobskie]

About 8 years ago I had all my photos backed up on a USB stick as well as having them on my hard drive(not the best idea but external storage was expensive then). I decided to install a different OS so I moved all my files onto this memory stick too. I put all my eggs in one basket for only a few hours and of course I had to drop the USB! I'm not talking a high drop, maybe 8 inches. Needless to say I ended up losing all my photos and files. It doesn't affect me now because I honestly don't remember what was on it but it was quite annoying at the time. Now I make sure to back up on an external hard drive and to the cloud. I do much prefer looking through paper photos though but never find the time or inclination to get them printed.

[DonaldStott]

I fully embraced the digital back-up era a few years ago when I purchased a NAS to store all those priceless home videos, photographs and my ripped CD collection.

I also regularly store back up images from the PCs and laptops used by the family.

The NAS has two hard drives in a Raid 1 configuration (NOTE: Not a backup) and I have two external drives that are used as backups - these external drives are rotated and one is kept off-site in the office.

I'm looking at cloud storage options but the main constraint appears to be speed.

Just my tuppence worth.

[ThePillenwerfer]

I agree with you, Terry. The only photographs I take these days are for things like this forum and once they are posted they've served their purpose as far as I'm concerned.

My digital camera hasn't even got an SD card in it as it'll hold twenty-odd images on its internal storage. When these are transferred to a PC for editing and use they get deleted.

I'm amazed at people who keep EVERYTHING, even outright failures such as having their finger over the lens. Storage may be cheap but shunting all this dross around takes time, making you less inclined to tackle the job, and makes it difficult to find what you do want.

[Refugee]

I split all photos into years and months and then in batches with dates.
Knowing roughly when a photo was taken narrows things down a lot.

[MrBungle]

Interesting thread. I’m more interested in data philosophy if I’m honest. Cloud versus box of photos is irrelevant in proportion to what the data means.

I’m actively trying to avoid collecting too much data and keeping it in 100% portable formats for my own use. My own data is around 20GiB of stuff I keep for my own purposes. Mostly videos and photos really. However I have around 2TiB of data I inherited from my father to get through still. This is thoroughly depressing. Leaving this on someone is a chore far greater than tangible items. Ignoring the cloud, data volume will kill us pretty quickly.

After reading Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker for the Dead, I concluded that a person’s life should be reducible to a few pages of A4 much like an extended obituary. A sample of their life, their personality, interests etc as truthful as possible. Things they create belong immortalised with the interest groups that they held, not the person themselves.

Everything else is trash. When I look forward to the future and my eventual demise I will be leaving carefully packaged packets of data detailing my life, ancestral information and an account of the interactions I had with that person. This totals around 10 people important to me.

Nothing else matters really. To quote my father, a rather crude but effective communicator, we’re just farts in the wind.

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by MrBungle

Nothing else matters really. To quote my father, a rather crude but effective communicator, we’re just farts in the wind.

Well, it does and it doesn't... My children and my cousin's children are very interested in their ancestry, as am I: it gives us a sense of place. Any documentation, written or imagery, is jumped upon with glee. One of my daughters graduated in history and wishes to pursue a career as an archivist nurtured by this interest, yet my mother isn't fussed about her forebears.

Regarding searching for stuff, it is indeed a chore and it's worth putting in perspective the amount of data on a memory stick that, in the printed form, would populate a filing cabinet. How many filing cabinets would it take to accommodate all those e-docs and PDFs that are contained on a handful of memory sticks in that little drawer in the kitchen?

Hence the importance of naming files and folders meaningfully.

[MrBungle]

Yes hence why I am packaging stuff up carefully. Sort of “here’s the good stuff”.

I do wonder what my great grandchildren will be doing on ancestry.com. Better paperwork but more data protection and compartmentalisation.

[Nickthedentist]

My parents moved into a house a few years ago where the previous occupants had both died, in their eighties.

All their photos, from the 1950s to date, all beautifully organised and labelled, were left behind in a pile for the bin men. The relatives simply didn't want them. But they represented such an amazing record of day-to-day life in postwar Britain that I couldn't bear to let them go.

Eventually, I gave them to a social historian who was advertising in the back of Private Eye.

[Boom]

I've kept all of my digital photos' on RW DVD's. They take up little space.

I also have family VHS tapes dating back to the 1970s which are perfectly watchable. (I still have an M7 around here somewhere).

My 35mm photos are the ones that weigh a ton and take up the space.

All in I reckon that RW DVD's seem the best bet so long as a decent make is used.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by Boom

All in I reckon that RW DVD's seem the best bet so long as a decent make is used.

No, you will have far more chance of longivity by using DVD-R rather than re-writeables.

[1100 man]

The value of photo's is not now but in 30-40 years when nostalgia kicks in. I firmly believe there will be a whole generation of people who will end up with no pictures of their kids growing up or their parents. People take endless digital pictures but most give no thought to archiving. The beauty of negatives is that you can forget them for 50 years and then view them with minimal technology. Digital files will need regular maintenance to keep them in a format which will be readable with current technology. For most people that just isn't going to happen.
I've got all the negatives I took as a kid 40 years ago even though most of the prints have long gone. I've got prints right up to the time I got a digital camera, but after that, nothing.
Physical negatives survive by accident: they are almost indestructible. Digital files take effort over the long term.
All the best
Nick

[IanBland]

I sort of consider my stuff to have three backup priority levels. Top level is my own data, which is irreplaceable. Music I wrote and recorded, art I drew (I drew comics for a living for a while), email, personal photos. I want that as near to immediate as possible, so that's always on RAID1 drives with daily backups to an external drive.

Next level is what I consider "cruft". Downloaded movies, music, pdf files etc. That's on single drives and gets backed up when I feel like it.

Third level is not data at all. Boot drive images etc. I don't bother backing this up as I can just reinstall and the backed up image would inevitably be out of date anyway.

And then if I pop me clogs suddenly I daresay it'll all get thrown away anyhow since none of it will mean anything to anyone else.

[k_yller]

digital camera it's only tool
it's not prohibited to make paper prints

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by 1100 man

The value of photo's is not now but in 30-40 years when nostalgia kicks in. I firmly believe there will be a whole generation of people who will end up with no pictures of their kids growing up or their parents.

This is what I fear too.
The rot started perhaps 20 years ago, but the problem then was qualitative rather than quantitative, with fast 110 and disk film becoming the format of choice for many.

My brother-in-law bought a 110 SLR with several lenses. His favorite one was called a "Pan Focus", it wasn't an auto-focus, it was simply fixed focus with a small maximum aperture. What a waste of money.

[1100 man]

Originally Posted by k_yller

digital camera it's only tool
it's not prohibited to make paper prints

Very true. But how many people do? None of my prints from 40 years ago have survived: they have just disappeared along the way. The negatives, chucked in a box have survived though.
Analogue media tends to survive by accident. Digital media takes thought & effort to ensure it survives!
Cheers
Nick

[Graham G3ZVT]

Originally Posted by k_yller

digital camera it's only tool
it's not prohibited to make paper prints

Well said!

And photography has never been more exciting and accessible to all, and that includes the cameras we all carry disguised as telephones, despite their shortcomings in their lenses and lack of proper flash.

[dave walsh]

I really think that 1100 man [32*] is on the right track, especially as it chimes with my post [8*]. Analogue might indeed be our saviour or someone elses . Just watched a CEO on News Night accused of using Digital Data to control things. Broadcast at exactly the same time as Philip K Dick's sixty five year old short story on CH4, "The Hanged Man" about our cloudy future. It shows one possible use of digital technology that doesn't seem all that far away!

Dave W

[Terry_VK5TM]

Originally Posted by Boom

All in I reckon that RW DVD's seem the best bet so long as a decent make is used.

Leave one in the sun for a couple of minutes and see if you feel the same way.

DVD-RW are the last thing I would use to store anything for any amount of time, regardless of who made them.

[MrBungle]

Yes. DVDRW has shelf life of perhaps 5 years if you are lucky. I have some I burned in 2005 which are chock full of errors.

Forget archival really. So far for longevity, DLT and physical mechanical disks seem to be the best although keeping your data on your current PC is the best storage medium as it gets upgraded regularly ish. The backups should be failsafe against that failing only. I replace my backup media yearly.

Data storage is all about spinning plates metaphorically and perhaps physically.