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Tommy Williams

I have struggled with digital archives for a long time as well. Mine go back to 1997 though I doubt I have anywhere close to the number of photos you have and I do not have to worry about bringing in photos from multiple computers. When I take pictures on vacation, I will use my laptop and a small external hard drive to hold copies of them so that I can clear off the card, but once I get back home, I import from the laptop onto my main machine. I don't do any editing or processing on the laptop--I'll add metadata there sometimes, but that's about all.

The other thing I have done is abandon optical media altogether. DVDs are too finicky and I found too many corrupt files on them. Luckily I am meticulous and I was able to recover them from the second copy that I keep at work. And, because I'm paranoid about how long the optical media will last, I used to verify the contents of all my optical media at least once a year.

Now, though, I just keep things on hard drives. I have a Windows Home Server that duplicates the pictures across multiple hard drives and, once a week, I hook up an external drive, update it, and take that offsite (to my office at work). And then I have another copy of the RAW files (not the processed TIFFs) on external drives connected to my main computer.

But, as you can see just from what I have written, it takes a lot of care and feeding to keep it alive.

And I have conveniently ignored talking about changing cataloging programs over the years and the effectively lost metadata from the times before the tools write the metadata back into the files (or I chose to do that), or before XMP, and so forth. I have the actual pictures, but about the only way I can find them is to remember when I took them and go browsing for the older stuff. That wouldn't work with the volume of pictures I generate now.

Doug Plummer

I still like using DVDs as a backup, because I like having more than one kind of medium that the data lives on. I don't think the disks deteriorate, it's more that the writing mechanism is so finicky that it's hard to transition through the hardware upgrades. It's a lot more convenient too to find a set of files on a disk than it is to fire up a backup hard drive.

Tommy Williams

I actually found that some of my earliest CDs did degrade, or at least things changed from year to year: it wasn't that the whole disk couldn't be read, but that individual files couldn't be read at all had corrupt bits in them. And I saw this on CDs that were fine one year and bad the next, even using the same optical drive that had successfully read them before.

I have had more problems with DVDs and I do attribute that to the finicky nature of writing to them. I never write at faster than 4X anymore and that definitely helped.

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