ok so I went looking for some photos yesterday.
while combing through the pile, it struck me.
The photos all ended about 4 yeas ago.
Everything else was on my wife's computer in digital format.

My mind drifted to watching super8 movies of my wife as a kid.
Those had been copied to VHS and will need to be scanned again to digital.


another thought out there.

since almost everyone has gone digital.
when was the last time you backed up your drive?
do you have those photos on two drives?

losing years of photos of the kids and grandkids will never be replaced when that drive crashes.

 

I agree. I back up my pc files and photos monthly on a external drive and each quarter back them up on discs which I store in a safe in case of fire. So they are backed up better than the paper albums which would be lost in a fire.

I converted by super 8s to VHS and then converted those to disc, making extra copies which I gave in sets to my kids.

 

Good advice. For those who have a lot of important memories on their computer drives, I'd suggest a periodic backup to an off site location; CD's stored at the inlaws' house, or such. Because if your house should burn, all the drives in the house may be lost.

 

Furthermore, with a reasonably good flatbed scanner, you can convert old print photographs to digital files with good fidelity (not great, unless you have a super-duper scanner, but pretty good). For many family keepsakes, this is just fine. We're reducing the amount of paper in our lives this way.

My epiphany happened when I got my entire CD music collection on disk (via iTunes), and I'm now thinking about TV-system next for our new house. Laptops with Blue-Ray drives are available, as are 5.1 (or even 7.1) amplified speaker systems. So: a quality HD-TV, a laptop, and a powered speaker system could well replace all the gadgets I currently have cabled together.

All this, of course, only reinforces the original message: backups become the more important. HPH

 

All good advice.

I download images to two separate hard drives... on separate computers (one of these is to an external USB drive).

Each year (or if something happens to either of the computer drives, immediately) the previous years images are archived to TWO copies on DVD, which are kept separate from one another. It is a bit time consuming, and since so many photos are shot in RAW format, the number of DVDs for a year has been as many as 4 dozen.... but I'd really hate to lose any of that stuff.

There are also relatively inexpensive devices that will allow you to dump a VHS tape, or a tape from a video camera (analog or digital) directly to a DVD. Once there, you can bulk erase the camera tapes for re-use. Yes, it is time consuming, but the DVDs are far more sturdy than the tapes.

All of us are taking far more pictures with digital cameras than we ever took shooting film. Management of this stuff can be a real chore... but if done religiously and cataloged so you can find something, it is well worth the effort.

 

Good point. I store them on a server here in the house, but in case of fire....well, good point.

 

More than just drive crashes, all it takes are format changes and data can be lost forever. We have written words that have survived for thousands of years, and cave art that has survived for tens of thousands. And yet, few people are willing to predict that our current electronic records will be accessible in 100 years.

This is an archival issue that has bothered many professional librarians and historians.

At my company, we used to rigorously back up important data to optical disks that we thought would be important safeguards against data loss. Less than 10 years later we threw them all out, because the machines that read that disk format were no longer available.

 

I do weekly backups to an external hard drive. I periodically burn the latest backups to a DVD, and give that to a friend to keep for me.

 

Just my 2 cents all media is subject to failure, the best media is hard drives. All Cd's and DVD's Fail its not if but when.