Whether you are a full time pro or the family photo historian, digital technology has changed the way we shoot and store photos. Digital cameras and electronic storage have us all clicking away, taking massive amounts of images and feeling largely free from the concerns of the costs of film and developing as well as needing to find space for boxes of prints or slides and having to throw out all of the duds. Once you own the equipment, shooting 1,000 shots isn’t any more expensive or wasteful than shooting one. Editing still takes time, but if you learn how to effectively use image management software, this time can be greatly reduced. Storage of large numbers of images is less of an issue with digital as well. No more need for volumes of photo albums or closets full of slides. Depending on the size of the digital image files and the size of the hard drive, thousands or even millions of images can be stored right in your computer.
With your entire collection of digital images stored on your hard drive, protecting against file corruption or hard drive failure is the new big issue that photographers have to consider. Over the past six or seven years of consumer digital camera development, storage and back up of digital image files has been a hot topic of discussion. For a while the trend was to utilize removable media, such as CD or DVD, to store and back up digital photos, but this is no longer seen as the best solution. CDs vary in quality. Some more expensive brands can last for decades, but cheaper ones can begin to break down in a matter of years. CDs also have limited storage capacity. A six-megapixel camera (a common size now available) can produce RAW files that are 18 megabytes when converted to TIFF. Only 38 of these images will fit on a CD. If you have thousands of images, the number of CDs needed to back up your collection becomes prohibitive. With rapid changes in technology the CD may go the way of the eight-track tape and the floppy disk in a few years, leaving you without a way to access your stored images. DVDs offer a bit more storage space, but even so a DVD can still only hold about 220 18-megabyte files. Additionally, DVDs are even less stable than CDs and have a maximum life of only several years, so they are not a good option for long-term storage.
So what is the best back up solution? Right now the experts are supporting the use of high capacity external hard drives. External hard drives are available in sizes ranging from 50 gigabytes up to several hundred gigabytes and are relatively inexpensive (about $1 to $2 per gigabyte). They are easily connected to your computer via high-speed USB 2.0 or FireWire connections and you can add as many as your computer has ports for. Files on an external hard drive are much more accessible than a collection of CDs or DVDs and they can still be edited, resaved and deleted as with any other hard drive. Hard drives store data magnetically, and this information can fade or become corrupted over time, but it is a fairly simple matter to recopy all the contents of a hard drive from time to time to “refresh” the stored data. As new storage technology emerges, transferring your image files from your old hard drive will be an easy matter. I use two 250-gigabyte external drives to house my photo collection. One is the primary drive that I work from and the second is a backed up mirror image of the first drive. Every few days I copy the contents of drive one to drive two. Then I can completely unplug drive two from my computer to protect it from crashes and surges and can even store it in a different physical location to protect it from fire or theft. Well-known manufacturers of external hard drives include Maxtor, LaCie and SimpleTech and can be purchased at retailers like Office Depot or Staples or your local computer dealer. Your digital photos represent the same kind of irreplaceable property that film once did. It is a good idea to make sure that your collection is properly stored and backed up.
