I was thinking a lot about my photos lately. After some searching, I found this article;
http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/library/pdf/vitale/2005-11-vitale-storage_image_files_long.pdf
That kicked my thoughts into overdrive. With my camera pumping out about 10-12mb PER shot on raw files - the storage and fault-redundant backup of images is getting almost prohibitive. Especially since I usually bracket every shot with 3 exposures.
My photo archive HDD has approximately 150gb of images on it from the last 6-7 years and it’s filling up fantastically fast with the new camera shooting about 10-12mb raw + 3mb mirrored jpg write per photo. On the trip to florida I was shot 1.5gb/day of pics, and that was limited to my 1024 + 512 compactflash storage. I held a lot of pics back and deleted others to make way for ‘better’ photos. I have 4gb now so I could reasonably expect I’d fill those on any further trips. 4gb/DAY.
And this is just raw photos. Once you start photoshop editing anything with a few layers that 10mb raw file becomes a 40mb photoshop PSD minimum.
I think as a result there is basically no time-sensible non HDD way to archive complete sets of photographs anymore. Even Dual layer DVD-R is only 9gb/disc and lifetimes run about 5-10 years it appears. 5-10 years is unacceptable - in 5 years I would have forgotten burning those photos and 25 years from now would be unable to look at them. After all, isn’t that why I’m taking photos?
I suppose one solution is to purchase another HDD, mirror my current one, and lock the backup in a cool dry place. Safe deposit box works but I have ZERO faith in magnetic media over the span of years either.
Perhaps even fill 3/4 of the HDD with photos and 1/4 with parity info from PAR2. Magnetic media RARELY dies completely, it is more likely that the data becomes corrupted. And a failure in that respect would simply have you buy a new drive, mirror what you can and run parity recovrery software to (hopefully) repair.
Also, offsite backups of jpg only files could be done to high lifetime DVD or CD-R. This would ensure that not EVERYTHING is lost in the case of failure.
It’s strange that the situation has even come to this. Even more absurdly the professional 12.0 Megapixel Canon 5D should do 18mb raw + 5-8mb jpg = 23mb/photo for raw files alone. With Photoshop layers, people are probably looking at 120mb/ per image to store. A studio would probably shoot 50 photos in a longer portrait sitting - that’s 6-7gb!
I don’t see any other solution. After spending all the time taking photographs, you want to know that they will be there ‘forever’.
Who convinced me that digital cameras made photography cheaper, anyhow? I’m just a poor student - it’s not nice to lie to me like that.
