Photo Art
McKaso
TM
Photography By: Steve Sullivan
[ Back
[ Back
Digital technology now allows a photographer to store photographs in a much more convenient way, but will you have them forever? And I’m not talking about prints, but the actual digital file.
Technology is great, but have you ever have a hard drive fail? Well…I can say yes and what a pain that can be. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of having my PC fail to recognize my external drive and got the cute little warning box that my drive needed to be formatted. Luckily I found a very good program to recover most of my files, but none-the-less I lost several that I had invested many hours into along with some family snap shots. It very important to back up your photos to several different locations to insure that technology does not let you down. Losing your files is just not limited to a hard drive. You can lose files from your compact flash card, SD card, CD, DVD or portable storage device. Technology can be great, huh? So far the only issue that has occurred to me was an external hard drive failure, which with the right software was fairly easy to recover from. If something does go wrong with a file/device do not be hasty in making a decision on how to deal with it especially if you are not a computer whiz. Contact someone who knows how to deal with the issue or spend time looking on the Internet for a solution, but beware not every site is reputable.
Personally I only save my working files to my PC hard drive. Everything else gets transferred to an external drive. This drive is also backed up by a second external drive and then the most important files get backed up on DVD. Another option would be to use an online provider to also store your files. Personally I prefer to use Iomega hard drives as I have been a long time user of their products and they have been very reliable for me. By the way, the drive that failed was not an Iomega drive and is not listed in the links at the bottom of this page.
If you are backing up files to a CD or DVD it is important to consider the disks archival properties and how you care for the disk. A fantastic resource is NIST Special Publication 500-252. It’s a guide for the care and handling of CD’s and DVD’s for librarians and archivists. If you can afford it Delkin products would be the way to go for disk storage options.
Like with anything else it’s a personal decision as to what device, disk or software you use. Spend time reading reviews and the product specifications to make an informed decision. Below are just some links to suppliers and more can be found using Google. The asterisk (*) notes the items I currently use and I cannot vouch for the others.
Technology is great, but have you ever have a hard drive fail? Well…I can say yes and what a pain that can be. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of having my PC fail to recognize my external drive and got the cute little warning box that my drive needed to be formatted. Luckily I found a very good program to recover most of my files, but none-the-less I lost several that I had invested many hours into along with some family snap shots. It very important to back up your photos to several different locations to insure that technology does not let you down. Losing your files is just not limited to a hard drive. You can lose files from your compact flash card, SD card, CD, DVD or portable storage device. Technology can be great, huh? So far the only issue that has occurred to me was an external hard drive failure, which with the right software was fairly easy to recover from. If something does go wrong with a file/device do not be hasty in making a decision on how to deal with it especially if you are not a computer whiz. Contact someone who knows how to deal with the issue or spend time looking on the Internet for a solution, but beware not every site is reputable.
Personally I only save my working files to my PC hard drive. Everything else gets transferred to an external drive. This drive is also backed up by a second external drive and then the most important files get backed up on DVD. Another option would be to use an online provider to also store your files. Personally I prefer to use Iomega hard drives as I have been a long time user of their products and they have been very reliable for me. By the way, the drive that failed was not an Iomega drive and is not listed in the links at the bottom of this page.
If you are backing up files to a CD or DVD it is important to consider the disks archival properties and how you care for the disk. A fantastic resource is NIST Special Publication 500-252. It’s a guide for the care and handling of CD’s and DVD’s for librarians and archivists. If you can afford it Delkin products would be the way to go for disk storage options.
Like with anything else it’s a personal decision as to what device, disk or software you use. Spend time reading reviews and the product specifications to make an informed decision. Below are just some links to suppliers and more can be found using Google. The asterisk (*) notes the items I currently use and I cannot vouch for the others.
External Hard Drives:
*Iomega - http://goiomega.com
Western Digital – http://www.wdc.com/en/
Seagate – http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/
LaCie – http://www.lacie.com/
CD / DVD
*Delkin - http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/dvdr.html
Memorex – http://www.memorex.com/
Verbatim - http://www.verbatim.com/
Philips - http://www.usa.philips.com/index.page
*Sony - http://www.sony.com/index.php
HP - http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/storage.html
Photo File Recovery Software
*Digital Photo Recovery - http://www.photosrecovery.com/
Media Recover - http://www.mediarecover.com/
Lexar - http://www.lexar.com/software/image_rescue3.html
*Iomega - http://goiomega.com
Western Digital – http://www.wdc.com/en/
Seagate – http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/
LaCie – http://www.lacie.com/
CD / DVD
*Delkin - http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/dvdr.html
Memorex – http://www.memorex.com/
Verbatim - http://www.verbatim.com/
Philips - http://www.usa.philips.com/index.page
*Sony - http://www.sony.com/index.php
HP - http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/prodserv/storage.html
Photo File Recovery Software
*Digital Photo Recovery - http://www.photosrecovery.com/
Media Recover - http://www.mediarecover.com/
Lexar - http://www.lexar.com/software/image_rescue3.html
