On Dec 25, 9:58 pm, Matthew Winn <*...@matthewwinn.me.urk> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:32:57 -0600, "Ric Trexell" <rictrex....TakeThisOut@vbe.com>
> wrote:
>
> > "Scott W" <biph....TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> >news:f88a00a2-b121-4794-ae55-a219aee88660@e23g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> > > Even my parents who are in their 80s manage to make backups of their
> > > photos, really how hard it it?
>
> > Scott: What you say is true but how many people are doing this. People
> > that read this newsgroup are serious photo nuts and even professionals. For
> > every serious photographer out there, there are 100 kids or people that are
> > not interested in preserving their photos. Even you who claim to be making
> > back ups do not say if you are burning them to archivial CD's.
>
> I've heard of many people whose "backup" is simply a copy to a second
> hard disk in the same machine. All they're thinking about is guarding
> against accidental deletion or a disk crash, not about the sort of
> problem that might take out the entire cabinet and everything in it.
> Essentially, they have no backup at all.
>
> A few others copy files to a DVD, but they use a cheap spindle of DVDs
> to save money, don't bother to check the quality of the medium before
> writing to it, and don't verify the backup after writing. Some of the
> lowest quality DVDs have a write success rate below 40%, so there are
> many people out there whose sole backup is a disc that was unreadable
> from the moment it was taken out of the drive.
Hmm, I would get upset at a failure rate any higher then 1%-2%
My burned CD that are in the range of 10 years old only have a failure
rate of maybe 3%, and these seem to all be from the same batch of CDs.
In the day of floppy Memorex disk had a huge failure rate, even to
this day I would not think of buying DVD or CDs from them.
For people like my parents, who shoot maybe 1,000 - 2,000 photos a
year, doing backup of their whole collection is not a hard task., for
the first 6 years or so their whole photo collection would fit onto
one DVD.
There is a gap in my parents photographic record, but it did not come
from any lost digital photos, from their early 60s to their late 70s
they had lost interest in film photography, it was just too much
trouble to be worth it. In looking at their photo collection they
have a lot of photos from the 50s, a fair number from the 70s, from
the 80s and 90s very few. In 2000 they bought their first digital
camera and every since they have been taking a lot of photos each
year. 1,000 photos/year might not seem like much, but that is around
28 rolls of film / year, that is probably more photos then they shoot
in all of 1970-1999. If my parents had not gotten a digital camera I
would think that we would have very close to 0 photos from them in the
last 7 years.
Some people will loose part or all of their photo collection I am
sure, but it only take a small bit of care to avoid this for typical
people who are only shooting say 1,000 photos / years.
Film does not do so well, one of my grand mothers past away many years
ago and my parents ended up with her photo collection. She was an
avid photographer and there must be around 2,000 slide in her
collection. After the slides had sat in my parent's basement for
something like 20 years, with out any one ever looking at them, my
parents were going to throw them out. I saved them, but when I go I
doubt anyone will care to save them, just too much bother. Likely the
only ones that will survive are the ones I have scanned and made
digital files of. And there will not be that many that I scan, they
are in poor shape after 50 to 60 years and don't scan all that well.
In the 50s my father shot a lot of B/W film, but only printed a
fraction of what he shot. He gave me all his old negatives and I have
scanned some of them. Some of these photos never have been seen
before, at least not as positives. But I will never manage to scan
all the negative, they are in poor shape and all need to be washed
before then can be scanned, even then they have dirt that needs to be
fixed up in the digital image.
There are no dates on the negatives and no way to know where they were
taken or who is in the photos.
I have seen what it is like trying to save photos in both film format
and digital, I much prefer doing it in digital format.
Scott
>> Stay informed about: For films (movies), digital costs more to archive than "pr.. 
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