No it's not time to call your insurance agent, in fact it might just be too late for you or more accurately your hard drive. Today everyone stores their images on hard drives, DVD's and CD's. But what happens when everything, and I mean everything is at risk of just disappearing. Well that is what this series of articles are about.
As a professional photographic company we make a living on the images we produce. Having them available months even years after they were originally produced is just expected. What happens though when there is a breach in that system. A tragedy if you will, fire, flood or somethingless damaging but just as devastating, a hard drive crash, are you prepared?
Don't think it can happen to you? Let me propose a scenerio. You are working along on say several hundred of the images that have been on your digital camera for months. You have transferred them to your hard drive and errased them from your camera's card. As you work along editing your images the day gets late and you decide to continue tomorrow. When you return to your computer the next day and click on the icon for you images, you receive a heart wrenching "donk" from the computer and an error message that says, drive can not be found !
You scream a few unmentionables and begin to pray that it is just a glitch. Like some electronic emergency room physician you reboot the computer in hopes of a resurrection. As you plug and unplug the computer the awful realization comes to you that nothing is going to bring this drive back to life.
All you can think about is "why didin't I just back it all up?" How am I going to explain to my wife that we have absolutely no pictures from the whole of last year? Our vacation to Disney with the kids, the Holiday, which one? Just pick one, all of them were included. The dance recital, your cousins wedding, your nieces graduation, and don't forget every single person in your families' birthday. AArrgh!
How could this happen? Well the answer is simple. Data storage, filing and backing up important files is something that people just don't want to deal with, The problem comes in when something goes wrong. If you have ever experienced any of this, you know exactly what we are talking about. You would give your left leg just to get those files back.
We are going to outline a few steps that if taken, can help you avoid this type of problem or at least minimize the shock. The first thing that you can do to keep from loosing it all, is to burn a CD or DVD of your images. You do this immediately, it should be the very first step when you offload your pictures from the camera. This should happen before you ever make a single adjustment to the images.
Then you verify the disk, insure all your images are there. After your verification, then and only then do you erase your images from your card. By this time you have images in 2 places. First on the hard drive you offloaded them to and the CD or DVD that you burned from those images. With 2 backups, you are now clear to move forward and begin your corrections and selections for printing. Should something happen, like the scenerio above discribes, you will still have a backup disk.
Now this system is not fool proof. Not only do hard drives fail but so do CD's and DVD's. While less common, "silver" CD and DVD that you can find anywhere are subject to failure. The reason is the recording material used on the disk. This material is very susceptible to corrosion from the environment. Heat is a bad thing here as is a salt air environment like if you live near an ocean. Keep your disks in a cool, dry, preferably dark place like the safe in your house. If you want to use a more fool proof method of recording your disks, check into gold CD's / DVD's. These disks while not cheap have an estimated shelf life of 300 years.
Other methods of backup include external drives that can be stored in your fire proof safe and off site storage through the internet. We will discuss these in more detail next month. We will also discuss what to do if you suffer a catastrophic loss of data from your hard drive and where you can sent it to get it repaired. - Aloha & stay tuned.
