By johnnycarter22/Johnny (10,852) 
on October 30, 2002 10:30:26 AM CST
Saving your memories
Saving your memories
I am fairly new to the world of photography, but I am not new ot the world itself, and I know there are a lot of things that happen that catch people completely offguard. I work in the computer repair business, and one of the most common things that I hear is, my computer crashed and I lost all of my data. This can happen to anyone at anytime.
I want to address this issue because like myself, there are many digital camera users out there, and we have no negatives to fall back on in case we lose our pictures. Even the film users quite often place their work on computers, or they wouldn't be posting to Photosig. I thought that I would pass on what I do to save my work, and if you find it useful fine, if you think I'm paranoid, well, maybe you're right, with my valuables I am.
I have a Sony CD300, and I record to mini CD's. Normally I use CDRW's, but it doesn't matter whether it is CD, memory stick or cube, the first action taken is to upload it to the computer, and in my case to reformat the camera storage device. I make a point of keeping all of my original photos on one hard drive. These are not the ones touched up by Photo Shop or whatever, they are completely as is. I organize this hard drive into different folders based on date and subject. Since I am paranoid but I don't have money to waste CD's, I also keep a copy of just the new PC's on a seperate hard drive (not folder, but physical hard drive) until I get the desired amount to fill up a CD. I then burn 2 CD's of the data. CD's are cheap, and with 2, in case one gets damaged I have a backup. Please be aware, CD's are great, they are very reliable, and they do sometimes lose their data, often for no discernable reason. I even go so far as to use different CD brands for each copy, and of course I store them in different areas. After checking my CD's I then delete the contents of the new photos folder on the second hard drive.
Normally I do not save my touched up photos unless there is something really unusual that I did. The ones I work over with software I save into a seperate folder and print them out from there, then delete those, keeping only the original, but that is a matter of personal preference. I figure that as long as I have the original photo I can always work from that. One thing that I will add on that, try to keep your original intact, do not move them from folder to folder. We are mostly using jpg format, and each time you save a picture you lose a little more detail, it's the nature of the beast. If I had the room I would save everything in tiff, but I don't.
I hope this helps some. I also hope you procrastinators (I'm the world's worst) that know to save but put it off, realize you need to keep on top of keeping them safe. One crash of the hard drive can wipe out a lot of valuable memories.
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From dulcimoo/Marc (2,271)
on March 17, 2007 9:57:38 AM CDT
You can move jpg or what ever from folder to folder. Once the photo is in jpg format it should be just fine to move or copy. It it the conversion from TIFF or RAW or other lossless format to jpg that causes the "loss". Once converted it will stay the same unless edited.
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From dulcimoo/Marc (2,271)
on March 17, 2007 10:06:06 AM CDT
You can move jpg or what ever from folder to folder. Once the photo is in jpg format it should be just fine to move or copy. It it the conversion from TIFF or RAW or other lossless format to jpg that causes the "loss". Once converted it will stay the same unless edited.
One problem with digital format is that the formats change. Analogue media like film or print can be resurrected relatively easily from the past but not the case with digital. Also digital media does degrade over time. As new formats replace old, like DVD+/- replacing CD-R, and Blu-Ray replacing DVD copy your old media to the new to keep the data refreshed and to avoid compatibility issues. While CD-DVD-BluRay may not have issues it helps keep the data refreshed.
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