It hasn't been long now since digital photography has been the standard for both professional and casual photographers. Digital files have replaced celluloid negatives and raised a whole new discussion of archiving
techniques.
There have been pros and cons to the transition to 'digital negatives' and I've gathered the following tips to share some responsible practices for archiving your digital files. It would be a catastrophe to my business for me to lose a clients work before delivering it, and equally as devastating to lose sentimental family photographs. These basic principles apply to pros and amateurs alike.
Fun fact: Ansel Adams lost up to a third of his early work to a fire in his San Francisco studio in 1937. Film stock used to have a nitrate base which was extremely flammable and could auto-ignite from exposure to heat or even static. At least today our storage media are not spontaneously combustible.
To begin with lets address a few risky practices. The absolutely most irresponsible way to store your pictures is on your cameras flash media card. I've seen far too many people who still have snapshots from last Christmas on their camera. Those images could be gone as easy as the camera being lost or stolen or deleted as a group with just a few button strokes. Please don't let me catch you doing this or you'll be in for a lecture. Get into the practice of regularly downloading the images to a hard drive or taking your flash card into a photo lab to have them transferred to disc or printed.
Now speaking of hard drives... they have a list of problems of their own. As a
general rule try to store your images on a separate drive or partition than your system drive ( where your operating system is installed ). This way if something goes wrong with your computer it's much easier to recover your files. ( I don't keep anything besides OS and program files on my C:\ drive )
Hard drives cannot be trusted. None of them. It doesn't matter how much you pay or what kind of guarantee they carry because when they break you're left with very few options. Professional data recovery rates are profane and often have no correlation to the difficulty of the job at hand. It's best to just plan ahead and cover your own bases by keeping redundant copies of your images on at least two hard drives. This can be set up with RAID mirroring ( the simultaneous writing of everything to two identical drives ), or automated with a variety of backup programs. A free and easy solution I've used in the past is SyncBack by 2BrightSparks - a free version is available. The biggest advantage of the digital negative is that it can be copied with no loss of quality, so take advantage of that fact.
What if your computer is stolen or destroyed by fire? Well it's likely that all of
your hard drives will be too, including your copies. To protect yourself against these situations you'll need to employ a form of off-site backup using an internet connection. There are several paid services which make setting up off-site backup simple, like Mozy.com Firesafe, bolt-down hard drives are also an affordable option. They're even waterproof so they'll survive the fire department hosing down your house. ( IoSafe makes a good one )
( I should point out here that I'm never compensated in any way to make product endorsements. I'm just offering a starting point if you're interested. )
If this is all starting to seem excessive its probably because you're hearing it from me. I'm absolutely paranoid about losing the work I've put so much time into. It's also probably why I have over three terabytes of hard drives hooked up to my computer and redundant copies hidden in various places to avoid total theft.
If you don't feel the need to take your photo archiving to the extreme a solution might be as simple as regularly making some prints of your favorite images. In many ways a photographic print is more permanent than a digital negative.
With a little planning most of your digital archiving can be automated using free or affordable solutions. The day something goes wrong you'll be glad you did.
