What happens when all those digital memories go "poof"

[Paolo]

What gripes me about the concept of digital memories is the fact that folks take "lasting" photographs, shots that happen only once in a lifetime and can never happen again, with a $40 camera they got on the rack at the gas station near the cashier. More than once I've been given photos for a website and asked to improve them so they look good, but the truth is, if you take a picture that looks like poop it will always look like poop.

AMEN!

And when it's a crisis, it's a bad photo, a bad file, a Crappy-Camera masterpiece along the lines of a fine Holga (a cult crappy classic, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holga ) and of course, it's all up to ME to fix it and make everything right.

You can polish a turd all day long, and at 5PM, it still smells like shit.

If I had a dollar for every time I've been expected to wave my magic wand and make a shitty image perfect, I could retire and buy a Lexus dealership and burn a car each night to roast hot dogs and marshmallows over.

I would also argue the longevity of stored analog media. I just scanned about 6 rolls of old Kodak B&W 'Safety Film' from WWII.

The images were amazing. Then again, I scanned a 6cmx6cm negative at 4800 DPI. No, it was NOT shot with a Holga.

And no, unplugged and/or boxed digital media will not survive the coming wrath of the sun, unless stored in a Faraday Cage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

[fhunter]

Best method to keep digital pictures.

Make a copy to a second drive,

Make a copy for your second PC,

Make a copy for your laptop,

Make a copy for your tablet,

Make a copy on a CD,

Put a copy in your cloud,



And when all else fails, Make a hard copy of it.

And do not forget to check if they are still readable periodically (CDs do age, and I had at least one time of serious data corruption due to buggy sata controller driver). Do not store the physical media in one place. Theft and fire are still an issue if you do.

One of the places I worked had a "2 places" backup scheme - to local drive (not in the server, but in server room), and one to the cloud (ok, to the server of another company, I never asked where). They successfully recovered from stolen server (that was before my time there) and a dead hard drive in server (that was during my time). And recovery time, including buying a new hard

drive and reinstalling everything was less than a workday.

And no, unplugged and/or boxed digital media will not survive the coming wrath of the sun, unless stored in a

Faraday Cage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

Does metal enclosure of external hard drive count ?

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Beginning with me, we keep sidetracking Dave's thoughts, if I understand him right. How many have not done what that male did? I have and I have had it done to me a lot. I guess it has happened so many times I have finally gotten a bit inured over the years. At the same time, I have finally gotten to be a bit less of an ego-centric asshole when emotions are concerned. Have other people followed that path of being pretty insensitive when teens, 20s or 30s and finally get a bit of awareness about other people's feelings or do people thing they stay about the same thru life?

[fhunter]

Beginning with me, we keep sidetracking Dave's thoughts, if I understand him right. How many have not done what that male did? I have and I have had it done to me a lot. I guess it has happened so many times I have finally gotten a bit inured over the years. At the same time, I have finally gotten to be a bit less of an ego-centric asshole when emotions are concerned. Have other people followed that path of being pretty insensitive when teens, 20s or 30s and finally get a bit of awareness about other people's feelings or do people thing they stay about the same thru life?

I am definitely guilty of simultaneously typing into chat program and speaking on the phone. Unfortunately it is usually the phone conversation that suffers. But at least I know that I can not hold fast enough conversation while typing and try not to do that regularly.

But spending time "in the phone", instead of with person and claiming that "I met the best woman..." (do not have flash installed on this machine, so would not go rewatching for accurate quote), that is just wrong.

[Riverwind (imported)]

Back before I retired, I worked for a Bank, they did a complete back up each night and it went off site storage. We also worked on a disaster recovery system and put together everything needed to load software bring up the off site backups and run.

For bigger businesses this is a normal kind of operation.

River