@cicopo wrote:
The important thing is to have a back up & I agree at least one set should be somewhere other than in your home because fire & theft are not very forgiving. I keep my second set in a storage building on site but well away from the house. I have 4 hard drives in my desktop, 2 are dedicated to specific types of photos, Events on 1 and Family related on another. Both get backed up to another 2 drives one of which is stored in the shed which is really a high quality building used to store collector cars.
One very important aspect of this is that there isn't a foolproof plan & I've been saying that since we first started moving to digital. I spent several conversations with a magazine editor that wanted to cover the topic but who gave up because it's just too big to say "do this & everything will be OK" because it won't. So far the ONLY storage medium that we use that has been around from the beginning is the hard drive, and they fail for many reasons. CDs & DVDs are popular now but we have no idea how much longer there will be drives to play them. We started off with floppy discs, moved to 3 1/4 or 1/2 inch discs & no one sells computers with those drives anymore PLUS we've changed file formats. FAT 16 was replaced by FAT 32 which will be here until????
Make your back ups, keep up as things change by backing up to the new tech as needed because none of this has stood the test of time like negatives have. My negatives & old prints are also safely stored but they don't have multiple copies BUT I did convert the important ones to digital years ago.
I've been using computers since before personal computers and hard disks became available. I go pack to the punch card and paper tape days, as well those big 8 inch floppies.
I agree with you though, about there not being any fool proof method besides overwhelming redundancy. You mention hard drives. I think recent improvements in the capacities of solid state drives just might be a more reliable form of long term storage than any electro-mechanical device.
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