The only thing I miss about photographing with film is that once you got film processed, and you devised a safe way to store it, you didn't need to worry about a favorite image, or folder full of favorite images vanishing overnight. The film I shot in 1978 is still in a folder, in archival sleeves, looking as good as the day I shot it. Not so with digital images on hard drives...
My ancient 4 TB, USB-2 Hard Drive, which I labeled "Bob" stopped cooperating with me this week. I've run Apple's "disk utility" on it a number of times. There's something wrong with the partition map. The disk spins and, after a time the disk icon will show up on the desk top but clicking on it to open it results in a finder crash and general system malaise.
I'm not too concerned since all the client data that was on that disk is backed up onto at least one other drive. And most of the client files are aging out of usefulness. Old head shots. Old projects. All stuff that would need to be updated anyway. There is one folder I missed backing up. It's on there somewhere. But if it goes away I'll take the blame for a spell of laziness eventually being punished by the resulting loss.
Still, the death of the drive spurred me to stay current with recent files of all kinds. I have two 10TB drives that back each other up. Amazon delivered me another 12TB hard drive so I can mirror the information on the existing (new as of October) 12 TB hard drives as well. Then there's the cloud back up. And the off site back up disks for critical client work and essential family pix.
If anything needs to get lost it will probably be some of the endless street photographs that seem to breed like warm germs in a petri dish full of agar. If I lost a bunch of those I doubt I'd cry too much.
I also have a filing cabinet drawer full of older hard disks that I pull out and fire up once a month. I feel like I am now partially in service to my own archive, knowing full well that most of it will end up being trashed and the drives recycled in the end.
The only silver lining I can think of in the moment is that hard drive storage really has gotten radically less expensive than it was in years (and decades) past. I guess I should just buy endless 18TB hard drives by the case and do a yearly "all hands" back-up with mirroring from all the previous generations of drives. Not quite willing to add tape back-up ... yet.
re: the dying disk. I know I can probably retrieved the files on the drive since it still spins, isn't making rude noises and still shows up on a desktop. It would just require buying one of the disk repair apps for about $100 and spending a couple of hours working the buttons. Either that or hire a service to do it.
But in the long run will it matter at all? Will I spend quality time with the files I recover? Are those 100 or so any more important than the other million plus I seem to have accrued? Probably not. But again, we never had this problem with film....unless we spilled coffee on it or were careless enough to store the film in a Texas attic space.
An interesting coda to surviving a week with a common cold.
And what's my real carbon footprint of having so much back-up data spread around?
But, on to more fun stuff. I last swam on Saturday and I've taken off since then, until this morning, both to wait until my cold symptoms abated but also to prevent spreading my cold germs to my fellow swimmers. And with good reason since practices have been packed with people lately. Five in my lane this morning. Makes circle swimming into more of an art than usual. You don't want to come out of your turns too far to the side you arrived on....
But it felt absolutely wonderful to be back in water. Of course, it was a "coach Jenn" workout so there was lots of stroke work beyond freestyle but the workout was still a reminder of how great it feels to feel great. And to move through the water. And to be back in the middle of a huge group of like-minded friends who also love to swim fast.
Today's diet discussion was all about steel cut oats. Our resident hardcore vegan approves... provided you don't douse them in a flood of whole milk. Or any cow milk for that matter. I was too intimidated to ask about covering the oatmeal with brown sugar....
The social discussion was all about the swim team holiday party coming up this Sunday. It's fun because we actually get to meet the other swimmers' spouses, and learn to identify each other when fully clothed.
Well, that's it for today. Be sure to use our links and.... oh wait! Nothing to buy here. Sorry.
6 comments:
You might want to consider a NAS (network attached system) that has backup in two physical locations. My son set up one that we share for my photos and his programming data. One unit is in his house in Round Rock and the other is in my house in NNY. Everything gets backed up to both in addition to the primary drives that the files reside on. The NAS protects you not only against drive failure but also against physical loss of the storage site due to fire, etc.
About film: Years back when I was going to be out of state for a time I rented a fireproof storage unit and piled in the vast majority of all my film photography negatives and prints. The storage may have been fireproof, but the stuff in the unit next to mine was not. In the end I lost almost everything, more of it to water damage than to the fire.
At least with digital it is easy and cheap to back up, and it doesn't take much space.
As to my experience, after the shock wore off I realized very little of what was lost had real value. Most was from my previous commercial photography life and was more a burden than of value. And somehow a cigar box of family snapshots survived undamaged - I realized later that was about the only thing in the whole mess I really cared about.
Jim said...
You might want to consider a NAS (network attached system) that has backup in two physical locations.
Couldn't agree more. Configure each of the two (or N) back-up devices with redundant storage drives (as much redundancy as your selected manufacture offers), set up a high-frequency (<daily) automated back-up regime, and check occasionally (once a week or once a month, depending on your file churn) to verify the currency of your back-ups. If you want a third tier of protection, arrange also to upload changes to your dataset to an online (a.k.a. “cloud”) storage provider during the wee hours every night.
Maple syrup and steel cut.My favorite.
Oat milk and steel cut. My neighborhood cafe makes an amazing latte with oat milk. It's been so long since I've had cow's milk (lactose intolerant) that I almost forget what it tastes like.
Any romantic notions that I might have had about film ended about 20 years ago. The major pro lab here made a change (unannounced!) in their E-6 line that I and many, many others put film through daily. Just over a year later, I was alerted by a colleague that he'd gone back to a chrome about 8 months old and noticed that it was noticeably green. He looked through his files and sure enough, everything since that change had gone significantly green. No way to stop it. I had a book's worth of work go down the drain; it's almost unbearable to look at those chromes. No recompense, of course. I will happily stick with backing up hard drives any day.
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