World Photo Adventure - So what do you do with yours?

So what do you do with yours?

So what do you do with yours?

Digital files that is? In the good old days, when film reigned supreme, the photographer would ensure that using correct processing techniques, his negative properly fixed and washed would last forever, well certainly most people’s life time., I have printed from 150 year old glass plates that have still been as good as the day they came out of the wash. Old roll film the same, except of course for the time they used Nitrate based emulsions. They can be a bit tricky, wrong storage and the film changes into a very effective incendiary device....you have been warned.

But what about digital files? O.K. store them on your hard disc and whoops the hard drive decides to commit Hari Kiri. Or a nasty little spotty faced youth, with nothing better to do, sends a creepy crawly through cyber space. A creepy crawly that happens to have a voracious appetite for files stored on hard drives.

There is an easy answer: make a CD copy or as my friends more used to modern terminology would say, “Burn a copy.” Fine, most modern P.C.s come with the C.D writers and the software to make it happen. Alright it’s another of those P.C. things to master so away we go. Eventually we have “Archived all our precious work“. Here I have a problem with modern parlance, Precious ‘work’? Now I have managed to avoid having to ‘work’ for the last twenty five years. If I considered photography as work I should chuck it and take up flower arranging. But the other word here is technically the one to question, “Archived.” I take it that this means that the ‘work’ has been placed somewhere safe for posterity. But has it? The internet is full of stories about how C.Ds burned with a P.C. have a very limited life span. Some come to the conclusion that the quality of the C.D makes a lot of difference and the normal stack of 100 for 50 pence are little more than useless. So perhaps the answer is to buy the best quality available. But no, experts in the field maintain that even the best discs will only extend their life a little and if you use them the heat of the P.C. will ruin them anyway. So, how about D.V.D.? Again the internet has millions of Gurus saying that these are perhaps a little better but after a few short years the information stored on them might turn out to be the next winner of the Turner prize, and we don’t want that.

So, it is very dangerous to store them on your hard drive. In fact I lost all mine once because I needed to do a factory restore caused by complete incompetence on my part. C.Ds and DVD’s have a limited shelf life, but don’t fret, help is at hand.

Nowadays modern technology proceeds faster and faster and at the same rate gets cheaper and cheaper. It seems to me the best way of protecting your snaps is to use an external Hard Drive.

I bought mine from Ebay for about £60; it is a LaCie and stores 500Gb, which is an awful amount of files. As a complete idiot even I could plug it in and get it working fairly easily. All it involved was making a telephone call to my friendly I.T. guy and he had it up and running in a couple of clicks on the keyboard. This LaCie is very small about 4”x6”x 2” sits very nicely on top of the P.C. tower a little badge on the side denotes that it was designed by Porsche. Really? It must have stretched their design team a bit, as it’s completely without any features whatsoever, a flat, straight forward box. The only trouble with this unit is that it gets rather warm; other models are often fan cooled so my advice would be to go for one of those. But with this unit installed and only connected to the main P.C for down loading,. I feel quite safe that my files are protected and will be available to bore the pants off future generations.

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