Saving Those Photos

Doctor Bob, who takes care of the Geek's eyes, is worried about his growing digital picture collection. As well he should be! After all, a shoe box of photos is pretty tangible, and I have seen pictures of President Lincoln still viewable. On the other hand, those snaps of Junior's new hair cut, you know just before the jury let him off, I haven't seen those in about two years, and where did I put them anyway?

There are several issues with photo back-up that really are no different than any other back-up of digital media. So lets think about them: where are they, how safe are they and will I be able to see them ten years from now?

Where are they? I know they're on your computer. Yeah and my record collection is out in the garage, but I can't tell you where and it would take me 6 months to dig through everything to find them. You really want to use a software program to keep your pictures ordered and identified. My favorite is (sorry for you pc boys) iPhoto, because it lets me categorize and tag photos. Tags are words that you attach to the photo so you can easily search for them. Junior, Court, Breaking and Entering, that sort of thing.

You want something that makes it easy to find the picture, again, iPhoto lets you sort by date, and "coverflow" makes it really easy to find the picture visually. So what do you do if you don't own a Mac? You could go buy one. The truth is there are numerous photo cataloging programs. Kodak has one, so does HP, just make sure that whatever you use, it isn't a cheap, I may not be around in a year company. You might want to try Adobe Elements, its reasonably inexpensive (less than $100) and Adobe makes good stuff, even if their support of the Apple products...sucks. A good program will find all the pictures on your hard drive and bring them together, then, sort them, tag them and--back them up.

How safe are they? All hard drives fail. Period. If your photos are on your hard drive you will loose them. Sooner or later. It will happen. So it would be nice if that program you just bought lets you back up. To what you say? Well DVD's are the likely spot. They are cheap, easy and almost every computer has one. In iPhoto, pick um and burn um. Anything else, there's something else you need to do. Figure it out and do it. Every month on the 6th of the month, or some other date, back up everything since the month before. Them label them, and store them. Now for the really bad news, no one really knows how long a cd will last. So maybe you need to do more. Read on.

There are three types of back up, on site, like on the machine, archival-you store it someplace away from the machine, and off site, really really off site. So you do the CD's and put them in a closet or safe deposit box. You can hook up a hard drive to your computer and copy all the pictures over to that: on your mac you use the program time machine to do it automatically when ever you make a change. There are ways to do it with Windows and Linux, but not with the same arrogance as a mac person. Time machine just does it.

Remember, a hard drive next to your machine is as likely to burn to a crisp when your house burns down as the computer is. So remote storage works. For $50 bucks a year you can use a service like Mozy or Carbonite to back up your files and store them. In fact, if you have a small number of pictures, you might get away with just their free program. If your wife is like mine, shell out the $50. It is done over the internet, takes a week or so to back up the first time, but then it is painless and quick. Carbonite is for PC users only, Mozy supports the Mac and PC. Mozy gets my vote, and they were really good at trouble shooting a issue I had when they were beta testing.

If you have a Mac, get Leopard, and start time machine and buy a new hard drive every 6 to 8 months when you fill up the back up drive.

Finally will I be able to see them ten years from now? Well who knows. I think that if you store them in jpeg or tiff formates, the kind most cameras use, the answer is probably yes. On the other hand, there are a lot of Zipp Drives in desk drawers (mine included) that no one will ever read again. And think about all the old Kinescope television shows. You will need to be sure that you archive and if necessary convert.

And it doesn't hurt to print a few of the best shots and put them in a shoe box.