Will your digital photos survive 10 years?

by Christopher Phin on Feb 14, 2008

Moving beyond optical media
The ever-increasing megapixel count of cameras is making optical media less practical as a backup medium. A high-quality JPEG from a 7-megapixel camera can take up more than 5MB, while lossless formats such as TIFFs can consume a staggering 45MB per picture. CDs are frequently too small to hold a day’s shooting, and even DVDs can quickly seem restrictive.

Hard disks are the obvious choice for backing up large photo libraries. With external 500GB drives available for just over $200, a dedicated backup drive isn’t going to require a second mortgage. As always, opt for the largest capacity you can afford; even if you don’t need all the space, you could partition it and use some for a boot drive clone and some for photos alone.

Hard disks are far from infallible, so again don’t simply drag a folder full of photos across and think your job is done. A crude but effective way to combat hard disks’ inherent unreliability is to use more than one. An increasing number of manufacturers are selling external disks that are in fact two drives mounted in parallel using RAID. Usually, you can choose to have both drives working together to speed data transfer, or – and this is the bit that interests us here – mirroring the data recorded to one drive to the other automatically. With this system, as soon as you copy a photo once to the external drive, it’s actually backed up twice – once to each drive in the RAID set.

Don’t be tempted by so-called “specialist photo backup devices”. These are comparatively expensive and low capacity. They’re most useful in the field, as many include flash card readers that can shuttle data from the card to the higher-capacity hard disk to help you keep shooting, but you’ll find much richer backup options if you download your photos to your PC before making backups.

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This article appeared in the October 2007 issue of PC Authority.