| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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It leads me to wonder if we really do NEED to keep 15 Terrabytes (times three?) of images in constantly accessible storage. Much of it could reasonably be archived and probably never looked at again except perhaps on rare occasions.
It would take a very long time to review that many photographs, let alone do anything meaningful with them. There must be a HUGE amount of repetition in the archive.
I went through my collection last year and reduced it from 36,000 images to 12,000 images. I could probably halve that again without disposing of anything I would regret loosing.
When it comes down to it there are probably only a few hundred I would actually treasure.
In my opinion many of us make a rod for our own back.
As time goes by and file sizes steadily increase, the storage issue is going to get much harder to solve. So far most of us only have around ten years worth of digital images and the early ones are tiny. This to a large extent can be eased by not keeping 15 or 20 versions of the same image. The best 1, 2 or 3 should be chosen and the rest discarded.
As for Scot's problem it's easy to recover the data, simply swap out the drives which he says are OK into one of his good Drobo housings and extract the data, then junk the Drobo's. Proprietary formats are not suitable for archive, or even reliable storage because when they go wrong you are stuffed.
I use a Time machine for short term backup, but NOT archive. All my important data is written to multiple HD's in multiple locations.
Actually digital data is a blessing not a curse. It's easy to copy verbatim multiple times and portable. Perhaps because it's so easy to copy we retain too much dross?
My mind goes back to my records of botanists who have hand drawn and written accounts of their unique discoveries in the early days of botany, many of these drawings and writings have been lost by worm, gnawing rodents, dampness, fire, shipwreck, theft and even at Kew, lost in files never to be seen again. Only recently some priceless drawings were "discovered" in the wrong files.
One account was of a botanist who made many discoveries made many beautiful drawings and wrote an account of his travels and discoveries, his house burnt down, his daughter helped him to re-write the account because he lost his sight, but the drawings were lost forever.
At least we can clone our data and images and store in multiple locations if it really matters.
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Robert.