photo storage+back up

Posted by: zorba on 02 January 2009

I've been using my first digital camera a pany TZ3 for about 8mths now and very pleased. It came with a free 1gb sd card and I bought a 2gb extreme III. They have now both been filled and I have transferred all content to computer and also just burned to dvd for back up.

I was wondering just before re formatting the cards for re-use if there is any benefit to storing the cards as they are instead of creating back up dvd's? I know it can be more costly but if you shop around the price of these cards can be quite cheap and if you need a new one very 3 mths it may not be an issue.

Are there any downsides to the cards being used as archive storage such as loss of data over time?

With every time you fill their capacity and have to fomat does it degrade the writing quality of the card?

thanks
zorba
Posted on: 02 January 2009 by hiace_drifter
Hi, the compact flash cards etc are meant for short term storage until the files can be transferred to hardrive or DVD, and that is what I would recommend.

Your best bet is to have 2 hard drives - one in use all the time, and a second one which you can use for backups. You can now get 500GB drives for £50 - to get 500GB of SanDisk Extreme III would cost about £1500!! (one 4GB card costs £15).
Posted on: 02 January 2009 by hiace_drifter
The quality of the card doesn't degrade over time, but they can give up the ghost at some point. Another reason not to rely on them for long temr storage.
Posted on: 02 January 2009 by Bosh
I do as Neil suggests and archive my Digital negatives (Nikon NEFs) and edited large JPegs to my external 500Gb hard drive and DVD-r and view the JPegs from the PCs hard drive

However I do worry about the reliability of hard drives and longevity of the DVD-r

How far can you go though?
Posted on: 02 January 2009 by zorba
quote:
Originally posted by Neil Partridge:
. You can now get 500GB drives for £50 - to get 500GB of SanDisk Extreme III would cost about £1500!! (one 4GB card costs £15).


Thanx Neil, it sometimes takes someone outside your thinking zone to smash you over the head with a mallet to make things look clearer.
Posted on: 02 January 2009 by hiace_drifter
Big Grin No problem Zorba. If you have a Mac, you can use the free Time Machine software (with OS X) that automatically backs up data on to a chosen hard drive. Otherwise, manual back ups every time you upload a card's worth of photos should suffice. Just out of interest, how many images do you get per 1GB card?
Posted on: 03 January 2009 by Derek Wright
Do not wait until the card is full before copying to the computer, that is the old film mindset - classically a picture of Christmas at both ends of the film with a picture from a sunny day on the beach or two in between then. This is quoting the north European model of camera usage.

If a picture is worth taking - it is worth getting it onto the computer as soon as you can.
Posted on: 03 January 2009 by teabelly
I use online storage with smugmug. I think it is something like $40 a year for unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth. It's much less hassle than trying to burn dvds. It will allow uploads of up to 8mb jpegs. Digital media degrades over time and some people were finding cds were unreadable after a few years. Smugmug have a free trial where you can try it out for 2 weeks and see how you get on.
Posted on: 03 January 2009 by zorba
Using the highest setting of 7million pixels I managed to get 259 photos + 2mins36secs of video to the 1gb card.

Using highest settings again on the 2gb card I managed 529 photos + 4mins65secs of video.

Thanks for the advice Derek. I have put everything to my computer and just the other day created a burn folder and burned to disk. I suppose now when updating new photos I will just drag the new events to the burn folder and burn to the same disk?