Archiving and storing digital photographs

Once you have your pictures in a digital format you need to store them. Long term, this can be a little bit of a challenge due to the ever changing world of technology. It seems like every 10 or 20 years technology changes so much that you need to replace your storage system because it is out dated. The good thing about this is that it is out dated because the newest technology has improved so much. 15 years ago people were using floppy disks that held 1.4 Mb of storage. That is barely one photo! Now people are using CDs, DVDs, USB flash drives and external hard drives that hold from 650Mb to multiple terabytes. The newer technology will hold hundreds to thousands of pictures where the “standard” from less than 2 decades ago would only hold one.

It is an on going task every few years to upgrade to a new digital storage method. The great thing about digital storage is that once the digital image is stored, it can be copied to another storage media without loss of data. Each new copy is a perfectly preserved copy of your original image.

Currently, the most common media for storing photo archives is CDs, USB flash drives and external hard drives.

CDs and DVDs – Many manufactures claim that their CDs and DVDs will last 100 years but how do they know that when they have only been making them for 10-15 years? We know that there have been bad batches of CDs and DVDs that have deteriorated over a few years. The old rule of thumb to have two sources of back up is still a very good rule to follow here.

USB flash drives – These are fairly inexpensive, small, easy to use and can hold a large amount of information. There have been reports of Jump drives failing and losing information when they are filled close to capacity. USB flash drives use a USB connection that will only last so many connect/disconnect cycles, which means every time you connect it and disconnect it the unit loses some life. Most people will never connect and disconnect their USB drive so many times that they will kill it, but it is still a weak point in the storage system.

External hard drives - These are a good alternative for storing large amounts of images. One great advantage of these large storage systems is that when you have to move files and transfer files they are all in one place. One of the main weak points in external hard drives is the parts and components. External hard drives have internal parts that can be knocked out of place or can fail due to poor manufacture.

All digital storage mediums need to be kept in a safe environment away from things like magnets, water, high humidity, extreme changes in temperature, etc.

The best system of storage at this time seems to be at least two different storage mediums in two different places.