Digital Focus: Archive Old Photos, Video on a Notebook

Archive Your Old Photos

There's a variation on Murphy's Law for computer storage, and it goes something like this: No matter how much space you have, it will never be enough. Even in today's world of 20, 40, and even 80GB hard drives, digital photographers still find themselves running out of places to keep old images. Rather than discard them, and lose part of your personal history, you might want to move those pictures off your primary hard disk and archive them--essentially forever.

Digital Means Forever

Most people don't realize it, but pictures taken with film cameras have a fairly short life span. Slides and negatives, for instance, fade in as little as a century--and even faster if they're not protected from sunlight and air. Prints themselves can fade quite badly in half that time.

Pictures taken with your digital camera, on the other hand, can last forever. Sure, we've all heard about how prints made on ink jet printers can fade after a few years. But you can always reprint them, and the new print will have 100 percent of the color and brilliance that was in the original.

More important, the bits and bytes of color will never fade or degrade as long as the medium they're stored on is still readable. So if you have images you want to keep, your PC's hard disk is arguably the worst place to keep them, unless you perform regular backups: If your hard disk fails, you can lose all your digital images at once.

The Perfect Archive

So what medium should you use to store your images? Using whatever you already have isn't a bad plan. Personally, I'd shy away from Zip drives, though. They only store 100MB or 250MB, depending upon which format you own, and that's like a floppy disk in today's multigigabyte world of storage. Worse, a small percentage of older Zip drives have failed catastrophically, eating the inserted cartridge and all its data at the same time. I wouldn't take that kind of risk with my images.

(Actually, you can download a free diagnostic program to determine if your Zip drive is susceptible to the Click of Death.)

Instead, consider CD-RW drives: They're dirt cheap (you can get a good CD writer for as little as $100), and they store up to about 800MB of data. Check out the latest CD-RW products and prices with our Product Finder.

DVD drives, which give you 4.7GB of data per each $20 disc, are also starting to drop out of the stratosphere. The Pioneer DVR-A03 is priced at $999. In fact, I found one on Product Finder for $640 from Shop Harmony.

I'm also jazzed about a new format called DataPlay. You'll hear more about it in the next few months as it appears in portable devices like digital cameras. About the size of a quarter, DataPlay discs store 500MB of data--close to the capacity of a CD-R. You'll need to buy a special DataPlay reader for your PC, but once you do you can archive all your pictures simply by leaving them on the DataPlay disc from your camera.

Of course, computer storage systems have a limited lifetime; eventually, your hard disk will suffer a failure, which is why you should perform regular backups or copy your data to a new drive every few years. Even optical disks like CD-R and DVD-R will fail eventually, though. Kodak, for instance, studied CD-R media and found that when stored under normal conditions, you can expect a typical CD to last for more than 100 years. In other words, you should only have to make a fresh copy of your CD-based picture collection once a generation or so to ensure it'll survive as long as that robot kid from the movie A.I.

Filing Nightmares

No matter what long-term storage solution you come up with, you'll need some way to find your pictures. After all, how do you find a picture from last year's July 4th barbecue when there are 300 other pictures stored on the same CD-R? Or a thousand pictures on the same 10GB external hard disk?

Filing, browsing, and organization software for digital images abounds. The forthcoming Windows XP, in fact, tries to make it easier to find pictures with better browsing tools, but I don't think it'll do the job if you have a lot of pictures. Try Sierra Imaging's $69 Image Expert 2000. It lets you browse thumbnails of your images or search by keyword.

Ulead's Photo Explorer goes further by also allowing you to select specific images and publish them to the Web quickly and easily. The program costs $30.

Living Album is a little different--it builds your images into virtual photo albums, and you can download it for free.

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