Like many folks these days I don’t own an analog film camera anymore. This is a bit of a mixed blessing really. Consider the instant gratification of seeing the photo you just took. The cost savings of not getting the junk pictures developed only to toss them out. Because of the lower cost folks snap more photos than ever before.
But here’s the downside, those pictures are nothing more than electronic bits on some piece of storage media. Baby photos, wedding photos, vacations, etc, all are sitting ducks for data loss. As anyone that’s ever had a hard drive crash knows, you need to back up that data. How though? Plastic optical media like DVD and CD discs only have a life span of maybe 5 years before they start to degrade and corrupt. Do you pay for online storage? There’s an ongoing cost paid to someone else who may or may not wind up changing their policies and sell your images. Not to mention they have their own data loss and security issues. Many folks do what I did, they buy an external drive and do periodic backups. One thing people don’t always realize is the difference between archiving and backing up. Backing up implies a redundancy of storage. You maintain a source copy and a backup just in case. Archiving is moving the data from the source to the storage area then removing the source. Backing up electronic data is smart and fairly easy. Archiving is risky.
My backup drive crashed yesterday, luckily I used it to back up data, including my children’s baby photos. So the loss of data is minimal (a few things had been tidied up to make room). I went out to buy a new drive last night to start the cycle again, but it really made me think.
Although as a generation we’re taking more photos than ever, and sharing more than ever, I wonder if our photos really are forever. Sure, if you get an upskirt, no panty shot of Britney Spears that sucker will never fade from the web. But what about that nice shot of you and the kids playing baseball in the backyard? There are daguerreotypes created over a hundred years ago still around today. Cave drawings persisted for thousands of years. Embarrassing photos of millions of bare assed children in their first baths live on in shoeboxes and photo albums all over the world. But today’s images exist only until the next big data corrupting power spike.
Food for thought.
Incidentally, I asked an intelligent question at checkout when the Staples cashier tried to upsell a replacement policy. I asked if the policy on the new drive covered replacement or recovery. It covered replacement only, not much use.