Digital BW, The Print

On 19/12/2007 Mark Savoia wrote:
> My only question is were we all this religious with our negs? How many
> of us did the "archival thing" years ago? Is this overkill?

Probably, yes. OTOH I have spent many dull days repairing scans of negs 
that are 20-30 years old and suffering from damage or deterioration, 
fungus being the usual culprit. The point is that - short of a fire or 
flood - film deterioration is progressive and up to a point repairable. 
That's why I have scanned some older material, to rescue it. But one dud 
bit in a file and it has gone forever; a hard drive failure can wipe out 
thousands of files. And drive failures are a common occurrence that has to 
be planned for.

I've never yet had a CD degrade in 10 years, but DVD I don't trust for 
acrhiving at all, having had several prove unreadable after a few months, 
or unreadable in any drive except the one that created them. These days I 
just use multiple hard disks and 3 copies of everything, 1 offsite.

The biggest risk is me accidentally deleting stuff through stupididty or 
confusion, and that has been the only way I have lost work - when moving 
collections around, upgrading disks etc. Months later I noticed a several 
hundred files missing, and of course by then they were missing from the 
backups too. That is something that never arose with film, it never 
reverted to unexposed!
-- 
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk